Minipost: -isms and -ists in MMOs

There's been some recent discussion about sexism by characters in World of Warcraft that has been sparked by a particular NPC in the beta named Ji Firepaw. On one side you have "This is offensive, please change it" and on the other side you have "It's not offensive" and "That would be censorship" and some other defenses. I'm not here to argue the cases, those link above do a much better job of explaining that than I could. I'm here to talk about what makes such a character different in an MMO versus a book/movie or even another video game.

In a book or a movie, a character such as Ji is targeting their offensive statements at other characters. In a typical video game, they're targeting their offensive statements at a character you're playing. In an MMO, they're often targeting their offensive statements at you.

Some video games let you customize your character so maybe you might argue that the character is you. However, even in Mass Effect it's not you, it's Shepard. Some video games do have the quality of MMOs where the character is close to you because they lack a firm identity but I'd argue that the character is more 'you' in MMOs because it's how you interact with other players. The other players affirm that the character is you, in a way.

Furthermore, video games are about the freedom to do what you want. You have agency in this world, but that agency is incomplete. When NPCs do things such as that, you often have absolutely no means by which to correct them. You just have to sit there and let it happen, powerless to change the attitudes of the NPCs around you, which is incredibly disheartening.

And that's why these things matter more in an MMO.

Journey's Unique Multiplayer

Multiplayer in video games is a very interesting thing. For some games, it's the one of the primary draws. This is especially true of racing games, sports games, fighting games, and shooters. In those contexts, it's competitive, the various players are working against each other and only one player (or team) can win. I typically am not a fan of that type of multiplayer, but there has been a title or two in days past that have drawn my attention.

Multiplayer can also be of the cooperative variety, where the different players assist each other to accomplish tasks. In some games, the cooperative multiplayer is separate from the single-player part of the game. Sometimes that means a separate set of missions. Sometimes that means that the cooperative part is stored on a separate save. However it's done, multiplayer has always something that the player opts into. A choice is made at some point, they either select a menu option to take part in multiplayer or they tell their friend to pick up the other controller and join them.

Journey is a very unique game in many ways, but one of those ways is in its approach to multiplayer. For one, the only way to opt out of the multiplayer would be to forcibly disconnect your system from the internet. You see, after you have completed the introductory section, which literally teaches you the five things that you need to know about for the duration of the game, the game will find another, random player who is at the same point in the game as you and decide that you will play together. A white mark will appear on the edge of the screen that is typical of so many games to indicate that there is something of interest in that direction. When you turn the camera to it you will find someone else who looks almost exactly like you.

Your clothing becomes more detailed as you accumulate trophies and the gold accents crawl up it.

If you didn't know it was another player you might think it was an NPC. You can't type or talk to each other and aren't shown the other player's name. The only ways that you have to communicate are through your actions, which are limited to movement and singing. Some accounts I've seen so far have talked about how they communicated with the other player. One such account said that they adapted to echoing two short chirps for "Ready?" and "I'm ready."

It's a very interesting experience. On my first playthrough I had two companions with me for my journey. The first went away after the first section but I got a new one just as I started the second section. Working together, flying around, and solving puzzles together made it a unique experience, like two children playing together even though neither can talk yet. We explored and made our way to the top of the mountain together. Sometimes we would go our separate ways and get separated, eventually not being able to see each other. If that happened, one of us would sing out a loud note which would inform the other of our location, and the other would respond and we would move towards each other.

Deserts are only in the beginning of the game.

In my second playthrough, I wanted to spend more time exploring. This meant that I would often run away from my partner to look at things, and they wouldn't wait for me. I wouldn't have waited for me either. So I spent a good amount of time in the game without somebody with me. It completely transforms the experience. It makes you feel alone. The world in Journey is not an inviting one. At it's best it's neutral about your presence and becomes hostile towards the end. Having somebody else there with you, to experience what you're experiencing, makes the entire gameplay experience different.

Furthermore, since there's no way to talk to one another, you can't harass the other player. You can't grief them. You can't inconvenience them. There aren't any tasks that you can't complete yourself, so you can't even let the other person down. Those who do fear potential harassment, at the end of a playthrough, after the credits roll, the game does tell you the names of everyone you played with.

