Star Worlds: Freedom versus Control in Online Game Worlds

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Preface This is an exploration of four complex and beautiful virtual worlds: Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Star Trek Online, and the Star Trek community in Second Life. The first three are generally called “massively multiplayer online games,” but they are far more than mere playthings. Rather, they are simulations of the real human future as many people wish it will be and thus are expressions of fundamental human desires. Both Star Wars and Star Trek are set among the stars and thus depict interstellar travel and galactic civilizations. Yet at present humanity lacks the means for mere interplanetary travel. In December 1972, I stood on a Florida beach in the after-midnight darkness to watch the launch of Apollo 17, the last human flight to the Moon. That was the same year in which the United States ended major research programs that had been intended to develop nuclear-powered launch vehicles, and hope for progress shifted to the hybrid of chemical rocket and aircraft prosaically called space shuttle, which now also has been canceled. Recalling that the Roman Empire never colonized the Americas, I have hope that a new wave of actual space flight development will begin sometime, but how soon I cannot predict. Yet the stars in the two popular science fiction mythologies represent something other than naturally occurring nuclear fusion reactions, being metaphors for all forms of hope. In 1976, the research that had sent me to view the last launch to the Moon and had earned me my doctorate in sociology from Harvard University was published as The Spaceflight Revolution. That was fundamentally a book of history, considered in the light of theory, charting the development of the space flight social movement in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States. My 2015 book The Meaning and Value of Spaceflight charts the diversity of ideas people have about the space program, as reflected in a myriad of public opinion surveys. Both projects adhere closely to exact facts and standard social science research methods. This book is no less rigorous, yet its focus is not mundanity but imagination. Star Wars is a form of heroic fantasy that blurs the distinction between Page x →science and magic, while Star Trek is more logical and closer to the traditions of science fiction literature. Yet each in its own way is extremely optimistic. Both imagine that individual human lives can have universal significance. Both assert that the present era exists long before the end of history. Both postulate a wide range of opportunities that our species can explore, in real life as well as in imaginative fiction. Neither may get all the details correct, but each serves well as inspiration if not prediction. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games, and the technically similar virtual worlds that lack ludic structures, can be viewed as inhabited computer simulations. They allow people to experience environments and events that do not exist, and in so doing to think in new ways about reality. Thus the star worlds described here are tools for considering the actual social world, including culture, economy, and human interaction. Specifically, they capture some of the contrasts in normal life: freedom versus control, cooperation versus conflict, success versus failure. The star worlds are also early manifestations of online commerce and community and thus afford vantage points from which to study human-computer interaction. Born in the final third of the twentieth century, Star Wars and Star Trek can perhaps serve the twenty-first century as guiding stars.

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1. Galaxies Far, Far Away Star Wars and Star Trek were the most popular science fiction brands of the late twentieth century, greatly influencing the public’s perceptions of alternative real futures for humanity. A seventh of the way through the twenty-first century, they, along with their movies, television shows, novels, toys, and games, remain dominant. The core of Star Trek was the seventy-nine-episode TV series, originally broadcast from 1966 to 1969, and the core of Star Wars was the 1977–1983 movie trilogy. Yet the most interesting region of these imaginary galaxies today is the electronic games, the most sophisticated of which take place online and involve thousands of players.1 This book will explore four of these star worlds: the massively multiplayer online (MMO) games Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Star Trek Online, plus the Star Trek community in the nongame, user-created virtual environment Second Life.

Four Thematic Dimensions However many dimensions physicists theorize the universe possesses, human beings perceive just four: three spatial dimensions plus time. The two fictional universes explored here are conceptually distant from us in terms of all four, and as a metaphor the four major themes of this book may be considered to be dimensions. Three describe relationships between pairs of concepts at some intellectual distance from each other: between game players and the roles they play, between the individual and society, and between people and computers. Analogous to the fourth temporal dimension is the dynamic tension between freedom and control, the dominant theme that shapes the other three and is energized by them in turn. The second chapter of this book will provide a theoretical basis for understanding liberation issues, rooted in classical political theory and behavioral psychology, and a glossary at the end will define technical terms from the many intellectual disciplines that contribute to this narrative. Here our main Page 2 →tasks are to sketch general perspectives, introduce the two science fiction traditions, and show how they have been embodied in much more limited solo-player videogames. Freedom Versus Control The relationship between freedom and control is a dynamic tension, not a static opposition, although it is easy enough to imagine a dimension of human reality extending from pure liberty at one end to pure slavery at the other. Rather, freedom and control interact with each other in complex ways, as freedom of choice implies that choices already exist, and accomplishment of personal goals implies that the results of our past actions are not free to dissolve the moment we have achieved them. The movies and television programs of these two brands often highlighted this theme, as illustrated by the following two examples. Luke Skywalker desperately longed to escape his boyhood home on the desert planet Tatooine and go where the action was at the bright center of the universe. He believed the best way to do this was to apply for admission to the Academy, where he would be trained as a starship pilot for the Empire, although he had heard about the Rebellion that had recently arisen in opposition to the imperial tyranny. His uncle, however, needed him on the farm for one more year, so he was trapped on his dreary home planet. Then, like dice rolled by chance from the heavens, two droids dropped into his life, taking him to the hut of a reclusive Jedi Master named Obi-Wan Kenobi, who proposed to teach Luke the ways of the Force. Luke objected that he was not free to leave but must return home to do the chores assigned by his uncle. But his uncle had been killed by Imperial agents hunting for the droids, and Luke would never again take orders. James Tiberius Kirk, commander of the Federation starship Enterprise, faced yet another of his great moral dilemmas. Recently he had encountered a mysterious man named Khan Noonian Singh in hibernation on an ancient spaceship, but now Khan had seized control of the Enterprise and intended to use it to establish a colony, where he planned to build a genetically enhanced master race with himself as its dictator. Kirk could not help but notice that Marla McGivers, the historian among the crew of the Enterprise, had fallen in love with Khan, seeing in him all the masterful men of the past, such as Napoleon and Alexander the Great. Yet her loyalties were torn,

and in the end she helped Kirk retake command. Kirk’s dilemma was what to do with Khan, given that Federation law would require imprisonment and perhaps even treatment to Page 3 →remove his messiah complex, yet when Kirk found Khan he may not really have had the right to awaken him. Whether from his personal whim, or deep ethical analysis, Kirk decided to let Khan continue his journey in search of a new world, accompanied not only by his original followers but also by McGivers. Luke was the hero of the 1977 movie Star Wars, and Kirk played the central role in Star Trek, encountering Khan in the 1967 episode “Space Seed.” Central characters of such dramas appear to possess great freedom, and climaxes seemingly hinge on decisions they make. Of course, their actions were really determined by the script writers, and actors are given little autonomy. Audiences for movies and TV shows have no immediate influence over the course of events, although, over the long term, writers and producers may follow audience preferences. The situation is quite different in the online computer games explored here; their players experience them through avatars they control, experiencing considerable freedom, but not without limits. What can we learn from the fact that the most comprehensive expressions of the two brands are based on carefully programmed computers and the chaotic Internet? Person Versus Role The computer games and virtual worlds considered here all represent the user as the computer-generated image of a person inside what appears to be a real world. Keyboard and mouse controls allow this virtual person to walk, interact with some physical objects, and socialize with others in the environment. That virtual person is often called an avatar, with the implication that it is primarily an expression of the user who plays roles inside the game that were scripted by the game designers but interpreted by the user. The game companies, however, tend to use the word character rather than avatar, which implies that the virtual person is not identical to the user and may have distinct characteristics of its own. A standard concept in the sociology of role playing is role distance, the degree to which people separate themselves from the roles they play, often asserting a degree of independence from or even discomfort about the role.2 Many game researchers have found role playing to be an excellent research methodology, productive of many theoretical insights.3 Some of them have emphasized the power that playing a role inside an impressively realistic virtual environment has over the individual user.4 Yet here we shall see that the situation in recent MMOs has become so complex that the individual must negotiate among many different ways of playing a Page 4 →role, or even playing multiple roles at once. This is especially the case in Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Trek Online, in which the user is often expected to operate from one to four secondary characters in addition to the main one. Central characters in both the Star Wars and Star Trek traditions often struggle over the role others want them to play, and this has also been true for some of the actors. Leonard Nimoy, who played the Vulcan science officer Spock in the original Star Trek series and several movies, published two autobiographies, titled I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock, powerfully expressing the ambivalent feelings of an actor toward the character with which he has been identified.5 Vulcans strenuously avoided feeling emotions as a human does, yet Spock was not a cardboard character lacking in depth, but at every moment sought the right balance between expression and discipline. In our real future, will we be able to express our own individuality, or must our thoughts, feelings and actions adhere to a role that has been scripted for us? Individual Versus Society In the three MMOs emphasized in this book, the user interacts with many characters, some of which are operated by other users and some of which are programmed into the game’s database and operated by simple forms of artificial intelligence. In gamer lingo, artificial characters are called NPCs, or nonplayer characters, and these are largely absent in Second Life because everything there is created by users and NPCs are hard for nonprofessionals to program. But all four have voluntary groups of cooperating users, and the MMOs also have factions comparable to competing nations or political movements, predefined by the game designers.

Another standard concept in sociology is social distance. Of course this is merely a refined version of the popular metaphor that our personal relations can be conceptualized as holding friends close versus keeping our distance from strangers. Way back in 1925, Emory Bogardus developed what he called the social distance scale, a kind of questionnaire item designed to measure how close the respondent feels to particular categories of people, and over the years one of its main application areas has been studying prejudice and hostility between ethnic or cultural groups.6 Conflict between groups is a major dynamic in online multiplayer games, and it can arise spontaneously in nongame virtual worlds as well. But social distance has another aspect in all these environments: the extent to which a particularPage 5 → user cooperates with others and joins and is active in a voluntary group, versus engaging primarily in solo play. Without society, the individual cannot be born, will lack partners to cooperate with, and cannot find a meaning of life that transcends death. Both brands are expressions of the immediate past of the society that created them. Star Trek draws much of its inspiration from the outcome of the Second World War and the Cold War that followed it. Star Wars is rooted in the childhood of American boys growing up in the 1950s and the mythology of knights in armor left over from European feudalism. Indeed, as we shall examine more closely in the following chapter, the most common form of governance in fictional gameworld societies is feudalism, especially so throughout Star Wars, where even the leaders of the Republic often hold royal titles, but not so much in Star Trek, where it is chiefly confined to the alien Klingons. Imagine that a Klingon or Vulcan historian had visited Earth during the twentieth century and familiarized himself with sociological World Systems Theory and the Iron Law of Oligarchy, both of which postulate that a small elite always rules, regardless of what ideology legitimizes their position.7 From an alien perspective, twentieth-century Earth might have seemed a contest between three forms of social organization that were less different from each other than they claimed: (1) feudalism modernized for industrial society through Fascism and Nazism, (2) idealized notions of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer band modernized for a potential world government through Communism, and (3) free trade between local farmers and merchants globalized through Capitalism. Interestingly, in many online gameworlds, including those featured in this book, two or three ideologically intense factions like those just listed compete, with the remarkable implication that they are equally moral and give the player equal degrees of personal freedom. How politically radical are these games? Can Star Trek and Star Wars suggest ways to transcend these antique formulations to imagine the society we really might build during the third millennium? Or do they ultimately follow a set of laws almost identical to those that constrain us in our daily lives?8 Human Versus Computer The distance metaphor may be less apt when we place the star worlds into that machinery that supports all of them, a rigorous technological context of human-centered computing.9 This theme interacts with the other themes, Page 6 →because a classic sociological perspective called technological determinism claimed that the most powerful factor shaping society was the changing state of technology, and developments in virtual worlds may foreshadow the future of the so-called “real world” that surrounds them.10 Movies were perfected early in the twentieth century, television in the middle, and personal computers at the end. In this historical sequence we see a movement along the dimension of technology gradually invading human lives. To see a movie, we go out to a theater. Television brought the equivalent of movies into the home, allowing viewers to sit across the room from the TV set, perhaps mesmerized into becoming couch potatoes but not yet incorporated into the technology. But to enter a virtual world, we must physically touch the mouse and keyboard and fill our senses with the game display. Perhaps here the distance metaphor solidifies into reality, as we become integrated into computer and communications systems throughout our daily lives. Launched in 2003, Star Wars Galaxies gave users the opportunity to build homes on many different planets, organize them into cities, and engage in extensive social and economic interaction with each other. Launched in 2010, Star Trek Online emphasized living in space, both in complex spaceships belonging to the player and in shared space stations. Both of these gameworlds not only offered many pre-scripted missions a player could undertake that were solidly based in the existing mythos, but they also gave them the opportunity to create their own stories and missions. Launched late in 2011, Star Wars: The Old Republic took a different approach, emphasizing story line like a movie or episode of a TV drama, imposing strict limitations on player freedom.

Second Life, launched in 2003, allowed Star Trek fans to construct their own virtual worlds, using visual programming systems built into the games yet beyond the confines of the game industry. Star Wars Galaxies no longer exists; it was killed off to make way for Star Wars: The Old Republic, in a commercialized world in which profit is king. At the point of this writing, Second Life still exists but has lost popularity since its peak around 2008, and the science fiction communities within it are small and often in conflict with each other. Star Trek Online, an expression of traditional American optimism, has been bought by a Chinese company with designs on conquering the online gaming industry. All four virtual worlds run on desktop computers, at a time when technological innovation has shifted from that kind of machine to mobile devices and to the Internet cloud, which no one can even define clearly. Yet these four worlds, and two science fiction traditions, express deep conceptions of humanPage 7 → society, bequeathed to us by the twentieth century. In our own century, new and more realistic images of a positive future have not yet emerged, so we need to consider the star worlds before they vanish into the mists of time. What general principles of human-centered computing can we learn from research on the most advanced Internet expressions of Star Trek and Star Wars?

Research Methodology In order to study this remarkable phenomenon, I have employed tried-and-true sociological methods, notably participant observation ethnography, some statistical analysis, and evaluation methods common in humancentered computing. Except in the final two chapters, the emphasis is not on the society created by the players, but the culture created by the game designers. Players are but one category within the populations of these cultures, and except in Second Life they are outnumbered by artificial, computer-generated characters. But whenever one of my game characters interacted with one of the frequent religious cults in one of the gameworlds, I thought back to the field research I had done many years earlier in two real-world religious communes and sought to achieve the same balance of observation versus participation.11 While innovative in themes and content, this research was not difficult for me to do because this is my sixth book about virtual gameworlds. Earlier I had invested 2,400 hours studying World of Warcraft, which led to a book published by MIT Press in 2010. That year also saw publication of a short textbook, Online Multiplayer Games, and an edited collection, Online Worlds, that grew out of the world’s first major scientific conference held inside a gameworld, which I organized in May 2008 inside World of Warcraft. In 2011, The Virtual Future was published, a study of nine gameworlds that depict the human future, including chapters on Star Wars Galaxies and Star Trek Online. In 2013 eGods deeply analyzed the fictional religions depicted in forty-one electronic games, providing connections to the work I had earlier done constructing a general theory of human religion. Then in 2014, I explored the admittedly unconventional idea of memorialized deceased relatives as game avatars in An Information Technology Surrogate for Religion.12 These diverse studies have in common the principle that online virtual reality environments are a new realm of culture that might in the future serve many serious functions for humanity, including but not limited to play. Page 8 →This background freed me to focus here not only on large themes like those outlined above, but also on important fine details that anchor ideas in empirical reality, convey the direct experience of living within a gameworld, and often are the spark that ignites a new general concept. Reality is based in atoms, individually of no significance but absolutely determinative of everything that is important. Similarly, the elements of culture are defined by cultural atoms. Hopefully the reader will agree that I have usually selected interesting atoms for discussion. The participant observation ethnography of the three MMOs was done by creating four avatars in each and taking them all up to the maximum experience level, known as the “cap.” Star Wars Galaxies actually tabulated how much time I invested in each character, and the total was 618 hours. The two other MMOs required similar effort but did not count the hours. Four avatars meant not only roughly four times the data, but also the opportunity to explore different parts of a gameworld with characters possessing different qualities, as well as highlighting the theme about the relation between people and the roles they play.

