I Used To Play WoW, But Toxic Design Can Encourage Toxic Environments
Sociology applies to gaming companies as much as it does any other industry, and the products crafted by some game creators are nothing short of toxic.
These products they make sometimes also are the perfect tool for observing sociology within the ecosystem of a single server where mini economies thrive off the efforts of players who often have markets replicating mini American capitalist systems that’s ingrained into the coders that program the bulk of games. Entire real life operations have sprung up around farming game currencies to sell despite that being an obvious violation to the terms of service. Specifically mass multiplayer online role playing games such as World of Warcraft, created by Blizzard over a decade ago. World of Warcraft has even been used as a way to observe the spread of a pandemic through the event Corrupted Blood in which a plague spread across Azeroth through players chaining the imaginary disease from pets summoned that still possessed a raid boss debuff. Before it would ever happen in a modern age, WoW showed us how people might act under these circumstances right down to the griefers who would spread maliciously and the inadvertent victims who didn’t understand the dangers their avatars were in. At this current point in time a lawsuit has just been unleashed by the State of California over the “frat boy” culture at the company that leaves women employees fending off sexual harassment or face retaliation for talking to HR. The latest in a line of controversies for the early video game pioneer.
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I’ve since migrated to a much different world where battles are still spontaneously erupting, Tyria of Guild Wars 2, a creation of Arena Net that was released all the way back in August 2012 and is by no means dead even after almost 10 years. Sure it hasn’t ever pulled the audiences of WoW but can consistently keep itself plastered on Top 10 lists for the genre MMORPG. I’ll get to more of what makes the two games different in a moment, but back to some explanation about current events.
Busting out on the scene with Diablo around 1996 to win many publisher’s Game of the Year Awards Blizzard was topping an already successful first game called Warcraft. You perhaps knew when the developers picked the name because it “sounded super cool” without much other meaning attached, that it was a bunch of bros at the helm from day one. The series would eventually evolve from its roots as a real time strategy game into a more individualized experience as the MMORPG World of Warcraft in 2004. You were now boots or hooves on the ground in the world of, as it suggests, tribalistic and never ending war.
The recipe for toxic is already starting to appear that is similar to real world sociological conditions where in the situational environment puts a abnormal demand on it’s players as it would on humans in the world to engage in behavior that is tyrannical or develop dehumanizing narratives about the supposed enemy they face. In no small way does this likely represent the creators of this world, like architects of any city they designed this interface and set up the conditions which were beyond a players control much like the challenges anyone faces for real.
As the signatures grow on a petition of current and former employees of Blizzard it’s clear that the company has a long history of hiding it’s culture and it doesn’t intend to stop now as the lawsuit was quickly dismissed by corporate talking heads as having no merit. Gee, what a quintessential response for sexual harassment, so much so that they banked on it working as a PR strategy. Maybe back in 1996 that would have worked but it’s 2021, and times change. Government organizations don’t move at the speed of technology generation so despite the company complaining these allegations are “old” it makes them no less egregious, somehow to them time alleviates accountability in the World of Warcraft. I think that’s the translation for “Just let it go”, which is a tactic to minimize whatever has occurred without self correcting any mistake.
It’s evolved into the employees at Blizzard now staging a walkout with four key demands as the petition lengthens. It’s now around a third of the company workforce. Those demands include the end of forced arbitration, new hiring practices, publication of salary and promotional data along with a third party watchdog to audit company leadership. A less official one is a call to retract inappropriate references from World of Warcraft and my mind immediately went to a chain of quests done as dailies in the expansion Wrath of the Lich King for the Sons of Hodir. “Polishing the Helm”, “Blowing Hodir’s Horn”, “Thrusting Hodir’s Spear”, and “Going Bear Back” in the prerequisite quests. The “Jormutta is Soo Fat…” is not that’s great but the frat boys think they’re amusing anyway. There’s weapons like Wirt’s Third Leg in the game because they can’t get enough of their own sex jokes and assume players can’t either. There’s so many. It just seems like a teensy bit of evidence of how developers really did find their sexually charged behaviors were appropriate because they thought it was appropriate for players of at least the Teen ESRB rating. What do you do with humans with perspective so broken that they cannot even see a problem with it? It was inevitable that they would, once again, downplay their actions as if it’s nothing.
You’ve seen this problem before haven’t you? Isn’t the same thing with every microaggression. “Oh I didn’t mean to say something racist or sexist, so it means I didn’t.” Intent vs impact problem. Blizzard slipped out of reality and into it’s fantasy world where it’s never wrong, but that will not save them from a judge’s perspective of the evidence. How interesting they seem to forget this before releasing public statements. If Bobby Kotick assumed his statement acknowledging how “tone deaf” his company response was would turn the tide on the walk out, he was sorely mistaken that he had any control after bringing suspicion on himself for being listed in Jeffery Epstein’s little black book of clients. Do they not understand that it’s the lack of trust the employees have in them that is the reason for the stubborn refusal to work?