One thing that I find particularly interesting is that as you gain trophies (the PS3's version of achievements), your character's robe becomes more ornate. Because of this your robe acts as a sort of indicator of your knowledge of the game. None of the trophies have a prohibiting skill requirement, they're pretty much all about finding things. So if you see someone whose robe is particularly adorned, then they know where much of the game's things are and just might show you where they are. In fact, as of this writing, I'm one trophy away from having all of them, and that trophy requires that I spend a week not playing the game. Once I have that, I'll have earned the platinum trophy and I plan on going through the game showing other players where things are, and hopefully they'll pass the knowledge on themselves.

Playing Journey has been a fascinating experience in more ways than way. It has really challenged ideas that I've had about multiplayer, storytelling, and achievements. I'm very curious about how the concepts used in it could be put in other games. Could Journey's anonymous multiplayer be put to good use in other games, such as cooperative shooters? What about a game, such as a shooter, where you "sign up" for various missions and the game picks a random partner for you to play with. Turn off the friendly fire and the ability to communicate and you could potentially have a rewarding experience. It's an interesting thought, and it's something that I really hope to see some day again in the future.

Obisidian's problem with reward cutoffs and continuity

There are tons of things in life which fall under the category of "If X is greater than Y, then you get this." For example, at my current job: I'm going to get laid off  eventually. I haven't been working here long, and by the time the layoff happens I will have been here less than a year. If I had been here longer such that when I get laid off I will have been employed for over a year, then my severance will be double  of what I will end up receiving. In simpler terms

• Employed < 1 year: Severance=X
• Employed ≥ 1 year: Severance=2X

Where X is a value that I'm not going to disclose. You've likely been in this sort of situation before if you've ever received a grade of 89, which for most school I've been to is the highest score you can get that isn't an A. You're so close, but not close enough, and it stings. I went to a Catholic high school where an A was 93 or higher. There were more situations that I'd like where my final grade was a 92. It was good, but not good enough, and at most other schools it would have been. I hated it.^[1]

Obsidian, developers of Fallout: New Vegas, have found themselves in a similar situation recently. In their contract with Bethesda, Obsidian would only receive a bonus if the New Vegas received a Metacritic score of 85 or higher. The game has an 84. Therefore they receive no bonus, and this has likely led to their recent layoffs and the reported cancellation of an unnamed next-generation title. I'm guessing they needed that bonus to keep that team running. I feel bad for Obsidian, because as far as I'm aware they did pretty good work with Fallout: New Vegas. 

Now, I'm not here to discuss how using Metacritic as a measure of how good a game is quite flawed because Metacritic pulls from reliable, trustworthy sources and other, less reliable sources. I'm here to talk about the mathematics of the situation and how

Graphically, Obisidian's situations can be represented as such

We can all see this plainly, once they hit 85, they get the bonus. Otherwise, they don't. You see, the unfairness lies in the discontinuity in the graph. Does it make sense that they get nothing for an 84 but get it all for an 85? I argue that it's not. Instead of the function that is in their contract, I propose a different function. What if, starting at a score of 80 they receive a small bonus that increases until maxing out at 85.

This seems to make more sense to me, since it rewards different levels of accomplishment in varying amounts. Now, of course, this contract deal would obviously benefit Obsidian more than the previous contract, so if this were part of a discourse, a compromise would likely have to be struck. If might start at 82 instead of 80 and cap out at 87 instead of 85. I made a composite image of that with the payment model that was used.

As you can see, when comparing the two, my way benefits Obsidian if the score is from 82 to 85, It benefits Bethesda if the score is from 85 to 87, and it's the same everywhere else. Under this model, Bethesda still wouldn't have gotten the full bonus, but they would have gotten something. In fact, they would have received 40% of the bonus, which may not have been enough to save their game team, but it would have been something.

I think that people often underestimate the impact that a reward structure can have. Discontinuous ones such as the letter grade system, Obsidian's bonus, and my severance can have very harsh effects for falling just under the cutoff.

I don't think people understand just how important continuity is when we create functions (and these payoff systems are functions) for our life. Every real world phenomenon is continuous. Although things can seem sudden to the point of being an instantaneous difference, they never really are. Their change can be sharp, but it's always there. For example, the people who write the tax code understand this, although the marginal tax rate is a discontinuous function, it makes the actual amount of tax you pay a continuous (specifically, a continuous and increasing) function of your income. That is, until you start to talk about various tax exemptions and loopholes.