In Star Wars Galaxies, I ran a Jedi named Simula Tion, a bounty hunter named Socio Path, a trader engineer named Algorithma Teq, and a Wookiee entertainer named Guzzlebooze. In Star Trek Online the four research characters were a Bajoran science officer named Rho Xi and a tactical officer named John Seaman Bainbridge in the United Federation of Planets, a Klingon tactical officer named Korbette, and a Federation engineer named Paupera who was on the game’s test server, Tribble. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, my four avatars were based on great science fiction writers who influenced my own thinking: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Alfred Bester. For the chapters on the manifestations of Star Trek in Second Life, I used my original SL avatar, Interviewer Wilber, who was created in 2006, plus a new avatar named Barbara Sims, because poor Interviewer Wilber became assimilated into the human-machine hybrids called Borg and was no longer entirely welcome in Trekkie communities. The research on the four star worlds began December 20, 2008, when I first entered Star Wars Galaxies, and the primary phase ended in the summer of 2012, when my last character reached the experience level cap in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Barbara Sims played a major role in the annual science fiction convention held in Second Life. In June 2013, I carried out brief follow-up explorations to see what recent developments needed to be reported when this book was published. I had previously played many solo videogames in the two traditions and will discuss Star Wars: The Page 9 →Force Unleashed and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force as part of this introduction, each following a section on the history of the mythos to which it belongs.

The Lucas Mythos Although Star Trek launched eleven years earlier, the science fiction roots of Star Wars were planted long before, and the mythos has a powerful orientation toward the past, so it makes sense to consider it first. The movies begin with the legend, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far awayВ .В .В .” There are really four things this phrase might mean. First of all, it marks Star Wars as a fantasy, far removed from reality. Second, it suggests nostalgia for the 1950s boyhood of the man who created it, George Lucas. Third, the movies depict a galaxy largely organized along ancient feudal lines, in which one of the heroines is a princess and the other is a queen. Fourth, it acknowledges that the whole mythos was inspired by a particular earlier tradition in science fiction capped by the Flash Gordon movie serials of 1936–1940 and beginning in 1911 when Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his first novel, A Princess of Mars.13 Inspirational Movie Serials George Lucas has explicitly stated that he had originally hoped to film a remake of Flash Gordon: “I tried to buy the rights to Flash Gordon. I’d been toying with the idea, and that’s when I went on a whim to King Features. But I couldn’t get the rights to it.”14 Many scenes in the first Star Wars film are directly derived from the three Flash Gordon serials. The words that scroll upward at the very beginning imitate the beginning of each episode of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940). The light bridge inside the Death Star that does not work comes from Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938), where it did function properly. Among the sci-fi anachronisms borrowed from all three serials are the fact that the ultimate enemy is an emperor and that heroes use an odd mixture of ray guns and swords. The Star Wars background music written by John Williams was specifically inspired by the collage of movie music used in the serials. In the original drafts of the Star Wars scripts, Luke Skywalker was named Starkiller, and at one point George Lucas explained, “In the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, The Adventures of Luke Starkiller is an engaging human drama set in a fantasy world that paralyzes the imagination.”15 In an interview, he Page 10 →said of Flash Gordon, “I just loved it when it was a movie serial on television; the original Universal serial was on television at 6:15 PM every day, and I was just crazy about it.”16 The seven main Star Wars movies are explicitly presented as episodes of a serial, and the original film was Episode IV: A New Hope. Its content is more comparable to that of an entire Flash Gordon serial, and since there were three of them, calling Star Wars the fourth episode applied the episode concept on a higher level of organization. From the standpoint of human-centered computing, it is worth noting that the games are assembled

from levels or missions that take place across separate virtual locations that are often as distinct from each other as planets are. Both Star Wars and Star Trek are modular, and this modular form of structure is almost universal in computer science, as programs are assembled from procedures, modern software is typically composed of multiple files, and data are chunked on multiple levels of complexity. The first Flash Gordon (1936) film begins as the Earth is wracked by storms and other natural disasters, which a “mad scientist” named Dr. Zarkov attributes to the gravitational effect of an onrushing planet named Mongo. In a rocket ship of his own construction, he goes there accompanied by Flash Gordon and Dale Arden. There he confronts Emperor Ming the Merciless, who has used advanced technology to turn Mongo into a weapon for subjugation of the universe. A crucial point about both Flash Gordon and Star Wars is that the heroes act independently rather than as agents of a large bureaucracy as in Star Trek. The first serial takes place in three very different locations on Mongo: Ming’s imperial city, especially laboratories and the palace, an underwater city ruled by one of Ming’s minions, and a sky city ruled by Prince Vultan, who pretends to be loyal to Ming but who really acts independently. The people who live in the two secondary cities seem to be different species, shark men who can swim like fish and hawk men who can fly like birds. The second serial similarly depicts forest people and clay people on Mars, and the third serial returns to Mongo to explore more of its geography and anthropology. This identifies another dimension of modularity adopted by Star Wars, the division of humanity into separate species, all similar to ordinary humans but possessing distinctive abilities, culture, and territory. Inspirational Literature None of these fundamental principles were original with Flash Gordon, because the King Features comic strip on which the serials were based was a Page 11 →direct imitation of Buck Rogers and the Burroughs Mars novels.17 Buck Rogers was derived from the novella “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” by Philip Francis Nowlan, which was published in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, the first science fiction magazine. Edgar Rice Burroughs published his sixth Mars novel, The Master Mind of Mars, in the Amazing Annual the year before, but he was not deeply involved in the science fiction subculture that developed around the magazine and tended to write actionadventure fiction that employed exotic environments to tell stories that involved radical science and technology but were not primarily motivated by them. In contrast, Amazing Stories emphasized the style later called “hard-science SF,” because it was based on fairly rational extrapolations from existing knowledge in the so-called hard sciences.18 Flash Gordon was closer in style to Burroughs than to Buck Rogers. Indeed, just as Star Wars came after a failed attempt to negotiate the rights to Flash Gordon, Flash Gordon came after a failed attempt to negotiate the rights to Burroughs’ Mars novels. For two years prior to the creation of Flash Gordon, King Features negotiated with Burroughs about bringing John Carter to the comic pages of the world’s newspapers. Burroughs’ more famous character, Tarzan, was already in the comics, but financial and strategy issues caused King Features to imitate Burroughs’ work rather than explicitly to build upon it.19 George Lucas drew upon a wide range of prior movies and literature in creating Star Wars, but he acknowledged a special debt to Burroughs: “I’m trying to make a classic genre picture, a classic space opera—and there are certain concepts that have been developed by writers, primarily Edgar Rice Burroughs, that are traditional, and you keep those traditional aspects about the project.”20 The Mars novels are especially relevant in the general history of fantasy games, not just to Star Wars. To be sure, Burroughs had precursors, and one thinks of the exotic adventure novels of H. Rider Haggard in this regard. But the most immediate influence was the picture of Mars developed by astronomers like Percival Lowell, in his popular books Mars and its Canals (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908).21 Lowell believed he could see straight lines on the surface of the red planet when he gazed at it through his telescope, and he concluded these were canals build by an ancient Martian civilization to deal with the gradual desiccation of their world, which aged faster than Earth because it was smaller. Burroughs tried to imagine what that decaying civilization might be like as the most adventure-prone environment possible. Martian society was gradually disintegrating, and survival

required not only maintenance of the canals, but also constant repair of atmosphere factories that replenished the oxygen in the air. In the Page 12 →final scene of the first novel, John Carter leads a desperate effort to restore an atmosphere factory in the last moments before suffocation brings death. He succeeds through use of a telepathic command like those that abound in the Star Wars stories. The fifth novel in the series, Chessmen of Mars, is remarkable in that it focuses on jetan, a Martian game similar to chess, which Burroughs invented and played with his friends and which many fans have played as well.22 Chessmen of Mars parodies excessive intellectualism, and does so in two different ways.23 First, jetan can be played with living human beings rather than wooden pieces, thus making life an intellectual game. Second, the novel introduces a strange hybrid race called the Khaldanes. Each Khaldane is actually two creatures that exist in a fragile symbiosis, an intelligent crab that serves as the head and a brainless humanoid that serves as the body. This novel also has an appendix that gives the rules for jetan and explains that it was based on the traditional warfare between the black race of the Martian south and the yellow race of the north. The creators of Dungeons and Dragons, the tabletop game from which MMOs are derived, explicitly credit Burroughs with much of their inspiration,24 and the first Warcraft computer game was similarly a battle between two races, but in a more complex environment. The original Star Wars movie begins in space but quickly descends to the surface of the planet Tatooine, not very different from Mars as described by Burroughs. Instead of atmosphere factories, there are moisture vaporators that draw water from the dry air. Lucas also imitated the Dune novels by Frank Herbert, written in the 1960s but based on a feudal conception of future society, like that on Barsoom and Mongo.25 Early action takes place on Arrakis, a desert planet similar to Tatooine, and occasional references in the Star Wars mythos to an interstellar spice trade recalls the psychedelic spice that makes Arrakis valuable. Feudal houses and cult-like religious orders compete within a star-spanning but scientifically static empire. The Jedi of Star Wars could well be an imitation of the Dune cult called the Bene Gesserit, who manipulate the hero to become a messiah, reminiscent of Luke Skywalker but more mystical. In the final action scene of the 1977 film, Luke Skywalker attempts to destroy the Death Star planet-killing superweapon with a single shot. The scene is reminiscent of the conclusion of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, in which Flash flies his rocket ship into the tower where Ming the Merciless is barricaded, leaping to safety at the last possible moment. In the re-enactment of this scene in the 1980 film version of Flash Gordon, the spike Page 13 →on the front of the ship exactly impales Ming, an impossible shot but a dramatic one. Other wellknown films that may have provided inspiration for the Death Star attack were The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954) and Dambusters (1955). But when Luke switched off his targeting computer and used his intuition to aim the missile that destroyed the Death Star, he acts out the thesis of Zen in the Art of Archery, written by a mystical German philosopher who believed that total Zen enlightenment would allow one to hit an impossible target without even seeing it.26 The Jedi seem very much like Zen masters, at least as they had been presented to Americans like George Lucas through popular literature.27

Playing Starkiller George Lucas had originally planned to call his main hero Starkiller, as mentioned above, so it is noteworthy that the main character in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has this name. There are versions for both Windows and Macintosh, but doing it on a videogame system illustrates the differences in the experience, so I completed it on a PlayStation 2. As the title suggests, the use of the Force is absolutely central to gameplay, but on a deeper level the game also examines the player’s relationship to the Force. Indeed, the title could be turned around to be The Player Leashed, because until the very end the player has few significant choices and seems to be fully under the control of cosmic forces. The Interface While there are a few significant exceptions, popular videogames require manual dexterity and extensive practice with the particular interface the user employs to take actions in the game, often rapidly and with precision. Most

obviously, this puts the elderly, the disabled, and people with contemplative personalities at a disadvantage. While games differ from each other in how they assign actions to the buttons on the controller, the user does not have the freedom to customize the system. The millions of young people who enjoy these games do not seem to mind the restrictions on their freedom, because the very fact the controls are predictable allows them to master the game. This is actually a key point, because in life more generally, people are willing to give up much of their freedom in return for a feeling of security that they can master the challenges presented to them. Page 14 →The online gameworlds that will be the primary focus of this book, however, provide more freedom, a fact that has many interesting implications. Exploring a virtual environment on a videogame system is indeed vastly different from doing so on a personal computer. The user holds the PlayStation 2 controller with both hands, as if grasping a pair of Siamese twin pistols. The first two fingers of each hand can press four buttons in the direction toward the player, labeled L1, L2, R1, and R2. Most of the action is in the thumbs, each of which can move a tiny joystick or can quickly press one of four buttons arranged in a circle. In The Force Unleashed, the left joystick makes the avatar walk in one direction or another, while the right joystick makes him look in different directions. Thus the left thumb is chiefly devoted to moving through the virtual environment, and the task of performing actions is generally done by the right thumb. Each of the right thumb’s buttons carries a symbol: X, square, triangle, and circle. Occasionally, in The Force Unleashed, one of these symbols will flash on the screen of the television set, telling the player to press that button quickly. The X button often just confirms a choice, but in action it causes the avatar to jump. Quickly hitting it twice can produce a big jump, which presumably exploits the magic powers associated with the Force, but the three other buttons more obviously control different Force-related powers. The square button operates the avatar’s lightsaber, while the triangle button operates the magical telekinetic abilities of the avatar, hurling objects at enemies without the need to touch them with hands. The circle button unleashes Force lightning that burns the enemy. Hacking the Game Knowing the general story of The Force Unleashed and the potential of the Dark Side of the Force, I decided that the best way to study the game scientifically was to cheat. After the second of 15 levels, a choice appears in the option menu to enter cheat codes, so the game designers offer the player a choice to seek the Dark Side near but not quite at the beginning. On the web, I found several amateur walkthroughs and cheat lists that told me what words to enter to achieve various things. Some of them are merely costumes the avatar may wear, but, seeking the power to be free, I entered these: SPEEDER—1,000,000 Force points [By the end of the game I had earned only 348,051 more.] LIGHTSABER—Amplified lightsaber damage Page 15 →CORTOSIS—Godmode [Suffering no damage from combat, but still vulnerable to some environmental dangers.] COUNTDOOKU—Increase combos to maximum level [combos = combinations of actions] KATARN—Increase Force powers to maximum level VERGENCE—Unlimited Force TYRANUS—Unlock all Force powers The VERGENCE cheat allowed my character to burn enemies endlessly with lightning without depleting the supply of Force, and CORTOSIS prevented them from doing damage in return. With all these immoral advantages, the game still took eight hours to run through, and it intensified—but did not create—part of the

