http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7280969.stm
Five things that Dungeons & Dragons begat
One of the creators of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax, has died. While the game's heyday has passed, its cultural influence bestrides gaming and how the media views young people.
ONLINE ROLE-PLAY GAMING
Without Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) it is hard to imagine the massively successful World of Warcraft. Both games immerse the user in a fantasy realm which appears on the surface to owe more than a little to Lord of the Rings.
Both are based on systems where characters can improve their attributes by gaining credit for game actions. Gains come from experience or honour points in World of Warcraft, following on from the experience points scheme in D&D. Both games have also converted early cult appeal into global phenomenon status.
D&D completed its journey into the cultural mainstream, when it featured in a scene near the beginning of Steven Spielberg's ET, without the need for any explanation. Younger members of the audience might very well have played it or known people who had. Older members of the audience probably knew about it through the media.
THE GEEK RAMPANT
Geek was, and remains to many, an offensive term. It has been a stick with which to beat anybody who does not enjoy all of the cultural and social values of the majority. Anybody who had an interest in computers, science fiction, fantasy literature or collecting comics could be easily dismissed as a geek once upon a time.
And the key thing with the classic "geek" pastimes was that they were - except for the occasional convention - typically fairly solitary pursuits.
Dungeons & Dragons had a number of effects. It brought so-called geeks together in a social setting as a matter of course, it quickly spread out into the mainstream, and it signalled that money could be made out of catering for previously niche audiences.
The game has also left a legacy of subcultures like live action role-play and online gaming, where there is a pronounced social element. The world we live in now, where "gaining friends" on social networking sites is regarded as a totally reasonable pastime, is a very different world to that in which Dungeons & Dragons made its debut in 1974.
REVIVING FANTASY MANIA
Fantasy can be regarded as perhaps the oldest genre in storytelling, but its popularity in the modern era has ebbed and flowed.
Despite the protestations of creators and fans that D&D was not a slavish aping of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it seems fair to suggest that it provided another source of enthusiasm for Tolkien's classics as well as boosting interest in a host of successors like David Eddings and Terry Pratchett. Games inspired by D&D such as Call of Cthulhu created new fans for authors like HP Lovecraft.
D&D's success in the late 1970s and 1980s represents a high watermark in the popularity and ubiquity of the fantasy genre along with the original publication in 1954/5 of the Lord of the Rings and the recent film adaptations.
TEENAGE GAMING MORAL PANICS
Moral panics about young people have been about since the dawn of the mass media, but Dungeons & Dragons cemented a link in the mind of worried parents between gaming and fears of effects on teenager's behaviour.
Today the focus is much more likely to be on violent video games like Manhunt, but in the 1980s there were people worrying about games like D&D. It was linked by campaigners to a number of suicides, the suggestion being that teenagers had become so immersed in the game that they had struggled to separate fantasy and reality.
Now paranoid parents would be more likely to suffer misty-eyed nostalgia over the era when gaming involved constant and varied use of the young mind's imagination, as opposed to today's games which typically offer the user images where once there was only the mind's eye.
Online gaming like World of Warcraft is suffering its fair share of concerns, particularly in the Far East, where there are fears of widespread addiction and detrimental effects on intensive users' health.
The message in circulation has remained constant since the rise of D&D - immersive game-playing by young people should be a cause of concern for adults.
MANY-SIDED DICE
Before Dungeons & Dragons, anyone wielding a dodecahedral or icosahedral die in the playground would have been regarded with wide-eyed bemusement.
During the game's popularity and in the wake of the slew of imitators it inspired, they became a common sight for some years.
Even with the rise of the video game, Dungeons and Dragons' influence rolls on.
Showing posts with label World of Warcraft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World of Warcraft. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Saturday, August 25, 2007
World of Warcraft: A Pandemic Lab?
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1655109,00.html
Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2007
World of Warcraft: A Pandemic Lab?
By Laura Blue
Who says video games are a waste of time? World of Warcraft — a virtual online world where millions of players quest for power, wealth and magical items — has got public-health experts considering new ways to track the spread of disease.
That's the message behind a new paper appearing this month in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, and also behind a separate, similar paper published in Epidemiology earlier this year. Both papers document the path of an unexpectedly virulent virtual disease called "Corrupted Blood," which swept through World of Warcraft's online characters starting in September 2005. (The game's administrators introduced the disease as a challenge for some high-level players; they didn't expect it to break out of the caves and into the virtual world's cities and towns.) The disease then ravaged the player population — despite administrators' efforts to quarantine the infected — and gave World of Warcraft its first virtual-world pandemic.