So what is it about continuous functions that makes them important? The important thing about a continuous function is that if you have a threshold on how much change you want in your output, there is some amount of change in your input that can be tolerated before breaching that threshold. To rephrase the problem with Obsidian's bonus payment function in these terms is that if you're sitting at a Metacritic score of 85, there is NO amount by which the score can go down and produce a small change in the bonus.<sup>[2]

[1]</sup> The grade scale at my high school was:

• A=100-93,
• B=92-85,
• C=84-77,
• D=76-70,
• and F=69-0.

^[2] The continuity of the function isn't the only important factor here. Frankly a continuous function, like the ones that I displayed, could have been made steep enough that it would emulate the bonus payment function that Obisidian had. It's not only the continuity of the function that's important, but also the continuity of all of it's derivatives. Continuity is just the first step at arriving to a function that would play more nicely. To note, a function for which all derivatives are continuous is called smooth.

WoW Survey Results: behind the scenes of "crossplay"

I tend to round to two decimal places for all the stuff I do, just so you know. I like two decimal places because it's the same level of accuracy that you get with money; so it feels specific without being overly so.

During the writing of my post on crossplay, I encountered a problem. When I was looking at the difference in crossplay between the young and the old group, I wanted a way to talk about whether a particular increase for a race or class was more or less than the average increase. I've included a small sample of one of those tables below.

Crossplay by age for race
	Younger	Older
Average	27.62%	34.65%
Human	31.28%	41.51%
Troll	16.67%	26%

You'll notice that the last column has been removed also. That's because that's exactly what we're here to talk about. My first instinct for that last column, which I'll just refer to as the "change" column, was to just to take the difference. This would give us a difference of 10.23 for the humans and 9.33 for the trolls. I didn't like that, though, because I felt that the trolls' gain was more significant since they started off much lower than the humans.

My next instinct was to try ratios (division) for the last column. This would give the humans a result of 1.33, a ~33% increase, and the trolls a result of 1.56, a ~56% increase. While this looks good for these two numbers, I actually have conceptual problems with this as well. Suppose I included a third race here for which the young group had 90% female characters and 100% female characters for the older group. This would give us a result of 1.11 (repeating, of course). I feel that's too low though; going from having 10% male characters to zero is a pretty significant thing. So I wanted something that will scale well at the low end and at the high end. Just as gaining 10 percentage points is a big deal when you have very little, such as the trolls, it's also a big deal when there's not much left to pick from, such as for this hypothetical race.
So it occurred to me that just considering how many female characters there were would be insufficient, and that I would also need to look at how many male character there were. This is when I turned to looking at the odds. In short (if you don't want to read that link), the odds of something happening is the probability that it will happen divided by the probability it won't happen. So if the odds of something happening are 10:1, it's 10 times more likely to happen than to not happen. So I decided to look at the ratio of the odds for each age group, or as I summarized in the last post

where p is the percentage of female characters for that group. When I did all the calculations and thought about how I felt about the results, everything just looked right. The values that I felt should be bigger than others were all that way. 

So if you're wondering how this stuff get's done; that's how. It's trial, error, and intuition.

WoW Survey Results: Looking at crossplay

Actually a dude

There's a bit of an adage about World of Warcraft that the men are men, and so are the women. This is to say that no matter what the gender of the character you're looking at is, it's likely a guy playing that character. Now, given the percentage of female players that some studies have shown and the percent of the time that players of both genders play oppositely-gendered characters, this is actually unlikely.

For this article, and forever on until I manage to find a better one, I will use the term "crossplay" to refer to when a person plays a character whose gender is different from their gender.

In general, from my survey results, male respondents engaged in crossplay ~33.96% of the time and female respondents engaged in crossplay ~9.19% of the time. Right of the bat we see that men engage in crossplay far more than women do, almost 4 times as much. If you ask, most male players would likely tell you that you spend all of your time in this game looking at your character's butt and they would like to enjoy looking at what is presented to them.

Is that all there is too it? Guys, why do (or don't) you play female characters? Ladies, why do (or don't) you play male characters? Well, we can look at this ourselves a bit while we wait for potentially helpful comments. Let's get some breakdowns in here. Unfortunately, as in the past, I can't supply a breakdown of crossplay for female respondents due to an insufficient volume of female respondents. I'm so totally bummed about that. So, if I fail to stipulate it later on, I'm just talking about crossplay by male players.