experience that was already morally questionable. Most of the hundreds of enemies I blasted were wearing uniforms and thus were deindividualized, and there was neither blood nor gore. But the game is extremely violent and forces the player to become a mass murderer. Psychologists may debate whether violent games promote violent behavior in the real world or if the cathartic effect of game violence reduces the need to act on murderous urges in the real world, but either way there is something ugly about gleeful slaughter.28 Identity Imprisonment Although there are exceptions, most popular video games make the player take a predefined identity, thus establishing considerable role distance. In the first level of this game, the player controls Darth Vader as he battles past innocent defenders to kill a Jedi, on Kashyyyk, the Wookiee planet. The point in time is shortly after Anakin Skywalker was transformed into Vader, and many individual Jedis survive, scattered across many planets. His task is to eliminate them one at a time. When he kills his target victim, his Force sensitivity detects another in the vicinity, and it turns out to be the small son of the Jedi he killed. Seeing the potential to use this boy for his own purposes, Vader adopts him, names him Starkiller, and raises him to be his apprentice on the Sith Dark Side of the Force. In the second level of the game, the player operates Starkiller, now a young man, as Vader sends him on a similar mission to kill one of the few remaining Jedi. The time now is shortly before the action of the first Star Wars movie, and the game explains something about the emergence of the Rebellion that Luke Skywalker later joins. In the novel written in connection with the game, Starkiller does not Page 16 →initially recall his real origins, but only after a while has a vision that unlocks his doubts and a few scattered memories.29 We sometimes speak of strict parents keeping their child on a leash—or apron strings—and one of the meanings of the game’s title is the tie to parents that can constrain a person’s freedom to seek a unique identity. A psychoanalyst might remind us of Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex, named after the Greek who killed his own father without knowing of their connection.30 Yet the Star Wars saga is not Freudian. It uses father-son relations to look at deeper issues of social distance, morality, and power, rather than halting the analysis with the obvious discovery that the process of becoming an adult requires renegotiating one’s relationship with parents. After Starkiller has killed some Jedi, Vader tells him he is ready to begin an important mission, preparing the way for Vader to kill the emperor and take his place as ruler of the universe. The emperor, however, apparently discovered this plot, arrives with an overwhelmingly powerful fleet, and commands Vader to kill Starkiller—which he dutifully does. Starkiller reawakens and discovers that Vader used technology to revive him, the same way the emperor had earlier used technology to transform a mortally wounded Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader. Vader gives Starkiller a new mission: attack a variety of Imperial bases in order to distract the emperor in preparation for his assassination. After succeeding in some of these attacks, one of which destroys an entire fleet, Starkiller helps to organize the early stages of the Rebellion. Vader has told him to do this because it is the best way to distract the emperor. Indeed, Starkiller’s success against Imperial forces makes him a leader of the Rebellion. Level 14 of the game is a cutscene—a short movie—in which the player is unable to take any action but can merely observe. The top Rebel leaders convene on the planet Corellia to plan their organization when Darth Vader arrives with a fleet, captures them all, and announces that the emperor will enjoy the pleasure of killing them personally. Over the course of the game, Starkiller seems to develop second thoughts about being Vader’s slave. Is he a genuine member of the Rebellion, seeking to become unleashed from Vader, or is he still Vader’s slave helping the Rebellion as part of Vader’s plot against the emperor? Then an unexpected answer comes, to a question that had not even been asked: It turns out that Vader was not plotting against the emperor, and the whole charade was a trick to round up the Rebels. At the end of the cutscene, Starkiller answers his own question by drawing his lightsaber against Vader, although their combat is inconclusive. Page 17 →Irony of Ironies

In the final level of the game, Starkiller enters the Death Star battle station, which is still under construction, and fights past many enemies until confronting Vader and seriously wounding him. He then faces what many commentators on the game call the only real decision a player has: Will he kill a Rebel named Rahm Kota and take Vader’s place as the emperor’s assistant? Or will he kill the emperor? When I reached that point, with great confidence I attacked the emperor with my light saber. For the Rebellion! What a fool I was! Again and again, I drove the emperor’s health down near zero and entered a scene in which the game required me to go through a sequence of particular button presses, sure that in the next instant I would be victorious. For more than an hour, well past midnight, we battled, back and forth, neither able to defeat the other. I was invulnerable because I had cheated. And invulnerability was the cause of my defeat. Whichever side the player chooses, Light or Dark, Starkiller is supposed to die at this point. Either way, Darth Vader and the emperor survive, as does the Rebellion, but Starkiller must be killed. But my avatar was immortal, so in the end I lost the game. To choose between the Light Side and Dark Side of the Force requires the freedom to choose at all. Free will requires that a person stand outside the universe, yet fundamentally all the universe is bound together. Thus the Force that unites everything binds us as well, rendering freedom meaningless. Even if we could make a free choice, we would need wisdom to do so properly. Yet, like Starkiller, we exist in a social system and a physical universe where the real truth is hidden from us. The Dark Side in the Star Wars mythos may be evil, but the Light Side is not necessarily good. To discover real hope, we must visit a different mythos.

The Roddenberry Mythos The Star Trek corpus of television programs, movies, books, and other media is not only vast but deeply rooted in an even larger cultural complex.31 Gene Roddenberry’s creation can be conceptualized as a bridge, connecting standard television drama to the literary science fiction subculture. When selling the idea to one of the three networks that dominated American television broadcasting in the 1960s, he presented it as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” referring to one of the most popular shows of the period. In Page 18 →Wagon Train, an ensemble of standard characters travels across the Wild West, encountering a different community or problem each week along the trail and having a distinct adventure. The episodes of the original Star Trek series were separate onehour dramas that could be broadcast in almost any order, rather than being held together by a unified story arc. Later episodes were often connected into arcs, but each series was predominantly episodic and adhered to wellestablished principles of commercial television: Star Trek (1966–1969), The Next Generation (1987–1994), Deep Space Nine (1993–1999), Voyager (1995–2001), and Enterprise (2001–2005), which came last in the order of production but was set earliest in the fictional history. Inspirational Television Programs A few professional science fiction authors provided scripts, but essentially all episodes drew upon the tradition of the Golden Age of science fiction literature, which centered around the magazine Astounding Science Fiction in the period from roughly 1938 to 1953, marked by such influential writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. For example, the android character Data from The Next Generation is a complex trope on the “Three Laws of Robotics” originally proposed by Asimov in the 1942 story “Runaround,” published in Astounding.32 Gene Roddenberry and his writers were not explicit in footnoting where they got their ideas, but tracing a likely connection to Heinlein will place Star Trek in a tradition that linked the serious literature to popular television. Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950–1955) was a children’s television drama based on Heinlein’s 1948 juvenile novel Space Cadet.33 The novel’s Wikipedia page nicely summarizes it in a single sentence: “The story translates the standard military academy story into outer space: a boy from Iowa goes to officer school, sees action and adventure, shoulders responsibilities far beyond his experience, and becomes a man.”34 It was one of three popular science fiction programs of its period, the other two being Captain Video and Space Patrol. In all three, the main characters belonged to a military organization, not unlike Starfleet in Star Trek, that used humane wisdom and advanced technology to explore new worlds in outer space and secure peace between

the planets. The common model of all four programs was of course the American military during the Second World War, which at the time was perceived as both noble and technologically advanced. Tom Corbett was the pilot of a four-man spaceship named the Polaris. Seated next to him on the main deck was Captain Strong, their adult teacher as well as commander, who thus emphasized values of mentorship, parenthood, Page 19 → and command authority. The two other members of the crew were on other decks that could be reached by ladders, Astro on the lower deck, who managed the engines, and Roger Manning on the upper deck, who handled communications. Astro was a hard worker and brave companion, but he lacked fire to the point of often seeming sullen. His role was comparable to that of Scott in Star Trek, running an engine room down below, like that on a steamship, and ready to provide stable support when needed on a mission. Roger was a prankster, technically brilliant, and rather arrogant. His role was like that of Spock on Star Trek, but representing a very different notion of superior intelligence, agitated rather than unemotional. The three heroes of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet were boys, not men, and the organization they belonged to was really a military boarding school rather than a mature air force.35 In 1950, thousands of children sent away for a copy of the Space Academy certificate, as if they were applying to attend the academy with Tom. Perhaps George Lucas had one, because in the original Star Wars movie Luke talks about submitting his own application to “the academy.” But from the year 1950 they would need to wait a while before attending, because the date on the certificate is 2350. Just as Starfleet in Star Trek served the United Federation of Planets, in Tom Corbett the Solar Guards served the Solar Alliance. One side of the certificate explained the historical background, and the other quoted the pledge to which every cadet was required to swear: The Solar Alliance was created in 2250 A.D. Earth, Mars, and Venus, the three great civilizations, make up the Alliance, dedicated to insure [sic] liberty and freedom of all people. Space Cadets train to become officers of the Solar Guards, who insure the future of the Solar Alliance. People of new and strange planets will be studied and greeted by you as men of peace; you will deal with them in honor and trust; you will fight only for honor and for peace: Space Cadet Pledge: I solemnly swear to defend the liberty of the Planets; to safeguard the freedom of space and uphold the cause of peace throughout the universe.36 Thus, the creation of an interplanetary society would not come for three centuries, and all the adventures were set in a more or less plausible future, not in the fantasy past as was the case for Star Wars. However fictional or utopian it may have been, Star Trek always pretended to depict the real human future. Page 20 →Since history has moved onward since 1966, a number of continuity problems have arisen. For example, the 1967 episode “Space Seed” claimed that the end of the twentieth century would be marred by widespread eugenics wars, which did not come to pass.37 The chief divergence has been the real history of spaceflight, which has kept humans locked on their home planet since the last Apollo flight to the moon, way back in 1972. Star Trek already distanced itself a bit from reality by setting almost all stories outside the solar system, whereas Tom Corbett chiefly flew within the solar system, until he had the opportunity of being on the first expedition to Alpha Centauri. Inspirational Philosophy For Star Trek the galaxy represents something very different from a physical spiral of stars. It symbolizes a utopian future in which technological advance is accompanied by moral advance and the universe is full not only of people but of peoples. Both for the practical reason that an episodic television drama needs a constant supply of different social situations, and as an expression of the political liberalism of the 1960s, Star Trek celebrates human diversity. Space travel then becomes a metaphor for progress, hope, and transcendence.38 Two philosophical Star Trek novels include scenes that explicitly concern space exploration in our real universe. Chapter 3 of Prime Directive, by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, takes place on the Moon in Tranquility Park, the landing place of Apollo 11, which had become a tourist attraction. Dr. Leonard McCoy, the grumpiest

member of the original crew of the starship Enterprise, has recently retired from Starfleet. Now he has stopped by this historic spot on his way to an old folks’ home to contemplate the course of his life. He ponders, “When had the Moon gotten this built up and civilized, anyway. It wasn’t the same as he remembered it had been when he was a boy.”39 A little girl interrupts his reverie, exclaiming that Armstrong and Aldrin must have been crazy to come here in their crude Apollo lander. Fifty meters away beyond the transparent aluminum wall, the spindly-looking second stage of the first crewed vehicle to land on Earth’s Moon sat beneath the brilliant, unfiltered sunshine as it had for more than two hundred years. Where McCoy and the child stood had once been an unimaginable frontier, the quest for which had shaped the dreams of an entire century of living, breathing, and hoping human beings.40 Page 21 →Now, students on day excursions from Earth could travel here with no trouble, and plans were being developed to replace ship travel with high-power transporter service, to beam instantly from Earth to Moon. “Civilization, McCoy thought sourly. The death of dreams.” Yet the young girl was filled with enthusiasm for her own future. She confidently planned to join Starfleet and boldly go where no woman had gone before. Based on the second Star Trek series about Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the Next Generation, I, Q, by John de Lancie and Peter David, views human progress from an even more paradoxical perspective. In the series, de Lancie played the role of Q, a godlike character from the Q Continuum. Apparently omniscient and omnipotent, Q periodically meddled in the affairs of the Enterprise, supposedly just because it amused him, but perhaps also because he became fascinated with the ability of humans to hope for a better future.41 Past and future were all the same to Q, because considering himself already to be perfect, progress had no meaning for him. The title of the novel, I, Q, is a play on IQ, the abbreviation for intelligence quotient, and in principle Q’s IQ was infinite. Yet did he possess any wisdom? A remarkable scene in I, Q takes place in New York’s Times Square at midnight, when thousands of revelers celebrate New Year’s and the dawn of the twenty-first century. Q has come to this place and time to experience the chaos of humanity, and, like McCoy at Tranquility Park, he feels more melancholy than joy. Then, in a nearly exact parallel to the scene in The Prime Directive, a young woman speaks to Q. She looks into the clear night sky at the stars and imagines the future: I see great ships, cruising the spaceways. I see species—all sorts of species—from different worlds, coming together. I see a new era of harmony, a new golden age for mankind—for universal kind. I see so many possibilities.42 But unlike the little girl who spoke with McCoy, she is not a naive optimist but a mature woman who can also imagine a dismal future: We might not make it. We might annihilate ourselves before that vision can ever be realized. And that would be just the most incredible waste. We’re at a crossroads, and I hope we’re able to take the right one. As the poet said, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: вЂIt might have been.’” Page 22 →The quotation derives from verses about the disappointment that a woman might face in this harsh world, and it is followed in the poem by these sad words: “Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies deeply buried from human eyes; and, in the hereafter, angels may roll the stone from its grave away!”43 The poet probably meant the grave to be the resting place of our hopes, rather than of the woman in the poem. But immediately after speaking with Q, the woman in the novel is killed by an insane terrorist whose explosive destroyed the great ball whose descent symbolizes the passage of time in the Times Square celebration, ushering in the future. The main story of I, Q concerns the remarkable fact that the entire universe has begun literally to go down the drain, flushing away even Q and the other super-beings of his continuum. Teaming up with Picard and

Data—human and machine—Q thrashes around in the whirlpool of cosmic destruction, realizing that he loves his wife and child as much as any human might. In the paradoxical climax of I, Q, it turns out that the meaning of Q’s existence, indeed the meaning of the entire universe, rests in the hopes and fears of that mortal woman in Times Square.

