I pointed to The Great Scam [new cached link] over the weekend, a first-person narrative of a scam perpetrated by Nightfreeze in the online game EVE. (Before I go into what caught my eye about it, I want to rectify an omission in my earlier post. The Great Scam contains derogatory references to women and minorities. I should have put a warning in the original pointer; my apologies.)

The piece is most interesting not as a story but as an artifact — the author does not set out to explain to much as describe the events in question, and in doing so, ends up documenting several areas of behavior that may be of interest to M2M readers:

• The use of out-of-band communications tools
• Issues of identity and presentation
• Questions of constitutional legitimacy

Communications tools

There was a time, in the days of LambdaMOO, when a number of observers of computer-mediated communications believed that most mediated interaction would be contained in a self-consistent world — users would go to a place and talk with one another once there. (Insert “as if” quotes to taste…)

My label for this was the Whole Worlds hypothesis — interactions would be through the lens of characters playing roles in immersive environments. Two additional assumptions made by the Whole Worlds camp were that the MUD/MUSH/MOO style of interaction would give way to more visually immersive environments, and that the interactions would move outside the realm of games and hang-out spaces, and become normal modes of business interaction.

These hypotheses seem to be right and wrong respectively — the MMO is the logical inheritor of the MUD, but MMOs have stayed game- and hang-out oriented. Business interaction, by contrast, has remained largely text and voice-based, and has moved in the opposite direction from the Whole Worlds model, towards fragmentation and multi-tasking. Not only are we not immersed in purpose-built online spaces at work, we aren’t even immersed in the real world anymore, as the rise of continuous partial attention (tip of the hat to Linda Stone) means that our presence in reality is lessened by interrupts from phones, IM, the Treo, and so on.

So the failure of the Whole Worlds model outside games is pretty obvious, leaving game worlds as the principal site of that theory. The question for game worlds is “Do player-characters consider themselves bound by the tacit rules of immersion, such as remaining in character?”

In the case of The Great Scam, the answer is obviously no. In addition to in-game communication, Nightfreeze notes 4 other communications tools he uses to conduct game business — the EVE bulletin boards, IM, irc, and the phone. He also references the dollar value of the in-game money he stole (~$1000), making eBay a 5th tool of out-game communication, albeit mainly for price signaling.

Rather than treating the game as an immersive environment, in other words, Nightfreeze and his contacts treat EVE as an environment surrounded by a field of alternate communications tools. Their behavior indicates that using those tools adds to the game experience in the way kibitzing does to chess, even though it subtracts from the immersive illusion.

Which brings me to the second area of interest…

Identity

The Whole Worlds model assumes that a player-character is mostly character, giving themselves over wholly to novel identities in different spaces, and even in the same space at different times. (danah has brilliantly glossed this as the assumption that everyone online suffers from multiple-personality disorder.)

The present narrative doesn’t follow that pattern at all. Instead, the constant use of out-of-game communications to conduct game business, and the casualness with which Nightfreeze addresses it (only the phone call is presented as a big deal), suggests that the player-character dichotomy is typically played with much more deference to the player than the Whole Worlds model suggests.

The mix of real-world and game-world identity is presented as both pervasive and normal — Nightfreeze refers to his best friend, but calls him by his in-game name; he recounts learning HardHead’s real name, Vinnie, on IM (he doesn’t mention if he disclosed his real name to HardHead as well); the ability to answer a land-line phone is considered a key token of solid player identity, which in turn generates transitive trust for the player’s character, and so on.

Note too that although this kind of game allows players to pick up and set down characters at will, the social universe obviously turns on assumptions of both persistence (someone I meet today will continue to exist tomorrow) and difference (two different characters are connected to two different players.) Thus social expectations make identity play in these worlds a lot less weird than predicted, and, as cases like Kaycee Nicole also demonstrate, using the game for that sort of identity play is regarded as aberrant behavior.