Percent of crossplay for male respondents for each class
Priest	Paladin	Mage	Shaman	Rogue	Druid	Hunter	Warlock	Death Knight	Warrior
49.21	40.57	38.62	34.04	32.81	31.53	29.88	28.78	27.59	24.66

What immediately springs out for me is something that I've noticed before. We find the warlock, Death Knight and warrior are at the bottom of a list. We saw this before when I was looking at gender and class, when those were 3 of the 4 least played classes for female respondents. It's interesting that three of the four least played classes for female respondents are the least crossplayed classes for male respondents. Although pinpointing why it's this way will have the same troubles that we had back then. The correlations between armor type, role, location in battle, and theme will confuse the analysis. We also see that our light-wielders, the priest and the paladin, hold solid leads in the top spots with the cloth-wearing mage in the third spot. Let's look at this a few different ways.

Average crossplay by armor type
Cloth	Leather	Mail	Plate
38.87	32.17	31.95	30.94

This table shows a pretty clear trend that indicates that as you go from the lighter armor types to the heavier armor types, the average amount of crossplay by male respondents decreases. This probably plays into the aesthetics of the armor as many male players probably don't imagine a male hero wearing a robe or a female hero wearing bulky plate.

Average crossplay by role
	No Heal	Heal
No Tank	32.52	41.61
Tank	26.13	36.05

This table show us that healers tend to have more crossplay while tanks tend to have less crossplay. Does this show that male players consider tanking to be a masculine role and healing to be a feminine role?

Average crossplay by fight location
Melee	Mix	Ranged
28.35	35.37	36.62

Here we can see that male players tend to crossplay less with characters in melee and more with characters at range. I feel less certain that this one plays into real feelings and feel that it may just be a correlation with the effects of role and armor type.

The three tables above really break down what I think are some of the predominant factors that influence whether a male player will crossplay. I think that armor type and how it affects aesthetics and role/fighting location and how that affects perception really make up the most of it. I'll admit that I am not immune to this as well, but I'll get into that after this next section. Now let's look at how race influences crossplay.

Percent of crossplay for male respondents for each race
Draenei	NE	BE	Human	Gnome	Goblin	Worgen	Undead	Troll	Dwarf	Orc	Tauren
59.70	52.87	52.60	40.64	35.77	31.36	25.33	22.94	21.72	14.83	13.92	12.80

There is some wide variance here, huh. Analyzing the races is different since they can't be broken into groups as easily as classes can be. The thing that tends to stick out to me, is the comparative of the female model, especially when that is compared to the male model. We see that the female models that are the most attractive (according to human standards, of course) are at the top of this list. I have complete faith that the patented female Draenei hip wiggle has played no small role in vaulting them to the front of this list. Gnomes, while certainly not having human proportions, are much like tiny humans, which is probably the factor that has placed them in the number 5 spot above all the "monstrous" races and the dwarves. Interestingly, although dwarves are quite human, moreso than the gnomes in my opinion, they are at tenth place here. I guess guys just tend to be too shallow for them. They probably couldn't handle a playing a dwarven lady anyway. One last table for this section, you probably noticed this yourself with the last one.

Crossplay by faction
Alliance	Horde
38.19%	25.89%

This combined with the fact that the Horde has fewer female players than the Alliance means that the Horde is a bit of a sausage fest, comparatively. Sorry Horde bros, that's just the way it is.

Also really a dude

In full disclosure I must admit that I am not immune to the draw of the female characters, although I believe my percentage is lower than the average. My very first female character was a Night Elf priest (how typical, right?) and my second female character is a human warrior, which I've talked about before (and need to play more). I honestly can't remember any others that I may have.

So it seems that the trends that drive men to play a female character are the oft-quoted attractiveness and their perception of in-game gender roles. What I'm particularly interested in is why there is such a difference in the percentage of crossplay between male and female players. Do women play so few male characters because female characters tend to be more attractive? What other components are there to this?

But wait, there's more - Age and crossplay
There is an age component to all of this, too. In general, older male players are more likely to play female characters than younger male players. Going back to the two groups that I set up for my post about the ages of male players and how that impacted what they played, I found that in general, the 18 and younger group played female characters 27.62% of the time while the 25 and older group played female characters 34.65% of the time. Futhermore, the increase from one group to another was not uniform, some groups saw a higher increase than others.