Simulation of Simulations Primarily conceptualized as a solo-player game, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force was released for personal computers in 2000 with the option to play special missions online with a maximum of thirty-two players. A year later, the PlayStation 2 version lacked Internet connectivity, but a couple of players could do the special missions while sitting around the same machine. The game’s Wikipedia article reports that the reception to the PC game was very positive: “There was a consensus amongst reviewers that Elite Force was the first truly successful Star Trek game, standing out from past titles deemed to be mediocre in quality and design.” But the reception to the PlayStation 2 version was quite different: “Although the original PC version of Elite Force gained critical acclaim, the 2001 PlayStation 2 port received a more negative reception.” The two versions were made by different companies, but the poor graphics in the PlayStation 2 version were a major factor.44 Thus both in terms of the possibilities for a multiplayer mode and in terms of specific design characteristics, the game illustrates the fact that technology constrains as well as enables gameworlds. Page 23 →Escaping a Microcosm The game’s historical background was also a significant determinant of its characteristics, especially in terms of our theme of freedom versus control. Star Trek Voyager differed from the other four television programs in that the action took place far away from home on a spaceship that had been accidentally hurled seventy thousand light years into the Delta Quadrant. Not only could the crew of Voyager not count upon any help, but it also was removed from any higher authority and had to work out its social system in isolation from civilization. The problematic nature of authority was exacerbated by the fact that the people on the ship included many Maqui rebels, as well as Starfleet personnel, who had to learn to cooperate in the common desire to return home safely. The game does not emphasize social conflict, but portrays an episode in which Voyager has suddenly found itself disabled in a starship junkyard. This episode is like a small-scale model of the entire series, and both involve an attempt to manage unexpected events in order to return to a situation that offered more security at the price of greater control. I had originally completed Elite Force in January 2006 on the PlayStation 2, and I entered it again exactly six years later on the same machine in order to write these pages. Undeterred by the ironic result of using cheats in The Force Unleashed, this second time running through Elite Force I used a full assembly of cheats. For example whenever I ran low on ammunition I could press the start button to pause the game, hold the two right-hand triggers R1 and R2, and press the select button. At this point a voice from the game would comment, “impressive,” and I could press start again to proceed. Other cheats greatly increased my character’s health and armor ratings. The first chapter is a tutorial, a simulation within a simulation, and thus can serve to describe the entire game. The player sees the world through the eyes of a single character, Ensign Alex Munro, so again the user cannot define role distance by naming the character, as players can in the online gameworlds. Following the convention of the electronic game genre called first-person shooters, the player sees only the character’s hands clutching a weapon, except in prerecorded cutscenes where no actions can be taken. Thus there is little meaning to the player’s choice of whether the character will be a man named Alexander Munro or a woman named Alexandria Munro, although presumably many players who like to identify with their characters will select their own gender. As an ensign, Munro is under the command of an officer, represented Page 24 →by Tuvok, the Vulcan character who was second in command of Voyager in the television series and is voiced by the same actor. Thus, a human being is controlled by a computer phantom who represents a television character played by a different human being, with the TV show writers and game designers pulling the strings in the background.

The game’s prelude nicely illustrates such intellectual issues. Almost single-handedly, but with occasional radioed directions from Tuvok, Munro must rescue crew members who are being held captive inside a Borg ship, which is shaped like a cube made of machine junk and which symbolizes the imposition of simplistic technical regularity upon chaos. The Borg are a cyborg civilization that seeks to assimilate all other civilizations, transforming captives into half-machines, thus they are a clear symbol of the dangers of technology dominating humanity. Munro encounters many Borg inside their cube-ship, zombies who look like animated human corpses with pieces of hardware affixed to their bodies. The standard tactic is to avoid them whenever possible. They are easy enough to kill at first, but they gradually gain immunity to whatever weapons are repeatedly used against them, through some alien form of machine learning. When possible, nodes on the walls should be destroyed to deactivate local Borg and prevent others from teleporting into the area. The player must navigate complex passageways, including elevator rides, often in dark conditions. Eventually, Munro reaches a small detention center, where other crew members are locked behind force fields. A few Borg must be killed and a node smashed before Munro can begin to figure out how to open these barriers to free the prisoners. Indeed, the control panel is behind another force field that can be shut down by destroying a power distribution node hidden in an alcove. Munro tries to operate the control panel, but it fails to work. At this point, control of the game is taken away from the player, and a cutscene follows. Over the protests of one of the prisoners, Munro smashes the control panel, which explodes and destroys the Borg ship, killing Munro and the Voyager crew members. A Real Shame Except that all this was just a simulation staged in Voyager’s holodeck, a game within a game. Nobody was really killed. In another cutscene, the crew members insult Munro’s mishandling of what was really just a training exercise, and they walk away. Munro and Tuvok then discuss the embarrassing episode: Page 25 →Munro: “Sir, if I mayВ .В .В . how was I supposed to know the panel would explode? ” Tuvok: “That point is not relevant, Mr. Munro. A given situation is not as predictable as you might desire. Your reckless decision has caused the death of you and your teammates. You have failed. Had you followed standard Hazard Team procedures, you may have survived this simulation and achieved your mission objectives.” Munro: “Yes, sir. ProceduresВ .В .В .” Tuvok: “Speak freely, ensign.” Munro: “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think вЂprocedure’ would have mattered. There wasn’t any way I could have possibly rescued them.” Tuvok: “Someday, Mr. Munro, you will be called upon to do the impossible. Consider this to be your personal вЂKobayashi Maru.’” The 1982 movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan begins with a space battle that turns out to be a training simulation, as explained in Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki: The Kobayashi Maru scenario was an infamous no-win scenario that was part of the curriculum for command-track cadets at Starfleet Academy in the 23rd century. It was primarily used to assess a cadet’s discipline, character and command capabilities when facing an impossible situation as there is no one answer to the problem.В .В .В . In the 2250s, James T. Kirk became the first (and only known) cadet to ever beat the no-win scenario. After taking the test and failing twice, Kirk took the test a third time after surreptitiously reprogramming the computer to make it possible to win the scenario.45

So I was inspired by Kirk when I used cheats to sail through Elite Force, but these scenarios are much more than a moral parable about rule violation. They also place gameworlds within the real world, in a manner that suggests infinite regress. The holodeck simulation is a game within a game, like the play within a play found in Shakespeare’s dramas.46 Each of the games considered here exists within a wider game, namely the competition between game companies for our dollars. And that game exists within the wider game of the modern global economy. Whether there is an even wider Page 26 →game, perhaps played between Olympian gods for whom our planet is but a pawn, I cannot say.47

Conclusion The Force Unleashed and Elite Force prepare us in chapter 2 to consider the star worlds in the context of the MMO game industry more generally and the social scientific theories that describe both them and the ludic world we inhabit. The eight chapters that follow are structured as the cube of the number two. Four chapters cover the Star Wars gameworlds, followed by four about the Star Trek gameworlds. In each quartet, the first two chapters consider the more conventional gameworld and the second pair considers the less conventional, either more constrained in terms of freedom versus control, or less constrained. In each pair of chapters about a gameworld, the first serves as an introduction, providing the experience of being in the world, and outlines its overarching principles, while the second considers topics that make that gameworld unique. Given the diversity of these virtual environments and the theoretical principles they allow us to explore, the structures of the chapter-pairs are not entirely comparable, however. Thus the book imposes a high degree of control over the large-scale structure, but freedom erupts from here to there on the small scale. This is a traditional book, after all, rather than a futuristic virtual world, so I will not apologize for suggesting that the words be read in the order they were written.

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2. Free Will Games are voluntary contests, a relatively constrained form of play that follows rules.1 They may offer the player a sense of freedom from reality’s constraints, yet they function as extremely delineated systems. Imagine a football player who sees he cannot possibly get past the opposing team on the field, so he runs out of the stadium, loses his pursuers in the neighborhood, then enters the stadium behind the opposing goal. Has he scored points? Certainly not, because he went out of bounds. Life is like that. The laws of nature force us to live one day at a time, in a set order, eating so we don’t starve and interacting economically with other people in order to earn our dinner. In so doing we must take account of human laws legislated by established institutions of society, whether we respond to them with obedience or with criminality. Laws are programmed into game software, and as more and more real-world social and economic exchange takes place through computers, an ever-greater fraction of control over people may be engineered into machines rather than arising in human interaction.

Principles of Freedom A common word like “game” has multiple meanings, and the attempts by social scientists to frame formal definitions tend merely to add alternatives rather than resolve this semantic complexity. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman considered how a number of authors defined the word, finding not uniformity but a plurality saying that games are voluntary goal-oriented activities outside ordinary life that are constrained by rules.2 The word “voluntary” in that definition suggests “free will,” a central theme of this book, which potentially conflicts with another word, “rule,” but together these words imply the voluntary acceptance of rules, which sounds like what philosophers call a social contract.3 A more modern way to find a set of definitions is to consult Google Translate to see which English meanings Page 28 →must be considered for separate translation into another language. In this way game sometimes becomes Spiel in German, but never when used as an adjective describing a person. Here are the alternatives offered: Adjective: 1. eager and willing to do something new or challenging. Noun: 2. a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck. 3. a type of activity or business, especially when regarded as a game. 4. wild mammals or birds hunted for sport or food. Verb: 5. play games of chance for money 6. manipulate (a situation), typically in a way that is unfair or unscrupulous.4 One could argue that the star worlds considered here are virtual worlds, more than mere games, that serve as environments for role playing, storytelling, and community building. Since they were derived from movies and television, they could be conceptualized as evolutionary offshoots from drama and all the visual arts. The game as play definition, however, emphasizes voluntary choice, even the personal bravery to accept challenges, and thus links well to issues about human freedom to choose. Philosophers have constructed a bewildering array of ornate arguments to dissect the concept of free will, yet at heart the issues they deal with are crucial to everyday life and to the wider meaning we hope our lives possess. Games are fun; philosophy is boring, yet games are philosophies. Here our two goals are to make philosophy interesting by playing with it, and to understand freedom better by examining it in the context of the control

imposed by games. We can puzzle over the dilemma of whether freedom is an ethical principle or a logical one, concerning what ought to be versus what is. The vast variety of rules of card games suggests they are arbitrary, yet the requirement to follow a set of rules implies they are absolute. How many cards in poker are dealt face up versus face down? AnswersPage 29 → vary. We can toy with the rules, as well as within the rules, implying that both truth and justice are relative concepts. Competing Definitions The pragmatic philosopher William James battled with depression and the feeling of helplessness, and he brooded over the profound question of whether humans actually could possess free will. Then, as a tactic of personal salvation, he decided that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. Eventually he extended this principle to the issue of how to know the truth, asserting two strong claims: (1) Truth is simply the useful in the way of thinking, so any belief that serves our goals is by definition true. (2) No one can be faulted for believing what others in the same society generally believe. Together, these points suggest that we are free to decide what is true, although they leave undecided whether the decision belongs to the individual or to the society.5 The first challenge of free will is that it has several definitions, implying that one can freely choose how to define freedom. That freely constructed archive of popular wisdom, Wikipedia, notes: The principle of free will has religious, ethical, and scientific implications. For example, in the religious realm, free will implies that individual will and choices can coexist with an omnipotent divinity. In ethics, it may hold implications for whether individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions. In science, neuroscientific findings regarding free will may suggest different ways of predicting human behavior.6 This is equivalent to three different definitions of freedom, because each of these implications operates separately from the others. Indeed, one can imagine endless varieties of freedom and control, so here we shall emphasize those that can be illuminated by games. Without too much distortion, we could say that the gods of each game are the designers who created it and who established the rules of virtual nature and defined which deeds will be rewarded by points within the game. If a religious perspective on freedom in a game focuses on its creators, an ethical perspective would focus on the other players. All four major virtual worlds considered here encourage players to group together, and the emergence of norms inside the groups certainly deserves study. But over the years MMOs have developed,Page 30 → the designers have structured the conditions of play in response to what seemed to have worked for past generations of players, essentially codifying their informal norms into formal laws. Many of the rules of MMOs are built into their programming, like rules of nature that cannot be violated. But some game rules can be circumvented, so the question shifts from can to may and enforcement becomes a choice for other players, who can kick a troublesome player out of their guild or set text chat to ignore everything he says. The authors of the Wikipedia article could have merged the religious and ethical definitions of free will, as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did in arguing that religious moral arguments are typically just rhetoric designed to give power to the moralizers, as he stated forcefully in The Genealogy of Morals. In that connection, free will is a paradoxical doctrine that justifies increased power over a person who is free. For a century and a half, juries and legal scholars have debated whether mental illness excuses someone who has committed criminal acts.7 This debate has many facets. For example, an insane person accused of murder cannot competently defend himself in a court of law, so perhaps we should place him in a mental hospital for treatment and execute him only after he recovers his mental health. Of course, there are two very different justifications for incarceration: punishment and protection of society. Under current thinking, malefactors do not deserve punishment unless they possess free will, thus taking upon themselves full moral responsibility for their acts. But even a beast lacking free will should be locked up to protect society from further bestiality. Interestingly, some research indicates that considering a criminal to be mentally ill can reduce a prison sentence because the person is only partially responsible and thus deserves diminished punishment, but conversely it can lengthen a sentence because psychotics seldom recover and thus society should be protected for as long as feasible.8

Wikipedia’s third definition of free will, unpredictability, is quite contentious and probably needs radical redefinition. Nothing at all in this universe can be predicted with absolute certainly, so unpredictability is vacuous as a definition of freedom. Yet games help us understand that unpredictability is a paradox, with at least two different sides. Competition by Chance For at least two centuries war games have been played as training exercises in real-world military strategy and logistics, and operating a Jedi knight in a Star Wars game can illustrate the micrologistics of combat. Consider Page 31 →what happens when a player’s Jedi character battles an enemy non-player character (NPC) operated by simple artificial intelligence inside the computer. Each time the Jedi strikes the enemy with a lightsaber, a certain but unpredictable amount of damage is done. Unpredictable by the player, that is, because the computer can predict the exact amount of damage that will be done. The player’s lightsaber and the enemy’s armor are associated with specific numbers measuring their relative strength. The player can easily know the Jedi character’s numbers, although only a few obsessive players ever do possess precise information about the parameters and the complex equation they function in. It is more difficult, but not strictly impossible, to know the numbers associated with the enemy. But the player cannot know the sequence of pseudorandom numbers the computer employs to determine the exact effect of each lightsaber slash. These numbers are pseudorandom rather than random because they are generated by a totally deterministic formula inside the computer, but one using hidden numbers in a manner beyond an ordinary person’s ability to calculate. So for a human being, the results are not strictly predictable, but they are predetermined. Is that freedom? There are two ways in which the player can affect the outcome, apparently exercising free will. First, both before the combat and during it, the player can select various different options for the character. As a Jedi ascends the ladder of experience, one major choice concerns whether to become a Sentinel, using two lightsabers simultaneously, or a Guardian, using one lightsaber but wearing heavier and more protective armor, essentially committing the character to a different balance between offense and defense. From early in a Jedi’s progress, the hotbar in the user interface offers alternative actions that can be decided instantly, starting with strike that “inflicts low damage with a series of quick melee attacks,” and slash that “slashes the target for moderate damage.”9 The player may use various other tactics, such as where the Jedi should stand relative to the position of the NPC. Prior to the combat, the player may use in-game money to buy components and assemble a better lightsaber. This gives free will a historical dimension; choices freely made long ago constrain the choices that exist now. Second, and this is more subtle, exactly when the player clicks the icon to wield the lightsaber may set the number that is the seed for the formula that generates the next sequence of pseudorandom numbers. The games never tell us how they generate these numbers, but a common method in computer programming is to check the computer’s clock when the user Page 32 →takes a particular action, such as logging into the game but possibly later actions as well, and extract a number that is the seed for the calculation. The usual formula is a long division involving a large prime number that is preset in the program, with the result being the remainder from a division involving that prime number and the seed, which not only affects the current event but becomes the seed for the next such calculation. Once the original seed is set, the sequence of pseudorandom numbers is perfectly determined. The program will have a rule concerning at what point to reset the seed, whether when the player logs into the game or at several points afterward, but the new seed is determined by the exact instant the user reacts. The player cannot know the consequences of acting at this instant rather than another. Pseudorandom numbers are not really random; they are meaningless. This brief discussion of pseudorandom numbers suggests a scary but valid meaning of freedom, namely meaninglessness. And it applies across nearly all complex computer games. This book focuses on four star worlds, which are based on science fiction mythologies that emphasize the tension between freedom and control. But the principle can be generalized widely. Therefore this chapter will examine some traditional philosophical issues concerning freedom versus control, drawing on examples from games outside the Star Wars and Star Trek

traditions, as preparation for focusing closely on the four vast gameworlds that were created within these traditions. The framework for this chapter is two intellectual schools of thought that teach interesting, game-related lessons about freedom: (1) behaviorism in psychology and sociology, and (2) political sociology with some forms of economics and political science. Running through all of them are two cross-cutting themes, the first superficially closer to control and the second to freedom: (1) the ways in which technology liberates or imprisons in the context of human-centered computing, and (2) principles of aesthetics and meaning stemming from the arts and humanities. The last section of the chapter considers that aspect of the physical world that constrains action in these gameworlds, namely the hardware.