The crucial mixing of the player and character comes when Nightfreeze, in trying to set up the scam on irc, drops clues about his player identity (references to a non-existent wife, needing to put his non-existent daughter to bed) in order to convince the other players that their characters won’t get burned doing a deal with his character. Because real value is involved, the veil of game identity needs to be lifted to show the solidity of the framework on which it is draped.

A swashbuckling character who is in real life a family man is a safe bet as a counter-party for transactions of real value, while a swashbuckling character played by a swashbuckling player wouldn’t be. To turn the old phrase on its head, Nightfreeze was asked to show that he had some skin out of the game.

Proof of long-term stability was a way of avoiding the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and Nightfreeze was willing to manipulate the signs indicating stability, because he had in mind a large, identity-burning scam that violated the standards of decorous play, because of the…

Constitutional Issues

Throughout, Nightfreeze exhibits an interest in gaming the system — what behaviors will maximize my rewards, irrespective of the larger game design? However, this behavior is split into two periods — good system gaming and bad system gaming.

During the period of good system gaming, he plays by the rules while trying to get ahead — learning the lay of the land, designing ships, going on cargo runs, and so on. (Interestingly, his business model — buy low, travel across the galaxies to someplace he can sell high — first showed up in the gaming literature in Lessons From Lucasfilm’s Habitat as a bug, but has now been incorporated as a feature.)

The bad system gaming involves prolonged, coordinated lying and theft, burning real relationships, hurting real feelings, and stealing game money of real value.

And in between the good gaming and the bad gaming come the constitutional issues. Nightfreeze reports the breaking point as a change in game rules, designed to affect play balance between traders and pirates in favor of the pirates, which was implemented with no notice, and after he had spent considerable monies optimizing his operations under the old rules.

Now of course, managing a game world is managing a polity above all else, and a polity helpless in either code or law to alter or reject management fiat. Thus the temptation is to simply do whatever seems best for the largest number of users, and to do it unilaterally. And although Nightfreeze’s reaction was extreme, his actions demonstrate the potential harm such unilateral moves can catalyze, both in making other players miserable, but also in removing himself (and his monthly fee) from the game world.

The management of EVE seems to have made two errors here. The first is not in changing play balance — a required freedom — but in changing play balance without giving the losers some feeling other than being shafted. There are any number of ways to do this, but the obvious one would have been to improve the rewards from some other aspect of trading as the risk was being increased, thus possibly making the game more interesting for both traders and pirates. Instead, management treated it as zero-sum — pirates only win what traders lose.

And then, to add insult to injury, they made the change without reference to the universe of play at all. Players seem quite tolerant of real-world leaks from other players, in all the ways mentioned above, but not from the environment. Suddenly, micro-warp drives would no longer speed an industrial ship safely past pirates. What happened? Same drives, same ships — did the laws of physics change?

Indeed, it takes Nightfreeze some time to figure out that the rules can have changed underneath him, as he is perfectly willing to regard the micro-warp drives as objects that have predictable behaviors — an irony, given the other manipulations of in-game characteristics he is about to embark on.

A better way to handle this might have been some long, involved story about regulation, forcing drive owners to trade-in their old drives or be tracked by bounty hunters, or any other of a number of in-game plausible scenarios that would have avoided the environment-breaking way they handled it.

Not everyone facing this kind of clumsy change turns socio-pathic, of course, but the extreme reaction here illustrates the clumsiness. As appalling as Nightfreeze’s behavior is, it’s hard not to feel a modicum of sympathy for being so badly mistreated by the inept game operators.

Epilogue?

The Great Scam ends with a dumb parody — given the themes, it would be interesting to know if Nightfreeze was ever unmasked, or will be. Someone in EVE knows the library phone number he used, and that he is a 5 minute run from said library; Vinnie (HardHead) may have chat logs that reveal clues to his identity; and so on. We may never know whether it happened or not, but, to reference Kaycee Nicole again, communities scammed by virtual members who don’t observe proper user to character mapping are willing to expend an astonishing amount of energy to find the perpetrators.

Anyone know of follow-on commentary within in the EVE community?