Crossplay by age for class
	Younger	Older	Comparison of odds*
Average	27.62%	34.65%	1.39
Priest	46.02%	47.26%	1.05
Mage	37.27%	37.24%	1.00
Paladin	35.33%	42.71%	1.36
Shaman	30.08%	32.88%	1.14
Hunter	27.27%	25.51%	0.91
Rogue	23.85%	26.84%	1.17
Druid	23.81%	39.87%	2.12
Warlock	21.11%	27.78%	1.44
Death Knight	17.65%	27.75%	1.79
Warrior	15.15%	25.48%	1.91

So every group except for the hunter and the mage saw an increase in their amount of crossplay among the male respondents at they ageds. When looking at this chart, however, some of the classes increased less than the average increase. So while female characters tend to appeal more as we move from the younger group to the older group, some don't increase as much. In summary, as male players age

• Decreased: hunter, mage
• Increased<Average: priest, shaman, rogue, paladin
• Increased>Average: warlock, Death Knight, warrior, druid

One thing to notice is that the classes that had the lowest percentage of female players among the younger group saw the biggest increases. It's distinctly possible that as male players get older, they tend to throw away a bit of their preconceived notions about in-game gender roles. This isn't to say that the older male players are an enlightened bunch, but just that they don't subscribe to those gender roles as strongly.

Crossplay by age for race
	Younger	Older	Comparison of odds*
Average	27.62%	34.65%	1.39
Draenei	58.75%	53.7%	0.81
Night Elf	47.58%	47.11%	0.98
Blood Elf	44.44%	52.02%	1.36
Human	31.28%	41.51%	1.56
Goblin	23.61%	30.43%	1.42
Gnome	22.92%	39.19%	2.17
Dwarf	18.18%	13.25%	0.69
Worgen	17.65%	30.84%	2.08
Troll	16.67%	26%	1.76
Undead	15.79%	29.27%	2.21
Orc	10.62%	9.17%	0.85
Tauren	10.48%	21.88%	2.42

 In summary, this is

• Decrease: dwarf, draenei, orc, Night Elf
• Increase<Average:Blood Elf
• Increase>Average:goblin, human, troll, worgen, gnome, undead, tauren

 One thing to notice here is that in addition to being more open to crossplay, the older male group also seems to have lost their qualms with the "monstrous" female races, with all of them except for the orc receiving significant gains in popularity. Quite frankly, I can't come up with a reason that the orc and the dwarf would have a decrease in popularity. It's puzzling to me.

I could have done the various breakdowns that I normally do but I think what we saw was pretty clear and that I would spare you all.   ;-)

Conclusion
Male crossplay is something that has many factors. In general, it seems to be affected by the attractiveness of the female model of the chosen race as well as the aesthetics of the class's armor. Futhermore, it seems to be affected by the in-game gender roles that the players seem to ascribe to their character's PVE roles.

As male players get older, things seem to change. They seem to become more willing to crossplay in general. It seems likely to me that this isn't due to an increased desire to play female characters but a loss of feeling that they have to play male characters. Furthermore, they seem to becomes more open in how they crossplay, not feeling as strong a pull to tend to those perceived in game gender roles and becoming more open to crossplaying with races that they might not find as attractive as others.

All in all, no matter how much analysis I do here, we can't conclude anything about why a particular person engages in crossplay or why they crossplay with the particular character(s) that they do. For some, it could just be about having something nice to look at. For some, it could be for roleplay purposes. For others, it can be part of their transition process as a transgendered person.

In the future, I'd like to be able to take a look at female crossplay. The fact that it is more rare makes the possibility of analyzing it all the more appealing. If I get the chance to do a study like this again in the future I will go to great steps to get a large enough number of female respondents so that I can achieve such an analysis.

Next time, I intend to look at what I'm calling "class correlations." I'll be looking at what classes tend to be played by the same person and how if one person plays one class, how likely is it that they play the other classes. Are there some classes that are much likelier to be played together than others? We'll find out.

*The comparison of odds column is calculated as follows. If p(young) is the percentage of female characters for the young group and p(old) being the same for the older group, with both being between 0 and 1, then the comparison of odds,

This is a measure of the increase in crossplay from the young group to the male group. It is the odds that a older respondent crossplays for that class divided by the odds that a younger respondent crossplays for that class.