Utopian Behaviorism Leading game researcher Nick Yee, in writing about the false beliefs players may develop about the contingences in their virtual environment, which can become so powerful as to constitute game addiction, naturally referred to the classic research of B. F. Skinner.10 Yee cites Skinner’s 1938 Page 33 →book Behavior of Organisms and his 1948 journal article “вЂSuperstition’ in the Pigeon,” which implied that human beings have not yet evolved beyond the stupid habits of animals when it comes to learning what behaviors to perform.11 Famously, Skinner used to place pigeons in what others called a Skinner box, where they would be rewarded or punished for pecking on one lever or another. Yee implies that computer games are Skinner boxes that condition humans rather than birds. Over the decades, Skinner’s tradition, generally called Behaviorism, became more cognitively sophisticated. Here it provides a useful perspective on freedom versus control in games and in the world at large. Behavioral Psychology In 1971, B. F. Skinner published Beyond Freedom and Dignity, an infuriating book that claimed that freedom was a spurious concept, yet urged readers to take an immense leap of faith to save the world from doom. He listed problems like the population explosion and weapons of mass destruction, optimistically suggesting that science could provide solutions to them, without fully acknowledging that technological progress was the cause of both problems even before it could be the solution. Then he expressed the radical theme of his book in a remarkable paragraph: What we need is a technology of behavior. We could solve our problems quickly enough if we could adjust the growth of the world’s population as precisely as we adjust the course of a spaceship, or improve agriculture and industry with some of the confidence with which we accelerate high-energy particles, or more toward a peaceful world with something like the steady progress with which physics has approached absolute zero (even though both remain presumably out of reach). But a behavioral technology comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology is lacking, and those who do not find the very possibility ridiculous are more likely to be frightened by it than reassured. That is how far we are from “understanding human issues” in the sense in which physics and biology understand their fields, and how far we are from preventing the catastrophe toward which the world seems to be inexorably moving.12 The rest of his book states the fundamental principles of behavioral psychology that had guided Skinner’s own work for more than three decades, Page 34 →in particular that the behavior of animals—including humans—was shaped largely by the consequences of actions. That is, at the present moment we have two choices, A or B, and we imagine that we are unconstrained in making a selection between them. But if A has been rewarding in the past and B has not, we will almost certainly choose A. Skinner argued that we should build a new form of society, using new research based on his old principles, to work out the proper design. The goal is to set the contingencies of reinforcement such that humans will perform the actions, and only those actions, that preserve humanity, as determined by the designers of the system. Superficially, Skinner wanted to take away our freedom and give all power to the designers of the world, who

would play the role of gods. But they themselves would be constrained by the findings of scientific research. This sounds for all the world like an online computer game. The designers intend to create a world that will endure, thus paying their salaries for years to come, and to do so they must succeed in making the game rewarding for players yet never spiral out of control. What might count as my first sociological research study, although I never published about it, was an observational study of a socialist utopia based on some of Skinner’s ideas. By pure coincidence, I came to know members of the Twin Oaks commune in Louisa, Virginia, including Kathleen Kincade, who later wrote a book about the first five years of this remarkable utopia.13 It still exists, but it was founded way back in 1967 and was two years old when I visited and was given a thorough tour.14 Twin Oaks was based on Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two. Even before reading Walden Two, one wonders about “Walden One.” Of course, it was Walden; or, Life in the Woods in which Henry David Thoreau meditates about two years he spent living apart from the wider society in a small cabin he built.15 Wikipedia summarizes, “The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self reliance.”16 Published in 1948, Walden Two describes an imaginary commune that uses techniques derived from Skinner’s brand of Behaviorism to provide members a happy life, free from strain but also free from freedom. Actually, they are free to create works of art and imagination, but within behavioral constraints comparable to those in a violence-free gameworld, such as A Tale in the Desert, where players build a replica of ancient Egypt. Many gameworlds prevent violence within one’s own group, so in that respect they are similar to Walden Two, rigidly controlling behavior between members of the same ideal society and projecting all nastiness onto other groups. Page 35 →Alan Elms has psychoanalyzed Skinner, deriving Walden Two from a midlife crisis Skinner had when he was 41 years old, which harked back to an identity crisis he had experienced at age 22.17 Elms suggests that the rigidity of Behaviorism offered a defense against depression and other psychiatric symptoms, but I prefer to see it more in terms of a quasi-religious conversion to a new conception of freedom. Many mentally healthy people who happen to be more perceptive than average or who experience events that in some way discredit conventional beliefs about life have very good reason to view human existence in pessimistic terms. Brute animals don’t brood about death, injustice, or the meaning of the universe, but we do. Often called intentional communities by social scientists, utopian experiments break away from the wider society to create something new, following a different and idealized set of rules, rather like the gameworlds studied here. Utopians seem crazy to many people, seeking an impossible escape from society. But utopians are only responding to the logical combination of two valid insights: (1) conventional society has severe flaws, and (2) it seems impossible to transform conventional society. In an influential 1958 journal article highly critical of the state of sociology at that time, Ralf Dahrendorf complained that utopias, whether fictional or real, are fatally flawed in that they postulate a static society that never changes and thus can neither adapt nor improve.18 The parallels to gameworlds are striking. They are escapist, and they are static. The actions of the player generally have no consequences for the world; for example every defeated enemy comes back to life so that the next player can kill him as well. Much science fiction, including dystopian novels like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, implies that a highly controlled society in which humans are treated like cogs in a machine would be diabolically evil.19 The Matrix Online and Anarchy Online are among the MMOs that played with this perspective. Like artificial intelligence, however, human intelligence analyzes experience in terms of laws of thought, and these laws can be manipulated to escape other kinds of constraints. Cognitive Science The Behaviorist tradition represented by Skinner is generally ignored by modern cognitive scientists, and indeed there is something antique about it. Originally, Behaviorism was a corrective against the speculative and nonempirical nature of psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century. Behaviorism focused on observable

behavior because it could be measured and verified, and it resisted speculation about anything deeper. Page 36 →But the behavioral sociology of Skinner’s friend and Harvard colleague George Homans was highly cognitive. In his classic textbook, Social Behavior, Homans argued that all human behavior could be derived from a set of simple axioms, such as the fundamental principle of behavioral conditioning expressed in terms reminiscent of economics, that people seek to obtain rewards and avoid costs.20 Yet when Homans wrote about social exchange between two people, he used a remarkably subtle example: I do not know how to obtain a desired reward, so I ask you for your advice. You give me that advice, and in return I give you approval. What could be more cognitive than the exchange of advice for approval? Homans believed that all social sciences should be united and derive every principle of human social behavior from a consistent set of psychological and economic axioms he called propositions. Homans loved to cook up “propositions” of every degree of generality and then see how he could connect them through logical deductions. For example, after departmental lectures by people he did not agree with, Homans often uttered a onesentence refutation. After hearing a lecture extolling Frantz Fanon’s theory of violence, Homans commented, “Violence is fine, if you win.”21 After a lecture about the suffering of poor people during the Great Depression, he said, “The Depression was great, if you had money.” While Homans was very serious about his theorizing, he played it like a game. Rodney Stark and I were inspired by Homans in constructing our formal theory of religion in the 1980s, going even further in the cognitive direction. We began with a more extensive series of axioms than Homans had used, but we included his and Skinner’s conception that human cognition evolved to enable our species to gain rewards and avoid costs: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Human perception and action take place through time, from the past into the future. Humans seek what they perceive to be rewards and avoid what they perceive to be costs. Rewards vary in kind, value, and generality. Human action is directed by a complex but finite information-processing system that functions to identify problems and attempt solutions to them. 5. Some desired rewards are limited in supply, including some that simply do not exist. 6. Most rewards sought by humans are destroyed when they are used. 7. Page 37 →Individual and social attributes which determine power are unequally distributed among persons and groups in any society.22 The first axiom seems obvious, and that is a virtue for axioms. It can be considered in several ways, however, for example as a definition of time in terms of human perception and action. That is, time may not be the fourth dimension of the physical universe at all, but a consequence of how our minds function. The theory formally defined 104 of the terms used in these seven axioms and the 344 theorems that followed from them, beginning with two highly relevant to issues of freedom and control: “The past consists of the universe of conditions which can be known but not influenced.” “The future consists of the universe of conditions which can be influenced but not known.” Notice the use of the world influenced rather than caused. Our ability to shape the future is limited. Perception concerns the past, while action concerns the future. Yet action is based upon perception, so how we perceive shapes our freedom to act, both constraining it and potentially increasing our freedom if we are able to perceive in creative ways. Traditional Behaviorism defines freedom in terms of desire, while modern cognitive science can define freedom in terms of discovery. Freedom, for a Behaviorist, means being able to seek satisfaction of one’s desires. Imagine a rat in a maze, turning left and right, scrambling to find the cheese. If there does indeed exist a route to the cheese, the rat can be said to be free, even if it has no choice which route to take. For a cognitive scientist, freedom consists of the ability to imagine and, with some effort, to discover a new path. For the rat this may mean hopping over the wall of the maze, an exercise of freedom even though the rat cannot find the cheese if it leaves the maze entirely.

The final three axioms in the list of seven remind us that our abilities to achieve our goals are limited and that people differ in their power over each other and over the surrounding environment. A pessimist, considering online role-playing games in the light of our theory, might say that success in a game is illusory, psychologically satisfying the desire to achieve instrumental rewards such as social status and knowledge of the world, but not actually getting us any closer to our fundamental life’s goals. Indeed, the theory based on the seven axioms examined in some detail the ways in which cultural phenomena like religion and the arts can be compensators, psychologically substituting for material and status rewards that the particular individual or social class cannot obtain in the real world. There are at least two ways of being more optimistic. First, like formal Page 38 →schooling, these games may be separate from “real life,” yet they teach us skills and ideas that are of real practical value. Second, assuming that we have already earned enough money in the real world for adequate food, housing, and medical care, we might as well invest our spare time in seeking fictional money in a virtual world—achieving a sense of greater satisfaction without wasting material resources that might be better used for other purposes. From either perspective, it is hard to get away from the facts that multiplayer games are competitive and that some people have won more than others from competition in the world outside the games.

The Iron Law Massively multiplayer online games are social in many ways. Players both compete and cooperate with each other, just as in society more generally. But they also interact with societies of nonplayer characters, who often compete and cooperate with each other as well. The player interacts more remotely but powerfully with the game designers and managers, and they in turn do the same with the people responsible for other games in the marketplace. Games are a big business, but they are often created by small businesses that must struggle to survive in cooperation and competition with big business. The four main examples in this book illustrate that very well. Star Wars Galaxies was shut down just five days before the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, apparently because the company owning the Star Wars rights did not want them competing with each other. Star Trek Online, which was not doing very well in the competitive marketplace, was bought by a Chinese game company as part of its strategy for world conquest. The various Star Trek communities in Second Life both cooperate and compete with each other, even as Second Life itself is struggling to find a model for long-term business profitability. Winners and Losers One of the main schools of thought defining the field of scientific economics is game theory, although game theorists seem to be constantly playing a status game against each other and many different theories conceptualize society as a game.23 In their classic 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern proclaimed this new field and staked claim to it.24 Immediately afterward, von Neumann played a clever game against the real inventors of Page 39 →computers, such as John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckerd, who developed the early Eniac computer, thereby establishing computer science as a respected field somehow separate from mathematics and electrical engineering, but based in a mythology that it transcended all earlier fields of intellectual endeavor.25 But economics and computer science are not the only games in town. There also is that multidisciplinary playing field sometimes called political sociology. Although a century old, one particular work in political sociology is especially useful in understanding MMOs, the blandly named but hugely influential book Political Parties by Robert Michels. It is the most thorough statement of the theory that human society is governed by the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is that individuals never rule, nor does the mass of people rule, but power is always exercised by an elite group that partly serves the other citizens in society and partly exploits them. However iron this law is, it governs a dynamic game in which winners and losers tumble over each other, chaotically increasing or decreasing power differentials, but always returning to oligarchy. Originally published in German in 1911 but expanded for the 1915 English-language edition to reflect the early days of the First World War, this masterwork ends with a remarkable paragraph: The democratic currents of history resemble successive waves. They break ever on the same shoal. They are ever renewed. This enduring spectacle is simultaneously encouraging and depressing. When

democracies have gained a certain stage of development, they undergo a gradual transformation, adopting the aristocratic spirit, and in many cases also the aristocratic forms, against which at the outset they struggled so fiercely. Now new accusers arise to denounce the traitors; after an era of glorious combats and of inglorious power, they end by fusing with the old dominant class; whereupon once more they are in their turn attacked by fresh opponents who appeal to the name of democracy. It is probable that this cruel game will continue without end.26