And frankly, why should they be trusted? Where’s the self awareness? Your CEO pals around with human sex traffickers and the games produced are laden with sexualized references. 25 years of accumulative behaviors stack as irrefutable evidence of the claims being made already, do you even need to wait for a court to address it or is it pretty obvious what happens in Blizzard and Activision offices if this stuff’s right out there in the games that were seen as acceptable for the general public. You can rationalize it’s harmless good fun or you can acknowledge it’s normalizing sexual behaviors. Perspective is everything, right? Or do facts and consequences matter?
Perhaps they should have for Blizzard, they could have prevented this.
How far can the lack of trust resound? Well, corporate responsibility issues can drive customer buying decisions so Blizzard might just wanna think about that or maybe they’re banking on their audience base being the same human trash as the harassers they’ve protected. As a marketing person, I think that’s a really dicey gamble to assume the customers will not react poorly given it can change 80%+ people to purchase a different product. And let’s face it, there’s a lot of great games out there we could be playing. Sometimes it takes me 5 minutes looking at my Steam library because there’s just too many good things to play at once and choice paralysis takes over for a moment as I debate how to waste the next 2 hours of gaming bliss. Not sure that would be a gamble I would roll on but hey, it definitely tells you what Blizzard thinks of its own customers. Ya’ll don’t care if people are being harassed or miserable at their job do you?
Oh wait? You do? Oh snap. See, Blizzard should probably take notice. But they think you’re too impulsive and addicted to care about others because you play their games. They banked on you not reacting from their market research. Cringe isn’t it? But take it from someone who strolls PR departments, that’s exactly how they decide to accept or deny responsibility in a situation like this one. Companies spend millions of dollars to understand how people will react. To their products, their ads and even the colors on the website. They know how addicted their own player bases are and that your own neurochemical system will keep you playing even if the company does things you find are against your personal values. The company doesn’t care what that does to your self esteem as long as you’re paying the $15 a month. The addictive properties built into the game would tell people that.
Well it goes back to the sociology of games and how their construction would inspire some personality types more so than others to play that particular game. As with most things in life it’s some of our deepest ideologies that leads us right to our own hobbies and political affiliations, we shouldn’t be surprised when we find similarities among others who gravitated toward the same things we did. That wasn’t entirely a coincidence where we ended up. The definition of sociology is loosely “a social science involving the study of the social lives of people, groups, and societies; the study of our behavior as social beings, covering everything from the analysis of short contacts between anonymous individuals on the street to the study of global social processes; [and] the scientific study of social aggregations, the entities through which humans move throughout their lives.”
RPGs like World of Warcraft can serve as testing grounds for sociologists to test theories of social relationships since we very much translate the same systems of behavior from real life to gaming. For those unfamiliar with WoW, it’s not all unlike the game I’m playing right now on screen and in many ways it’s identical. Even aspects of the user interfaces in many RPGs have all the same familiar elements. And while Guild Wars 2 cooperates all the playable races together into a collective effort against the game’s lore generated foes, World of Warcraft instead pits players against each other in two main factions of Horde and Alliance. Upon first opening the game it’s the first decision a player is confronted with is what tribe they belong to unless you choose a more recent addition, Pandaren. Should you select this furball you’ll start off a neutral party that must choose their fate around level 10. If you had to pick your political party at age 10, do you think you would make a wise lifelong choice? But even more interesting of a thought, did those who went with any other playable race realize when they chose their faction that they would also be choosing the personality types they were about to play with? Or that it would say something about their quirks?
Because sociologists actually did look into this one, they proposed that perhaps personality traits could be paired with the player’s choice of avatar in game. What they found is that there is little if any correlation between the selection of race, however, it was the choice of faction that actually showed significant correlations to traits. Those who choose the side of the Horde tend to be more aggressive players who engage in more sadistic tendencies within the game. Over the years the franchise has seen a steady increase in Horde players, so much so that it’s created imbalance without enough alliance players to satisfy the bloodthirsty for tyranny it’s sent many a new player scrambling for a PVE server.