In real life, epidemiologists have long used complex mathematical models to predict how an outbreak of, say, pandemic flu might spread around the world. The problem is that testing those models isn't very easy, which makes it hard to judge whether the models are accurate. Scientists can't just release pathogens into cities and see how many people die. So, instead, they base their models on past outbreaks, where information collection was imperfect, or on people's stated (but hypothetical) beliefs about what they would do during a future outbreak. The resulting models can be remarkably sophisticated, but they "lack the variability and unexpected outcomes that arise ... not by the nature of the disease, but by the nature of the hosts it infects," according to Eric Lofgren and Nina Fefferman, authors of the Lancet Infectious Diseases paper. For example, they say, the failure of the World of Warcraft quarantine "could not have been accurately predicted by numerical methods alone, since it was driven by human decisions and behavioral choices." In other words, no model will know whether or not people ignore infection-control rules in the real world.
Lofgren and Fefferman — along with Ran Balicer, who wrote the Epidemiology paper — hope that virtual worlds will offer a chance to study that human variability. A few features of World of Warcraft made the game's 2005 outbreak a surprisingly good simulation of a real-world epidemic, they suggest. Players could teleport from one virtual-world location to another (not unlike hopping a transcontinental flight in the real world) and players kept pets, which got infected, serving as reservoirs for the disease. In response, some players with healing powers then traveled to help heal the sick, just as medical staff would be dispatched during a real-life epidemic.
Virtual-world characters aren't a perfect mirror of human society, of course. It's probably safe to assume that 20-year-old suburban males are overrepresented among World of Warcraft players and that teen mothers from Cambodia are underrepresented. We might also assume that players become more daring with the health of their online orc-slaying adventurers than they would be with their own health; in real life, death can be kind of a big deal.
But Lofgren and Fefferman believe a virtual disease could be devised to prompt a "reasonable analogue" of some real-world human responses — or at least give some sense of scale of the impact that human variation is likely to have. Games also have a couple of distinct advantages over real-world studies. Researchers can have a perfect understanding of the parameters of the disease and capture every person's response exactly, without any lost information. "Human response is, almost by definition, difficult to predict," Lofgren and Fefferman write. Virtual worlds may not be perfect, but perhaps they can eliminate some of the guesswork.
Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2007
World of Warcraft: A Pandemic Lab?
By Laura Blue
Who says video games are a waste of time? World of Warcraft — a virtual online world where millions of players quest for power, wealth and magical items — has got public-health experts considering new ways to track the spread of disease.
That's the message behind a new paper appearing this month in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, and also behind a separate, similar paper published in Epidemiology earlier this year. Both papers document the path of an unexpectedly virulent virtual disease called "Corrupted Blood," which swept through World of Warcraft's online characters starting in September 2005. (The game's administrators introduced the disease as a challenge for some high-level players; they didn't expect it to break out of the caves and into the virtual world's cities and towns.) The disease then ravaged the player population — despite administrators' efforts to quarantine the infected — and gave World of Warcraft its first virtual-world pandemic.
In real life, epidemiologists have long used complex mathematical models to predict how an outbreak of, say, pandemic flu might spread around the world. The problem is that testing those models isn't very easy, which makes it hard to judge whether the models are accurate. Scientists can't just release pathogens into cities and see how many people die. So, instead, they base their models on past outbreaks, where information collection was imperfect, or on people's stated (but hypothetical) beliefs about what they would do during a future outbreak. The resulting models can be remarkably sophisticated, but they "lack the variability and unexpected outcomes that arise ... not by the nature of the disease, but by the nature of the hosts it infects," according to Eric Lofgren and Nina Fefferman, authors of the Lancet Infectious Diseases paper. For example, they say, the failure of the World of Warcraft quarantine "could not have been accurately predicted by numerical methods alone, since it was driven by human decisions and behavioral choices." In other words, no model will know whether or not people ignore infection-control rules in the real world.
Lofgren and Fefferman — along with Ran Balicer, who wrote the Epidemiology paper — hope that virtual worlds will offer a chance to study that human variability. A few features of World of Warcraft made the game's 2005 outbreak a surprisingly good simulation of a real-world epidemic, they suggest. Players could teleport from one virtual-world location to another (not unlike hopping a transcontinental flight in the real world) and players kept pets, which got infected, serving as reservoirs for the disease. In response, some players with healing powers then traveled to help heal the sick, just as medical staff would be dispatched during a real-life epidemic.
Virtual-world characters aren't a perfect mirror of human society, of course. It's probably safe to assume that 20-year-old suburban males are overrepresented among World of Warcraft players and that teen mothers from Cambodia are underrepresented. We might also assume that players become more daring with the health of their online orc-slaying adventurers than they would be with their own health; in real life, death can be kind of a big deal.
But Lofgren and Fefferman believe a virtual disease could be devised to prompt a "reasonable analogue" of some real-world human responses — or at least give some sense of scale of the impact that human variation is likely to have. Games also have a couple of distinct advantages over real-world studies. Researchers can have a perfect understanding of the parameters of the disease and capture every person's response exactly, without any lost information. "Human response is, almost by definition, difficult to predict," Lofgren and Fefferman write. Virtual worlds may not be perfect, but perhaps they can eliminate some of the guesswork.
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