This cruel game! So does Michels describe the power struggles in human society. Over the century since Michels wrote, many political theorists have toyed with his ideas. For example, in a system of oligarchy, freedom exists, but it is concentrated within the powerful elite.27 In recent decades, variants of the Iron Law have been stated by social scientists in ways that are especially amenable to computer simulation. If society is conceptualized as a dynamic network of interactions between individuals, then the larger the Page 40 →society is, the greater the pressures toward oligarchy will be. In very small groups, interpersonal exchanges will take place face to face and people will come to value each other and thus to reward each other, as Homans explained in his 1950 classic The Human Group.28 Also, following the general principle from statistics that chance has a greater effect when the number of cases is small, power structures tend to erode in small groups.29 The first word in the expression MMO is massively, and the total population adding together the players and the NPCs in an MMO is in the thousands. Computer games differ greatly in terms of how well they illustrate this or that sociological theory, but MMOs do a remarkable job of illustrating the Iron Law of Oligarchy, on multiple levels of abstraction. To begin with, the political systems inside the games, typically represented by communities of NPCs with which the player interacts, tend to be organized in a feudal system or some more modern form of oligarchy. The tradition from Edgar Rice Burroughs through Flash Gordon to Star Wars had several reasons for emphasizing feudalism, beginning with the tradition’s focus on interpersonal passions, including romances and tensions between family members. We naturally think of the complex relations in Star Wars between the emperor, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker who turns out to be Vader’s son, and Princess Leia who turns out to be Luke’s sister. But the original Flash Gordon serial includes a romantic triangle involving Flash, Dale Arden, and Princess Aura, who betrays her father, Ming the Merciless, in a vain attempt to win the love of Flash. Setting aside the soap opera potential of stories set in feudal societies, we can consider how feudalism provides a template for fictional conflicts in MMOs. Feudalism Key terms require definitions. Traditionally, feudalism was used to describe a historical situation in Europe in which local land was held in exchange for service performed for the monarch. One of the main characters in the prequel Star Wars films, Count Dooku, holds a feudal title, count, that suggests some valuable property, a fiefdom, has been put under his control in return for the services he performs for the emperor. The term feudalism is ambiguous, and its meaning has been debated for more than a century.30 Perhaps it refers only to the system of governance that existed in part of Europe for the span of a few centuries, or it applies more broadly to all situations in which a monarch is sufficiently weak that he cannot control the entire territory with his own forces and must delegate local control to lesser lords. But in that latter case, there may be many systems for delegating control, Page 41 →and the one usually associated with feudalism expects the lord’s family to hold the fiefdom after his death, thereby over time establishing a broad aristocratic class. In Star Wars, the term Lord is used among both the Jedi and the Sith, the most noteworthy example being Lord Darth Vader. But Vader does not hold any particular fiefdom, such as a specific planet, and he belongs to a religious cult, the Sith, and thus might seem comparable to the clergy that played a significant role in European feudalism but generally were not themselves lords. In fact, land tenure across Europe followed many different legal forms, for example whether inheritance was partible versus impartible, such as in primogeniture when the eldest son inherited the entire estate and thus kept it together as a political and economic unit, versus each son taking a fraction.31 The Star Wars movies claimed to depict a time when a republic was breaking down, subverted by a man who

declared himself emperor. But if we are to believe the Old Republic games, that republic was always contaminated by the equivalent of a landed aristocracy, to a greater extent on some planets than on others, but without a really open system of political representation. Cartels of merchants are significant as well, as are occasional technocrats and messiahs, providing greater diversity for the mission stories. Similarly, in the Star Trek tradition, some planets are feudal, and the Klingon Empire seems to fit the definition especially well, with an emphasis on the instability of authority, aggravated by the constant threat of assassination. Both science fiction traditions tend to be elitist, offering stories about leaders or unusual individuals, and thus, especially in the case of Star Wars, they do not say as much about the lives of vassals as the lives of lords. MMO players do not belong to families, so that feature of aristocracy is missing. But each player is imagined to be a hero and deserving of the rewards of a dynasty-founding feudal lord, even though games generally do not award fiefdoms. Feudalism then becomes a metaphor rather than an analytical concept, and the key point is that players are comparable to warlords, but under the control of an authority that assigns them martial missions and rewards success. It may, however, be an apt metaphor for science fiction, because sociologists have plausibly argued that Europe’s feudalism set the stage for its remarkable technological progress during the Renaissance and the subsequent Industrial Revolution.32 It did so, they say, through a system of distributed power that avoided the rigid control of a centralized bureaucracy and thus encouraged local innovations by giving the elite a degree of freedom. Page 42 →War Games Consider World of Warcraft, still the dominant MMO although its subscribership has dropped far down from the peak of twelve million. Two great factions face each other in the cold war following a hot war, the Alliance and the Horde, each holding vast territories and consisting of an alliance loosely centered on one of its member races. When I studied it originally, there were five races or ethnic groups in each faction, and four capital cities because one race in each faction had lost its original home. One race overshadowed the others in each faction because it had been one of the two forces in the original 1994 chess-like game, Warcraft, which as noted in chapter 1 was similar in its mythology to the Martian game jetan, invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Human oligarchy was central to the Alliance, and the Orc oligarchy was central to the Horde.33 The Human oligarchy in World of Warcraft is the residue of a formerly greater empire, which had been organized along lines similar to feudal Europe. The main World of Warcraft wiki lists its chief leaders, who clearly hold positions in an aristocracy: “Led by King Varian Wrynn, with his son, Prince Anduin Wrynn. Other leaders include: Master Mathias Shaw, Leader of SI:7, Archbishop Benedictus, Leader of the Church of the Holy Light and Lady Jaina Proudmoore, Ruler of Theramore.”34 The Orcs are also organized under an oligarchy, but of a more primitive kind based in tribalism. When I first studied them, they were led by a war chief named Thrall, but subsequently, as the wiki said, they were led “by Warchief Garrosh Hellscream, named by Thrall to succeed him in the wake of the Cataclysm.” Their wiki page then listed nine clans, of which the first two are most influential: “Frostwolf clan—Thrall’s own clan, led by Farseer Drek’Thar since the death of its last affirmed chieftain, Durotan. The Frostwolf clan is the largest concentration of orcs in the Eastern Kingdoms, residing in Alterac Valley since their exile by Gul’dan decades earlier. Warsong clan—Led by Garrosh Hellscream, these orcs have largely settled in Ashenvale Forest.”35 That was the situation in 2013, but two years later the same wiki page reported, “Eventually, the Horde was fractured in two and a civil war erupted, between Garrosh’s Followers and the Darkspear Rebellion led by Vol’Jin. With the help of the Alliance, the Rebels ultimately overthrew Garrosh Hellscream. He was then arrested to stand trial in Pandaria. Thrall the Orc appointed Vol’Jin of the Darkspear Trolls then as the new Warchief of the Horde, and King Varian agreed to put an end to the war.”36 A large fraction of the other MMOs I have studied have oligarchies Page 43 →reminiscent of feudal Europe, including Lord of the Rings Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and Dungeons and Dragons Online. The succession of Garrosh Hellscream to the position of supreme feudal leader previously occupied by Thrall, then his own fall from power, are nice illustrations of the circulation of the elites, a concept developed by Vilfredo

Pareto that expands upon the Iron Law of Oligarchy by giving it a more dynamic quality.37 Yes the oligarchy is iron, but it is composed of moving parts, like a steam locomotive in which some parts move up and down even as the whole locomotive moves forward. Some individuals move upward in the oligarchy, balanced by others who move downward, and the same is true for entire factions, such as Warsong and Frostwolf, or even races, such as Orcs and Trolls. If the upwardly mobile individuals and factions earn their ascent through serving the society as a whole, then their increased power may be justified. But most ordinary citizens have no opportunity for significant upward mobility, so the political system is a dynamic mixture of justice and injustice. Progress has it limits, because on a wider scale this kind of theory describes the rise and fall of entire civilizations, as the Orcs rise across the three Warcraft games, and the Humans decline.

Rise and Fall of Civilizations All four of the virtual star worlds examined in this book went through stages of growth and decline, as will be documented in detail when each is considered. I have studied four top-quality gameworlds that no longer exist, including The Matrix Online (2004–2009), Tabula Rasa (2007–2009), and City of Heroes (2004–2012). The striking fourth example here is Star Wars Galaxies (2003–2011), which existed for eight years and is examined in the two following chapters. Now all four are dead civilizations. Many historians and social scientists have written about the rise and fall of civilizations, but frankly the topic is not a popular one today, and most of the best thinkers worked decades ago. Here I will consider four of them whose works deserve to endure: Arnold Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin, Oswald Spengler, and Frederick Jackson Turner. They represent four different cultures—England, Russia, Germany, and the United States—but they wrote about issues that transcended their own nations. Their ideas were sweeping and their writing styles were poetic, highly relevant to the fictional civilizations in MMOs. Page 44 →Challenge and Response As they stand on a bookshelf, the twelve volumes of Toynbee’s A Study of History look dramatic. The first six volumes are most relevant here, and thankfully an abridged version of them was published as a single fat volume in 1947.38 Toynbee identified twenty-one distinct civilizations in human history, all of which began in the same way, although their life stories worked out differently. In 1940, an accurate but critical review was published by Toynbee’s rival, Pitirim Sorokin, which summarized key ideas in a single paragraph. A civilization is born through a specific combination of two conditions: the presence of creative minority in a given society and of environment which is neither too unfavorable nor too favorable. The groups which had these conditions emerged as civilizations; the groups which did not have them remained on the subcivilization level. The mechanism of the birth of civilization in these conditions is formulated as an interplay of Challenge-and-Response. The environment of the above type incessantly challenges the society; and the society, through its creative minority, successfully responds to the challenge and solves the need. A new challenge follows, and a new response successfully ensues; and so the process goes on incessantly. In these conditions no possibility of rest exists, the society is on the move all the time, and such a move brings it, sooner or later, to the stage of civilization.39 Toynbee’s perspective parallels that of Michels, because his creative minority is an oligarchy. This connects to MMOs because their creative minority is the game designers, the original oligarchy that creates the gameworld, which is equivalent to a civilization although it may be composed of distinct parts, just as England, Russia, Germany, and the United States were all part of Western civilization. The United Federation of Planets is the primary civilization in Star Trek, and the struggle between the Republic and the Empire in Star Wars seems largely to be a competition between two factions following different political principles, presented as morally equivalent although each considers the other to be evil. There is a powerful moral quality to Toynbee’s conception of challenge and response, because individuals also face challenges, and everybody admires people who face their challenges successfully, so long as their

success does not harm the people passing judgment on them. Challenges come in Page 45 →many varieties, some caused by the physical environment and others by the actions of other social groups. Toynbee believed that ancient Egypt’s challenge was the desiccation of the land on either side of the Nile caused by climate change, which forced Egyptians to develop a civilization capable of thriving near the river. Beginning with the building of the pyramids, however, the oligarchy lost its creativity and merely exploited the majority of Egyptians rather than leading them to ever-higher levels of achievement. In Toynbee’s analysis, once a group responds successfully to a difficult challenge and becomes a civilization, the plot thickens. The ruling minority may lose its creative quality, especially if new challenges do not arise quickly. The rank and file of the population merely follow the oligarchy through a process of submissive imitation Toynbee called mimesis. A separate group with some creative potential may exist within the society, what Toynbee called an internal proletariat, for example Greeks within the Roman Empire who had some influence because the Romans treasured the classical Greek culture. Subsequently, the Christians were an internal proletariat until they became dominant. If a civilization has ossified, as Toynbee said happened in ancient Egypt, it may die, and its territory could be taken over by a wholly unrelated civilization, such as Islam in the case of Egypt. In Star Trek, the Klingon and Romulan empires experienced challenges they seem poorly prepared to meet, while in the Star Wars mythos the dynamic circulation of elites between Republican and Imperial tendencies changed little over a period of many thousands of years. For the minority that creates a successful MMO, namely the game designers, the second challenge is keeping the gamer community interested, and a familiar strategy is game expansion, such as those that added new territories to World of Warcraft in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014. These are comparable to Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, a decisive point in Roman history that ultimately doomed the Republic while launching the Empire. But such major expansions are costly, and only very successful games can afford them. The Civilization Life Cycle One of Pitirim Sorokin’s criticisms of Toynbee is that he cited almost no social science, not even mentioning a founding father of sociology like Max Weber, who was the teacher of Robert Michels. Sorokin himself, and Oswald Spengler also, offered a different analysis of the fall of a civilization. Both of them acknowledge the importance of a creative minority at the momentPage 46 → of a civilization’s formation, but both argued that the key factor making the whole process feasible was the assertion of a new cultural system, which in Spengler’s case could be based on a single idea. Spengler’s famous book, The Decline of the West, argues that Western civilization has begun the decline that will inexorably lead to its fall, drawing analogies with many past cases, of which the classical civilization of ancient Greece and Rome was the most familiar. Interestingly, much of the first volume of this two-volume work is devoted to an analysis of the distinctive conception of space held by Western civilization, often using “space” in the abstract mathematical sense of the term, which considers space to be boundless. He wrote much about the problematic nature of human freedom, stating early in his second volume that individuals may enjoy a good deal of liberty in their tiny lives but have little or no power to shape history, given that it follows inexorable laws. When discussing this principle, he uses an outer space metaphor: “Even the planets in their great cycles are in servitude, and it is only these tiny worlds that move freely relative to a great one which appears in their consciousness as their world-around (environment).В .В .В . This beat of cosmic cycles goes on notwithstanding the freedom of microcosmic movement in space, and from time to time breaks down the tension of the waking individual’s being into the one grand felt harmony.”40 A civilization is such a harmony, in which most people accept a single set of key ideas, the distinct cultural principles on which that particular civilization is based. Western civilization was extremely dynamic in that it advanced not only in its technological development, but decisively in its geographic expansion, in harmony with a conception that the space occupied by this civilization should be boundless. Compare the history of Rome. It had achieved much of its physical expansion by the ascent of Julius Caesar, adding England for a time shortly afterward and disputing territories in the east for a century after that. But Rome never reached America. Western

civilization did cross all the oceans, but as it aged, its ideas lost energy, such that its conquest of the spaces on Earth would not be followed by expansion into outer space. Spengler’s writing is poetic more than scientific, but his conclusion employs metaphors about star worlds: “Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man—a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes.”41 Page 47 →Sorokin was less poetic than Spengler and more optimistic, but in Social and Cultural Dynamics he agreed that individual freedom was limited because civilizations go through a life cycle, from birth to death, lasting typically one thousand years.42 Each civilization begins when a group of aggressive founders establishes not only dominion over an expanding territory, but, crucially, imposes a set of cultural principles. A young civilization is ideational, stressing a set of transcendent principles, which often take the form of a religion. Over time, people tend to give greater emphasis to worldly desires, which may increase their personal freedom but may erode the faith on which the civilization is based. The culture becomes sensate, which eventually heralds the civilization’s fall, followed by a bloody period of chaos. Sorokin’s optimism lies in his belief that a second cycle could follow, starting with a new ideational period. From this perspective, Western civilization could indeed be considered a renaissance of Classical civilization, although its principles are markedly different. Being a pragmatic American, Frederick Jackson Turner was not so bombastic as the three Europeans just mentioned. Beginning in 1894 and culminating in a 1920 collection of essays, he considered the role of the American frontier in promoting democracy.43 On the frontier of the Wild West, social control was naturally weak, so people created their own social structures, enjoying greater liberty than Europeans or even their fellow citizens in the original thirteen colonies. Acting as a safety valve because malcontents could migrate to it, and contributing to economic progress, the frontier increased the dynamism and democracy of the more settled lands connected to it. From a wider perspective, we could say that the Age of Discovery, in which European civilization expanded around the globe, was a period of unusual democracy in which the Iron Law of Oligarchy temporarily lost power. But the Wild West was tamed, and in about 1890 the frontier was officially considered closed. During the twentieth century, science became what Vannevar Bush called the Endless Frontier, serving as the functional equivalent of the Wild West because it constantly created new conditions to which other institutions of society could adapt only with difficulty and over periods of years.44 Especially if we think of outer space as the “final frontier,” we seem to have passed the point at which it also closed, given that I write these words forty years after the last expedition to the moon. Perhaps we should imagine Michels, Toynbee, Spengler, Sorokin, and Turner in whatever afterlife the five now inhabit, debating the prospects for freedom on a planet where the only star worlds are imaginary environments existing only inside computers and the players’ imaginations. Page 48 →Gameworld Mortality The perspectives of these social historians do apply to the star worlds described here and to MMOs in general. Every successful gameworld begins with a period of rapid popular growth, as players rush in to explore and conquer. Within a few months they reach the top level of experience, and in most cases their populations begin to bleed as many players migrate to new worlds. Despite updates and expansions, the general culture of the gameworld is fixed at launch, and few are able to maintain their initial popularity long after what Sorokin would have called their ideational period, or during what Turner would have said was the exploration of a frontier. Some cases, however, illustrate Sorokin’s theory that civilizations can repeat their historical cycle of rise and fall. Three obvious examples are EverQuest, Lineage, and Guild Wars, each of which was followed by a version two. The interesting but unpopular space colonization gameworld Entropia completely replaced the old version with a new one, as if its planet were going through a major phase change but reflecting a switch to a more advanced graphics system. On November 1, 2012, the ambitious but deeply flawed Japanese MMO Final Fantasy XIV archived player data and proceeded to shut down, relaunching ten months later as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. A similar but less complete reboot of Star Wars Galaxies occurred as the character advancement

system was radically changed in the New Game Expansion after the original launch. But consideration of classical theories of the rise and fall of civilizations provides good reason to believe that every virtual world faces eventual doom, a decline and fall that overrides whatever individual freedom players possess. The Star Trek mythos suggests a solution to the problem of civilization decay and also to totalitarianism, namely, transcending any one civilization by encouraging many civilizations to cooperate. A book by Shane Johnson, describing the primarily extraterrestrial civilizations that formed the Federation, explains how this could enhance individual freedom: As a governmental body and a political organization, the United Federation of Planets is founded on a simple but important idea: diversity. Indeed, diversity makes up the very fabric of the Federation, which is essentially an amalgamation of different worlds, races, and cultures. Out of respect for diversity comes recognition of individual rights—the rights of all beings to self-determination, the right to choose and follow their own destiny.45 Page 49 →Thus the best way to achieve freedom in star worlds may not be to become a dedicated denizen of any one of them, but the cosmopolitan citizen of several, such as the four explored in the following chapters. But one dimension of tension between freedom and control must be considered first, namely the technological affordances and constraints of the particular computer system for which a virtual world was designed and which the user owns.

