After finishing Wake in three days and ordering its sequel, I’m back to Synthetic Worlds again. At least until Watch gets here. Let me summarize, once again: this is an amazing book, and I’d love to see Synthetic Worlds 2.0. If you have ever in your life used the internet for social interaction, played a video game, been interested in economics, sociology, psychology, technology, or even if you’ve done NONE of those things, you will enjoy this book. Seriously, this is some intense delving into the subject of MMOs.
Here’s the amazing thing about Synthetic Worlds: it was written when WoW only had five hundred thousand subscribers. The global total of MMO players was ten million, less than the estimate thrown around by those WoW ads! This is six years ago, people. Two-thousand-and-four. I haven’t gotten to the part where he talks about the future yet, but I can guarantee some of the stuff he predicts has come to pass.
Here’s another thing: it was written before the Wii was called the Revolution, when gaming was something mainstream but not necessarily a household activity. Digital distribution was only beginning to pick up Steam (oh, come on, there was no way I could resist that) and the average person likely didn’t play video games on any kind of regular basis. Maybe some… oh, wow, this is even before Guitar Hero. Maybe they might have played some Mario Kart, some Mario Party? I mean, we’re talking your grandmother and her dog here.
There’s a lot of data in there just to say that no, people playing MMOs aren’t sweaty teenage nerds living in their mom’s basement, many of them ARE the fathers/moms of regular kids. The average age was, off the top of my head, something like 29? Many were married, most had good jobs. The results were divided between those who considered themselves “residents” of their chosen game, and that they “visited” Earth much the same way a casual player would “visit” Azeroth or Norrath. Many considered themselves to be addicted, but there was surprisingly little difference between the two groups in terms of time spent playing. The author questions whether “playing those silly video games” more than other people counts as an addiction by default, and suggests that addictions are the things that have a negative effect on our life when we aren’t doing them, such as drinking or drugs.
He also gets into why exactly someone would get deeply involved with these games at all. Why would you want to live on Earth, where you’ve got a crappy office job and will never amount to anything? Why not live in Azeroth, where you’re the leader of a guild and everyone loves you? There’s a bit of psychology thrown in there, too, about how we get immersed and how it’s actually harder to suspend our belief when we play an MMO than it is to suspend our DISbelief. When there are 50 people around you, equally involved in slaying some giant dragon, it’s hard to step back and go “no wait, this dragon is a worthless pile of code and actually means nothing because it doesn’t really exist.”
The idea of emotional immersion rather than physical immersion isn’t exactly new, but this gets into WHY your brain wants to believe you can cast Magic Missile rather than “waaah this game had no immersion” or “blah blah the characters were so realistic and I was so immersed and I cried blah blah blah” crap. There’s a history of virtual reality, the goggles and giant suit and no fun kind, compared to the fun, interesting, made to be enjoyable rather than a tech demo kind of synthetic realities engineered specifically for the benefit of the player.
Wake had interesting ideas and it was really cool and awesome to read, but that was a novel. Synthetic Worlds is 300-something pages of statistics and sciencey examination of things that are likely near and dear to you, and in a word, it is wonderful.
