The Proteus Paradox by Nick Yee Read Free Book Online Page A

networks, and well-adjusted gamers are largely not at risk of problematic gaming. 11
    As big as the stereotypical jock-versus-nerd divide is in high school, there are many similarities between football and online games. Both are social activities that take place in a cordoned-off portion of reality. In these virtual worlds, different rules and objectivescome into play. Players take on fantasy roles that have functional meaning only in the fantasy world. They are awarded points for arbitrarily defined tasks. Teamwork and competition play a large role in both games.
    On the other hand, there is a tremendous difference in how people interpret tragedies that occur in these two games. Between 1994 and 2009, an average of three football players died each year in the United States from overheating, usually during intensive training in summer. When such a death occurs, the media often approach the subject with a holistic perspective: they question whether the coach set an unreasonably exhausting regimen, whether the parents saw warning signs, and whether the school reviewed the coach’s history thoroughly; they wonder why the school mandates practice in the hot summer months and how the team physicians took into account the idiosyncratic health profiles of different players. And in no time during all this introspection does anyone suggest football is addictive and that a new pathological designation should be created for football. A leather ball is too low-tech and too mainstream to be useful for instilling paranoia. 12
    We cherry-pick addictions. Some people accumulate cats in their houses until their lives are overrun with toxic animal waste, but there are no dramatic news stories warning us that cats are addictive. Certainly, some gamers spend too much time playing online games and this leads to problems with their work, relationships, or health, but the label “online gaming addiction” is a rhetorical sleight of hand that distracts us from the actual psychological problems from which these gamers suffer. When we focus our attention on the technology, we take the person out of the equation. These labels are a disingenuous rebranding of common coping mechanisms stemmingfrom depression and social anxiety; they sideline the fact that taking the technology away won’t resolve these underlying psychological problems.
    Whether it’s the frivolous nature of video games, the people who play online games, or online gaming addiction, our cultural stereotypes often distract us from the reality of gaming. And by focusing our attention on these myths of bad inputs and outputs—delinquent male teenagers, antisocial behavior, and gaming addiction—these self-serving cultural stories have encouraged us to ignore what actually happens inside these online games. In the next part of the book, I’ll draw from different aspects of online games to explain why the promise of escape and freedom in virtual worlds is illusory. Our psychological baggage and social stereotypes follow us into these fantasy worlds.

CHAPTER 3 SUPERSTITIONS
    In EverQuest there were several folks in my guild who believed if their characters got drunk enough they would actually be teleported to a special location. I think this rumor started because somebody got so drunk they couldn’t tell where they were walking (since being drunk warps the way the game draws the graphics) and got stuck in a weird place under Freeport or Qeynos. So these guys kept getting smashed on long camps to try and go to this “special” location, which really screwed us one time when the mob we wanted appeared but half of the group was too wasted to attack it. No matter how much others tried to convince them that there was no special place, they never stopped believing it was true.
    [
World of Warcraft,
male, 36]
    In the early parts of online games, and even after many hours of playing, players are often only tapping a few keys on their keyboard repeatedly. The