The Silicon Law Just as the periodic table of the elements—iron and silicon among them—defines rules that govern our daily existence, human behavior in online gameworlds is both made possible and limited by the hardware available at the particular point in the history of information technology. This book focuses on Windows-based software running on a desktop computer in the period from 2009 to 2013, but we considered two PlayStation 2 games in the previous chapter, and there is much to say about the influence of hardware over the design and experience of star worlds. Arguably the first computer game sold to the general public was the 1955 Geniac. It was a crude machine that had zero bytes of RAM, used flashlight bulbs as the output, and needed to be rewired from scratch for each new challenge.46 Edmund C. Berkeley, founder of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), designed it as an educational tool, and it used games and puzzles for its examples of logical programming. Since emerging in the 1970s, the videogame industry has been famous for booms and busts, rather like a roller-coaster ride, and one of the drivers of this volatility was the introduction of new hardware every few years, with increased memory and speed in handling graphics, permitting bigger and more complex games. It is hard to say when computer games first included NPCs, but the 1981 strategy game for the Apple II Napoleon’s Campaigns 1813 & 1815 was especially interesting because some of Napoleon’s NPC commanders had a tendency to ignore his orders. The graphics capability and active memory capacity of desktop personal computers increased steadily over the years, but after four decades of progress, a point of diminishing returns may have been reached. Desktop computers may be stabilizing in terms of their technical capabilities, and for those with decent Internet connectivity there seems little change in the rapidity with which data can be transmitted between players and the game servers. Many companies in the PC game industry, however, had assumed Page 50 →that the graphics capability of desktops would continue to increase. Starting in 2008, an economic downturn made it difficult for many people to afford new desktop computers, and hardly any applications other than games seemed to require such an investment. This caused trouble for Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) when it was introduced late in 2011, because many players experienced considerable lag. The game’s designers assumed that players would be using more recent or expensive computers. For ordinary gamers and researchers alike, one key reason for having a high-end machine is so that one can run a web browser at the same time as the MMO and consult game-related websites

frequently for advice on how to meet the next set of game challenges. Arguably, SWTOR should have targeted casual game players as well as dedicated gamers, because the Star Wars franchise would attract many of them. For example, it could not be played on the native operating system of Macintosh computers, but only on machines running a version of the Windows operating system. Given its emphasis on story, it could have used much lower-resolution graphics, but in the competitive world of MMOs, this might have sent a message to experienced gamers that SWTOR was not for them. In addition, nobody could have realized years ago, when SWTOR’s design team selected the graphics engine it would use, that the economic problems starting in 2008 could have lasted so long and left so many gamers with no money to spend on new machines. This point reminds us that social status within the games is connected to social status outside, in several ways. Hardware and software cost money, and originally the MMO market emphasized subscription-based games, in which each player has the same chance to win, which economist and game research Edward Castronova argued set a good example of equality of opportunity for the world at large.47 Now a market shift is in process to free-toplay but pay-to-win games in which affluence in the external world can transfer to superiority in the virtual world, as rich players can buy better armor, weapons, and magic potions. This could erode MMOs’ compensatory function, in which fictional success within a game substitutes psychologically for actual success in the wider world. As MMOs evolve, the role of computer technology in the external world is evolving as well. One legitimate concern is the possibility that information technology is taking over more and more functions traditionally performed by human beings, leading to ever-increasing technological unemployment.48 I recently helped organize a set of international workshops, leading to a book-length report, that debated whether innovation could create more jobs than automation destroyed, without frankly coming to a Page 51 →confident conclusion.49 Critics of technology are often derided as Luddites, yet the real Luddites of two centuries ago were responding to declining wages in a textile industry where human workers served as vassals to the machines.50 More than a century after the Luddites, similar problems in the American textile industry forced exploited workers to seek psychological compensation in emotionally intense religious sects.51 Perhaps a new compensatory market for low-cost MMOs will be found among people who sadly have already lost in the wider game defined by Michels: real life. Clearly, technology sets limits on human freedom, even as it gives us new opportunities to choose. Thus the simplest versions of Technological Determinism are not correct, and only a complex equation could describe the relations between invention, freedom, and control. In a synopsis of the works of the French archaeologist AndrГ© Leroi-Gourhan, Evan Selinger stated three more sophisticated principles: 1. Technology augments the human ability to exert control over people, places, and things. 2. Technology influences the ever-expanding goals that humans select as worth trying to gain control over. 3. Technology transforms how both individuals and collectives understand their comparative worth.52 These principles suggest that information technology transforms the human game, not simply giving more power to the elite, but making it more difficult to distinguish winners from losers. By analogy with the Iron Law of Oligarchy, we might postulate this Silicon Law: Whenever technology gives humans a new power, it simultaneously demands an increased degree of control over humans.

Conclusion There is something extremely fitting, yet paradoxical, about the fact that social-scientific theories dating back as much as a century apply so well to the most modern art form: massively multiplayer online games. It is also perplexing that the games encourage players to join factions, like the Republic versus Empire in the Star Wars games, which often behave like the Nazis or Communists that are commonly considered the villains of the twentieth century. Yet the form of governance in MMO fictional societies is at best feudal, but often dictatorial, and highly concentrated power structuresPage 52 → may merely reflect one extreme in the dynamic balance

described by the Iron Law. MMOs are not only virtual worlds, but a metaphoric attempt to reboot the real world, seeking a realm of freedom beyond good and evil. They offer opportunities to satisfy desires, at least through metaphors, and to make discoveries, although of things that may not really exist. While constrained by an Iron Law and a Silicon Law, they escape the ordinary table of chemical elements that defined traditional human life. We can see that life more clearly from the perspectives of four far galaxies.

Page 53 →

3. Living on Tatooine When C-3PO asked what planet he was on, Luke Skywalker replied, “Well, if there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.”1 Named Tatooine, it was a desert world where the farmers’ main crop was water, painfully harvested from the dry atmosphere. A frequent location for the action in Star Wars movies, it contained the boyhood homes of both Luke Skywalker and his father Darth Vader, as well as the haunts of Jabba the criminal boss and Watto the junk dealer. Tatooine was the first planet visited by players of Star Wars Galaxies (SWG), and many felt it was their virtual home. Star Wars Galaxies was noteworthy among popular MMOs in the extent to which it encouraged people to experience social life freely in a virtual environment, rather than follow a rigid course of story-based missions that were predefined by the game designers.2

Missions Versus Quests MMOs tend to use the words mission and quest synonymously, referring to a special line of action to achieve a predefined goal, and yet the words have very different implications for liberty. Mission specifically refers to being sent to complete a task, while quest implies seeking a goal and thus suggests greater freedom. In SWG a large fraction of the goals were set by the players themselves, often in cooperation with each other. Indeed, reviewers criticized it for lacking many interesting mission arcs that built upon but creatively expanded the Star Wars mythos, and major arcs were added only well after SWG’s launch. One reason may be that it was set at a point in the Star Wars timeline when relatively little was apparently happening, immediately after the action of the original 1977 movie and a while before the early action of The Empire Strikes Back. Another reason was that it was launched in 2003, relatively early in the history of MMOs, and the industry had not yet worked out what would attract players and hold appeal with them over a long periodPage 54 → of time. In particular, Star Wars Galaxies has elements of nongame virtual worlds, comparable to Active Worlds, which dates from 1997, and Second Life, which like SWG dates from 2003. It also has some features of two European gameworlds, Anarchy Online, a 2001 science-fiction gameworld set on the planet RubiKa, not much different from Tatooine, and Entropia Universe, also dating from 2003 and set on the planet Calypso. Games designed to maximize player freedom are called sandbox games. The analogy of course is to play spaces, indeed containing sand, where small children may freely play with toys. In recent years they have been less popular than games that impose more structure on the player’s behavior, typically through having large numbers of prescripted quests. For an extreme example, as of November 1, 2015, World of Warcraft had 16,269 identifiable missions, all connected directly or indirectly with the broader backstory.3 The opposite extreme from a sandbox is represented by the Force Unleashed solo game, in which the player’s choices are extremely restricted. Using more technical language, Force Unleashed was linear, whereas Star Wars Galaxies was nonlinear. In gamer lingo, high-constraint linear games are sometimes described as being on rails, because like railroad trains they allow travel only over well-defined routes. SWG was under a very different kind of constraint, because it needed to conform closely to the mythos of the Star Wars movies. In terms of real-world chronology, Star Wars Galaxies was released between the fifth and sixth films, after Attack of the Clones came out in 2002 and before Revenge of the Sith in 2005. Originally, SWG offered 10 planets, but in 2005 both Kashyyyk the Wookiee planet and Mustafar the lava planet, where Obi-Wan Kenobi defeated Anakin Skywalker, were added in separate expansions. In 2008, the planet Hoth was added, but only to serve as a battleground for teams of players, and it was not readily accessible for solo players. In each of the twelve open worlds, the action of the Star Wars saga is in suspension at the point in time depicted by SWG. Indeed, with the exception of Luke Skywalker and Yoda—whose swamp planet is not included—the movies imply that no Jedi still exist. The one novel published in connection with SWG makes this dearth of Jedi very clear.4 Yet players wanted to become Jedi, so SWG allowed them to gain this status after lengthy hard work. In 2005, in highly

controversial major transformations of the profession system and other central features, the Combat Upgrade and New Game Enhancements, it became possible to create a Jedi character without any special effort.5 Given the restrictive nature of the mythos, however, it was unclear what their dramatic function was, and few Page 55 →new quests or special goals were added that might have clarified the meaning of being a Jedi.

Simula, the Jedi The different character professions in SWG can be categorized in many ways, but the simplest is in terms of what behavior earns points to ascend the ladder of experience from level 1 to level 90. By that measure, most professions are combat roles that can gain experience by killing, so I ran two of them. Of course one of them needed to be a Jedi, like Luke Skywalker, and for that role I created Simula Tion, a female because I always wondered why all prominent Jedi were males in the movies even though Princess Leia was Luke’s sister and presumably had a similar aptitude. I imagined Simula’s personality being like Leia’s, idealistic but a bit caustic, but I made her ambivalent about the great conflict, sympathizing with the Rebel Alliance but not becoming fully committed to the defeat of the Empire. For contrast, I also created Socio Path, a sociopathic bounty hunter like Boba Fett, who took any job that paid, killed any person with a price on his head, and for purely selfish reasons would work for the Empire. Commitment Versus Independence Most MMOs assign each character to a faction, at the initial point when the character is created, with no option to defect to another faction later on. Every player character in Star Wars: The Old Republic belongs either to the Republic or to the Empire. One example of factions having moral significance is City of Heroes, which is a merger of two originally separate gameworlds, City of Heroes and City of Villains, and another is Warhammer Online, where the major factions were the Armies of Order versus the Armies of Chaos. An influential example of a gameworld divided into factions with none holding moral superiority is Dark Age of Camelot, where three ethnic groups compete: Albion, Hibernia, and Midgard. In Anarchy Online, a character begins Neutral but is under great pressure to join either the Omni-Tek corporation or the rebellious Clans. Star Wars Galaxies is unusual in that one may remain neutral forever, or affiliate in varying degrees over time with the two factions. In both Star Wars MMOs, it is considered perfectly fine to belong to the Empire, although the movies depict it as evil. All SWG characters are encouraged to complete the Legacy Quests, Page 56 →which are several arcs of missions that ascend most of the levels of experience, but I decided it was best for my research to use just Simula for most of this long series of tasks. I also took my bounty hunter, Socio Path, through parts of this series, for example, so I could compare his experience of doing the Jabba Theme Park with that of Simula. Writing in the prominent MMO blogazine Massively, Eliot Lefebvre explains: “Usually, references to theme parks when it comes to MMOs are meant as derogatory terms. Not so much the case when playing Star Wars Galaxies, where вЂtheme parks’ are areas with connected and in-depth quest lines designed to invest the player in the region’s storyline.”6 The Jabba Theme Park centers on the hideout of the infamous Jabba the Hutt, the immense slug crime boss whom Princess Leia kills in Return of the Jedi. Like a real-world amusement park, it assembles several activities. Given the focus on Jabba, it connects the player’s character to the equivalent of a Mafia organization, toward which Simula and Socio would have different feelings. At higher levels, the Legacy Quests are simply a series of progressively more difficult theme parks, each of which ends by sending the character on to the next, but at the early levels there is a definite story arc that reflects the original Star Wars mythos. In the original 1977 movie, Princess Leia gives some crucial information to the droid, R2-D2, telling him to deliver it to Obi-Wan Kenobi at all costs. The information consists of the plans for the Death Star, which allow Luke Skywalker to destroy it in the climax of the film. The major early section of the SWG Legacy arc concerns a similar droid. Initially these quests are tangled up with Jabba’s nefarious business dealings, but they eventually take the character off Tatooine and into the wider galactic context far beyond the theme park. After doing some simple missions that incidentally help train a new player, the quest “Starting the Search” begins