(https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/mcnair_journal/vol6/iss1/12/)
While some attribute this merely to special abilities granted to each race that aid in gameplay, there’s a much more sinister element of game design that probably has a more pervasive effect, the reduction of the social aspect of MMORPGs by streamlining the title for casual players in a myriad of different ways, for example the institution of the Looking For Group option. If waiting for a timer is all the social skills required, then it encourages little if any interaction between players since the dungeons have also been toned down to eliminate the need for coordinated crowd control. More emphasis was placed on individual storyline progression and achievements that catered to a growing market segment of millennial gamers accustomed to console achievement schematics. So Blizzard lifted the tactic at Wrath of the Lich King. And boy, did I fall for it…
Let’s break this down real quick for anyone else who needs a little catch up here for context from the Williams …
Sociology is concerned with most aspects of human social life. Sociologists study a range of phenomena, from small-scale structures and processes such as individuals and how they think, feel, and act, to mid-level structures and processes such as local communities or the cultures of organizations or groups, to large-scale patterns of stratification that affect entire societies, such as class, gender, and race.
Sociologists are interested in the structures surrounding social life, as well as in its processes. Both are readily found in role-playing games (RPGs): rules and game mechanics are important structures, while the performance of roles and the cooperative actions of players are important processes.
Looking at fantasy races in fictional worlds, Kwan (2007) and Monson (2012) suggested three ways in which they are grounded in real-world stereotypes and ideologies. First, many RPGs essentialize race. In TRPGs, game rules regularly claim that there are objective, immutable, and strong differences between races: orcs may have the racial trait “berserk,” while dwarves get +2 to perception after consuming alcohol. Second, “fictional races [are given] recognizable cultural traits associated with real-world race [and ethnic] groups” (Monson 2012, 54). In World of Warcraft, the Tauren race, with their totems, teepees, and shamans, are clearly representative of Native Americans, while the Troll race are a hybrid of familiar African cultural stereotypes, with witch doctors, spears, and a Caribbean accent (“greetings mon!”). Third, across races, light skinned Western European appearances are associated with good, while dark-skinned appearances are often associated with evil — effectively expressing notions of white Supremacy.
In the book eGods: Faith vs Humanity in Computer Gaming, William sims Bainbridge draws comparisons to how fantasy computer games replicate struggles in the real world when religion butts heads with secular humanist policy in modern politics.
“In traditional societies, religion sanctifies the particular system of morality endorsed by the culture, using one or both of two mechanisms: (1) inculcating general values to guide an individual’s actions, and (2) imposing direct social control through interpersonal interactions between individuals organized within a religious community. Gameworlds tend to have factions, each with a distinctive normative system. In Rift, two factions have taken competing cultural paths, very relevant to our real world, in response to the danger that their entire world is disintegrating. The Guardians are religiously devout and seek to reestablish communion with their gods, who mysteriously seem to have withdrawn from the world. The Defiants resent the aloofness of the gods and have turned to advanced technology as a secular alternative. Social scientific concepts like multiculturalism and cultural relativism are illustrated by a variety of other computer games, through factions identified with popular notions such as angels and devils. The Sims Medieval and Age of Conan illustrate the complexity of tensions between two and even three factions.”
What’s interesting about Guild Wars 2 is that I’m a Charr and if you read into lore a bit, you would find that the Charr were the primary antagonistic race in the first Guild Wars game. A race of beastly upright walking cat warriors with horns for the sole purpose of war the first game as undeveloped “beasts”, but the game backed away from this narrative with many of the Charr realizing their mistakes by the end and siding with the other races of Tyria to become a force for the greater humanity. It was a treaty that would end the 1400 years of war and now coexistence is achieved, so in Guild Wars 2 you’ll find Charr are playable. That’s the history behind the little kitty I’m playing. Occasionally in game you’ll be running down a few of your own who refuse to be democratic with attempts to overthrow the treaty in uprisings up violence. It shows how much similar politics can play out in real life in this microcosm as well, but that the game designers have chosen a more inclusive route and a story rich with empathy. It’s harder to find any direct stereotypes drawn between the Charr and race, interesting to note however that these fictional characters experience more player bias than anything else, where in players find themselves mocked for being a Charr because of residual hatred from Guild Wars 1 players.
I think this points out how uncomfortable it gets when it’s toxic players that enter the game space. It might be all in good fun of veteran players who want to show off their lore knowledge in a weird flex, but ends up being confusing to a new player unfamiliar with the history of the character they chose. It’s kinda like being born into a race you didn’t choose, then finding out everyone doesn’t like you because of stuff that’s in the past that’s connected to what your skin or in-game texture looks like. I’ve personally gotten whispers, “Stupid ugly Charr” before in game too. Figured it must be RP nerdery, looked it up and sure enough… I’m society’s bad guy in this game and had no idea like a naive kid. Just getting random comments for standing in a city, which has happened to many or in other context of being teased by guildies. Interesting lived experience confined within a virtual space which is a luxury when compared to the real world where one’s life is being affected by that kinda of bias at a job.
But if a guild leader is oddly biased enough against pixelated characters to exclude a Charr player from a raid, it’s not hard to imagine how much it can start to affect the quality of the gameplay experience for those affected. Once the prejudice was set by the designers, it became quite difficult to get rid of despite many humanizing efforts to what’s been presented as an uncivilized race. Shows human nature playing out in a game society where it now is the players affecting the game. And this is where we get to personality profiles and I wasn’t as aware way back then of the models for gamer behavior and personality types. This has already been established as the Four Battle Types at Gamasutra.
(https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6474/personality_and_play_styles_a_.php?print=1)
- Killers: interfere with the functioning of the game world or the play experience of other players
- Achievers: accumulate status tokens by beating the rules-based challenges of the game world
- Explorers: discover the systems governing the operation of the game world
- Socializers: form relationships with other players by telling stories within the game world
How to narrow down what this means, the four styles come from two core concepts of how a person plays a game with the activities they could choose from, content and control. Content is defined to mean either acting simply and directly on objects in the game world, or interacting more deeply with world-systems. Control refers to how players want to experience the game world — either through the dynamic behaviors of other players, or with the relatively static world of the game itself.
Killers and achievers were more interested in acting on things or people and behaving in a way where things and people are externalized. Explorers and socializers, on the other hand, took a more internalized approach. Killers and socializers were more interested in how they could control their play while interacting with others, achievers and explorers demonstrated more concern over controlling the computer generated objects and what’s happening in the virtual world. These personality models compared with the 1970 Four Kiersey Tempermants,
- Artisan (Sensing + Perceiving): realistic, tactical, manipulative (of things or people), pragmatic, impulsive, action-focused, sensation-seeking
- Guardian (Sensing + Judging): practical, logistical, hierarchical, organized, detail-oriented, possessive, process-focused, security-seeking
- Rational (Intuition + Thinking): innovative, strategic, logical, scientific/technological, future-oriented, result-focused, knowledge-seeking
- Idealist (Intuition + Feeling): imaginative, diplomatic, emotional, relationship-oriented, dramatic, person-focused, identity-seeking
There’s really interesting further reading you can see about this on a link in the description, it gives a more in depth analysis of what each one of these types means and what it would look like reflected in gameplay. What you have is frameworks for the different audiences possible when a studio is creating a game. Potentially what audience that game is designed for it’s going to attract an imbalance of types that may start to overwhelm social qualities of the game. Deteriorating it all together until the social aspect that once held it together falls apart and players abandon it for other means of entertainment leaving behind only a dedicated base of the types it evolved around. Others note this effect happening to World of Warcraft throughout the years or specific changes that could have driven the culture in a direction that shaped it’s player bases behavior. Both cycle to affect the other.
It’s been attributed to things from server transfers to implementing the achievement system and in the end, it all ends up being responsibility to shareholders. So the goal was to make it as popular as it could be within its market and stay that way. Which it did as it opened up more features that made the game accessible to casual players with less time and made more activities possible to do without cooperation of a larger group. While this was beneficial, it may have allowed for that lack of collaboration to have an effect on the social aspect of the game reducing the quality of player experience. Players leave for a variety of reasons, but many found slowly discouraged out of the game from the dwindling lack of coordination between players and gatekeeping through ratings mechanisms, often tinged with toxic behaviors in a structure where pixels denote superiority. But that one’s ability to acquire such things had much to do with the privilege of time to play. People might just find better ways to spend their time.
It can be not just what types of players the design attracts to it from gameplay, but also how the way the game progresses that can create or further encourage the choice for behavior that’s considered in the toxic category. It could be gear rating causing more likely exclusion from group activities or the restriction on how many or what roles would be needed despite what efforts were done to make each class useful. How items and gear are distributed could be opportunities to see conflicts arise. How frustrating or tedious do game tasks become and how much are others needed? Can they design activities that appeal to killer types as much as the explorer types with as little conflict opportunity possible. It’s never a perfect process, but just one for them to consider in a really boring average Wednesday morning meeting. Conceptualizing something that brings people together can salvage the game, maybe the company’s reputation? That’s a big question mark on the end of that sentence. They’re looking irredeemable as the state of California steps up the game by expanding the case to contract workers and has alleged Blizzard of obstructing their investigation. Yikes.
Also saw that subscription numbers are falling and have been for quite some time, the combination of players disappointed with content and the lawsuit might have been a perfect storm. Last video titles I caught while scrolling noted below 2 million at this point and who knows where the free fall stops as fun Histoseekers transition off to Final Fantasy, Guild Wars 12 and other games. At this point Guild Wars 2 has hit 12 million accounts as it approaches a promising expansion for those who just recently discovered the franchise. There’s just so many games out there, it’s still only a small amount of the time spent in a virtual world somewhere, lately it’s been a ton of simulators of different varieties. Gaming can have all kinds of effects on your life for the good but it could go for the bad when out of moderation.