after the player kills a low-life named Brok. The SWG wiki explained: Starting the Search Level: 14 Reward: 600 XP, 1460 Credits Brok had learned that both the Empire and the Rebellion were interested in the contents of a certain cargo that landed on Tatooine not long ago. This is a perfect chance for you to ingratiate yourself with one of the two sides. It is time for you to choose your path. Please note that actual factional affiliation is not required here—you do not need to be a member of the military. It’s only a matter of who you wish to work for. From a role-playing Page 57 →point of view, of course, now is the time to start thinking about your path in life: Rebel, or Imperial? Or maybe neither one? For now, you must chooseВ .В .В . Rebel: Search for Captain Carh’la Basra (128 -5428) in Anchorhead. Imperial: Search for Commander Barrezz (-1146 -3893) in Bestine.7 Anchorhead is a tiny outpost where rebels tend to hang out; nearby Bestine is the Imperial capital of the planet, and the numbers in parentheses are the map coordinates of Rebel and Imperial quest givers. The “certain cargo” is a droid that may be carrying secret information, just as R2-D2 did. Unfortunately, the droid was hijacked and broken up, and the pieces were sold for scrap. The player must hunt not only for the pieces themselves, but also for clues to their whereabouts, and the player must do extra missions for NPCs to convince them to help. At the end of the droid quest arc, but long before the end of the full set of Legacy Quests, the droid must be delivered either to the Rebels or to the Empire. Naturally, Simula delivered it to the Rebels, and afterward she did many small missions for the Rebellion, attacking Imperial assets in the neighborhood of Wayfar, a town west of both Anchorhead and Bestine and within sight of Jabba’s headquarters. But she never fully declared her loyalty to the Rebel Alliance, and the Empire never became aware she had been covertly working against it. A large fraction of the missions in SWG, and of other missions combat characters can perform, involve criminal gangs. Jabba is merely the best-known gang leader, but there are many others. There are three explanations for this anomalous fact, which does not seem to fit the traditions of science fiction. First, the existence of many immoral gangs justifies killing hundreds of non-player characters, almost as if SWG were a shooting gallery, thus permitting many small scenes of action where a few felons are walking around and should be killed one at a time. Second, the general milieu represents the disintegration of civilization, both because Tatooine and some other planets are part of a wild frontier of the galaxy, and because the fabric of civilization has broken down into a period of lawlessness from which either the Empire or a new society created by the Rebellion will arise. Third, the depiction of outer space as a gangland reflects the tradition of movie serials from which Star Wars ultimately sprang. Episodes and Arcs There is a long mass media tradition of assembling brief story episodes into arcs of various sizes inside the equivalent of virtual worlds. A culturally Page 58 →influential predecessor of both Star Wars and Star Trek was the first television series set largely in outer space, Captain Video, which first broadcast June 27, 1949. On the short-lived Dumont network, the budget was very low, and in its early years many broadcasts simply reused episodes from adventure movie serials.8 Headquartered in his mountain retreat, the captain hero would use an advanced form of television—the wonder technology of that moment in history—to contact many of his agents as they experienced their own adventures. That conceit allowed the program to insert one episode of a pre-existing movie serial each of the days it was broadcast, a world within a world. The theme music, played at the very beginning over a picture of the mountain retreat, was the overture to Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, not much different from the music in the Flash Gordon serials, which included Les PrГ©ludes by

Franz Liszt. An emotionally charged opening narration describes the ideal science fiction hero: Captain Video! Electronic wizard! Master of time and space! Guardian of the safety of the world! Fighting for law and order, Captain Video operates from a mountain retreat, with secret agents at all points of the globe. Possessing scientific secrets and scientific weapons, Captain Video asks no quarter and gives none to the forces of evil. Stand by for Captain Video! George Lucas was born in 1944 and saw episodes of many serials, whether on Captain Video or simply broadcast individually. The most relevant ones included not only the three Flash Gordon series, plus Buck Rogers, but also Tim Tyler’s Luck, set in Africa but with science fiction themes and starring Frankie Thomas, who played the lead role in the competing spaceflight program, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Two Don Winslow navy adventure serials plus four Dick Tracy detective serials were set in contemporary times but emphasized innovative technologies with a science fiction flavor. Perhaps the most astonishing of the science fiction serials was the earliest, The Phantom Empire, which dates from 1935 and stars western singer Gene Autry, who discovers that a sinister high-tech subterranean city exists under his ranch. Many other serials were conventional westerns or spy dramas, but a common feature of most of them was frequent fistfights, in which actors could give the children in the audience the excitement of violence without blood, gore, or much death. Thus, repeated encounters with outlaw gangs heightened the action in many movie series, and it was natural for Star Wars to retain this tradition. At a very high level of experience, the two planets that were added to Page 59 →SWG in 2005 offered independent mission series that provided some degree of intellectual interest. On the arboreal Wookiee planet, Kashyyyk, the Rryatt Trail quests involved climbing gradually down from the tops of gigantic trees, and another set of quests for the chief of the Kerritamba tribe of Wookiees required curing Kkowir Forest from a magical blight. In addition to a quest to explore the lava planet, Mustafar, Simula was pleased to complete quests involving a labor dispute in which she initially took instructions from the capitalists but then went over to the side of the poor, oppressed miners. The quest arc “Crisis of Allegiance” illustrates the issue of neutrality in the galactic struggle. It begins in Dearic, a city on the planet Talus in the Corellian system, nominally under the Corellian Security Force (CorSec) of the more-or-less independent Corellian civilization. The in-game instructions explain: “As the conflict between the Empire and Rebellion grows ever more intense, Dathnaeya Loessin, a CorSec officer in Dearic has reached a point were she believes she can no longer stand on the side and watch. She must choose. Her quandary is that she does not know which side to take, therefore she has asked that an investigation of both sides be undertaken and a report made that will enable her to make this crucial decision in her life.” Simula accepted this responsibility and undertook a difficult mission for each side to observe what they say and do, in order to decide not only for Dathnaeya but for herself. At the end of the mission, Dathnaeya must choose on the basis of ideology, as the game text poses the issue: Rebel Ideology: The Rebels are compassionate freedom fighters, not terrorists as the Empire would have us believe. Law without mercy, order without compassion, duty without love. That is the Empire. Empire Ideology: The Empire is dedicated to maintaining order and stability in the galaxy as the rightful government. Freedom without responsibility, action without authority. The Rebels are anarchists and terrorists. Simula had difficulty deciding. The Rebels had a much more humanistic ideology, while the minions of the Empire seemed very cruel, yet both sides demanded much murder, so the ideological difference was not matched by a behavioral difference. Eventually, Dathnaeya decided to Page 60 →join the Rebellion, while Simula decided to continue her half-hearted support for the Rebels, while primarily dedicating her efforts to exploration of the

galaxy.

Socio, the Bounty Hunter The bounty hunter, Socio Path, experienced existence very differently, even during the earliest moments on a space station where characters could begin their lives if their player wanted the benefit of a tutorial. When Simula departed that station, she did so on the Millennium Falcon in the company of Han Solo. When Socio departed, he did so in the company of Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who was hunting Han Solo. Crime Incorporated Socio Path completely lacked political opinions and eventually sided with the Imperial faction simply because he believed it was to his advantage to do so. He delivered the R2 droid to the Empire and lost interest in the Legacy Quests at that point. At experience level 25, he declared allegiance to the Empire, but as an independent bounty hunter, rather than as a disciplined member of the military. Over time, he frequently changed his duty status, which made him more or less vulnerable to attack from Rebel NPCs. Because any of the towns on Tatooine might fall temporarily into Rebel hands, Socio was forced to be cautious. The map part of the user interface could be set to display the current state of the struggle, so he checked it often. Socio needed a base of operations where he could sleep but not be instantly attacked when he awoke, yet one that was near an Imperial terminal that could give him missions, and also near a bounty hunter mission terminal and other resources such as a cantina and an auction bazaar. For a time, he slept in a vacant room in Mos Eisley, the town depicted in the first Star Wars movie, in the basement of a building belonging to the Empire. Upstairs, inside the building, stood an Imperial mission terminal. Just outside to the left were many town facilities, and to the right was a gate that allowed him to run out of town quickly when necessary. In Socio’s “basement of operations” there were two levels, each with a couple of rooms. He preferred the larger room on the upper level because it was quicker to exit from there. An actual, honest-to-badness criminal used the other room, a level-5 female human spy who made her living Page 61 →through smuggling or fraud. On September 16, 2011, the day after SWG stopped accepting new players, her name was Othopo. Starting on August 13, when I created Socio, her name had been Ofeospor, Yikao, Ssisreb, Iroish, Gocir, Iquego, Ocagih, Agielo, Ydoe, Ufati, Lovean, and Onokofe. Although her name repeatedly changed, her appearance and behavior were always the same. She looked very much like Simula, wearing a skin-tight gray pants suit, with long black hair held in a ponytail. She failed to respond when Socio tried to speak with her and always danced while facing the wall, but over the month she sent Socio 28 messages through the in-game email system. All said the same thing: Welcome to login Top4Game.com im Annie keep 500M SWG Credits in Stock. if you never mind, you can place order first, we will to delivery for you within 20 mins Don’t miss out and trying us. Buy Now, Try us !!! ——————————Buy Credits—————————— Now SWG Credits 10 Million = $5.49 SWG Credits 50 Million = $26.79 SWG Credits 100 Million = $54.88 ————————SWG Powerleveling Service———————— Now: Special offer Level 1–90 only $120.01

Trader 1–90(2 day)$50.99 Please contact me at anytime when you have any questions MSN: [email protected] My name is Annie ^-^ Othopo—or Annie—was a gold farmer, probably Chinese from the grammatical errors, and quite possibly a credit card fraud. Imagining for the moment that she was an honest gold farmer, she offered to sell SWG money, denominated in a virtual currency called credits, for real dollars. Somewhere in China a sweatshop of poorly paid SWG players, operating level-90 avatars, was grinding through missions that earn lots of credits. A player who wanted some virtual credits could use a real-world credit card to send Annie the appropriate number of dollars, and a few minutes later Othopo would deliver the credits to the player’s character in the basement of the building in Tatooine. For power leveling, the player would pay Annie, then give her the login information for his character, after which somebody in the sweatshop would run the character up the levels of experience before returning control to the character’s owner. The prices strike me as implausibly low, earning the gold farmer perhapsPage 62 → a dollar an hour, but probably less than that. When gold farming began a few years ago, such prices seemed plausible to American players, because Chinese were believed to work for very low wages. Economic progress in China rendered the prices less plausible, despite Americans’ ignorance of the actual wage scale there. Recently a rumor spread through the web that the people working in the sweatshops were actually prisoners in Chinese penitentiaries whose income was zero per hour, and the money would go at no cost to the prison warden and his Internet-sophisticated cronies. A more plausible theory is that the whole thing was a credit card fraud. One occasionally hears a complaint that a gold farmer failed to deliver, but presumably most people who fall for this fraud will not admit they did. I was too timid to test this theory by attempting to buy from Othopo Annie, but the facts that her name constantly changed and that her level was always 5 are evidence of some form of criminality. Legitimate players would report gold farmers to SWG’s hosting company, Sony Online Entertainment, who would ban the gold farmers or their characters, so the gold farmer would need to create a new one using a different identity. The lowest level at which a character can reach Tatooine is level 5, and indeed the first 5 levels take zero minutes to achieve, if the character’s user elects to skip the beginning tutorial on the space station. After September 15, 2011, no new accounts were permitted, as SWG crawled toward its death, and no gold farming advertisement appeared after the following weekend. So in a gameworld filled with fictional criminality, it was interesting to encounter a real criminal, and indeed to share a hideout with her. Murder Incorporated Socio had a very different ethical code from Simula, and he happily completed a few quests that she rejected on ethical grounds. For example, on Kashyyyk, the Wookiee planet, Socio was pleased to help a murderer named Borantok, for a price. This unworthy fellow had killed two Rodian nobles in a barroom brawl but had been too inebriated himself to hide the bodies very well. Both were almost in plain sight in the Wookiee port town, Kachirho, one under a bush and the other in a junk pile. Socio accepted the job of taking both corpses deep into the Rryatt Trail, where Borantok’s accomplice could do a better job of hiding them. Then Socio had a “friendly talk”—involving harsh threats—with the bartender in Kachirho to make sure he kept his mouth shut. At the same time, Socio took on missions for a group of Trandoshan Page 63 →slavers, who were busy capturing Wookiees for the interplanetary slave trade. Trandoshans are scaly reptiles whereas Wookiees are hairy mammals, and they evolved on different planets, so they definitely are not members of the same race. Thus this set of quests resembles European slavers in Africa capturing local people to be shipped to the Americas centuries ago. In one mission for the Trandoshans, he defended a group of them against Wookiees who were trying to preserve their homeland. In another he killed ten escaped Wookiees to convince the other captives to be docile, rather like doing ten regular bounty hunter missions simultaneously.

A Trandoshan noblewoman named Ysith assigned Socio a very normal bounty hunter mission, trekking halfway across Kashyyyk and battling past guards to kill a rival Trandoshan noblewoman named Myssith. Only after doing the killing did Socio learn that they were sisters as well as rivals, but Socio did not care for family relationships, so this fact did not bother him in the slightest. Socio’s very first bounty hunter quest had started with Boba Fett, and after a series of interactions with Tatooine low-life eventually required him to deliver a symbolic death mark to a fellow named Untas deep inside an underground bunker on Tatooine, then kill him. A later mission from Boba Fett sent Socio to the planet Naboo to dispatch another victim in the same manner. Most missions however came not from Boba Fett but from a bounty hunter mission terminal machine, and they were boring, sending Socio a long distance across Tatooine to kill a mark with only a paragraph of text to differentiate this victim from any other. At higher levels, the victims could be characters operated by other players, and one time Socio himself was attacked by a fellow bounty hunter, but Socio found ordinary hunting quite boring. He decided to switch to missions from the Imperial terminals in the lobby of his hideout instead, and to perform them while on duty for the Empire so he could earn “GCW points” in the ongoing Galactic Civil War. He could accept two missions at once, and tended to select easy ones a level or two lower than his own experience could handle, and in the same geographic direction to reduce travel time. While accepting each, he could read the one-paragraph story associated with it, but those stories were irrelevant during the mission itself. He would typically ride his speederbike a kilometer or more to find two or three Rebel officers wandering in the vicinity of a Rebel flag. He had to be careful to deal with the enemies one at a time if at all possible. Then when the area was clear, he stood for a couple of minutes shooting at the flag until it exploded and he earned the mission rewards. Page 64 →This process became slightly more difficult after September 15, 2011, when the rules began to change on the way to the end of the universe. An update announcement that day informed Socio, “Special teams of elite troops from either faction have been dispatched to hunt down anyone who seeks to tip the scale in the Galactic Civil War by attacking minor installations and patrols. Anyone who accepts a factional mission risks drawing the attention of an enemy strike team.”9 He encountered such teams only rarely and learned how to spot them and take them out—to his profit—prior to attacking his target. The rules limited him to ten such missions each galactic day, which earned him about two and a half levels of combat experience all together, as well as money, reputation, and GCW points. By the time he finally reached level 90, his total of 27,630 GCW points had earned him the rank of corporal in the Imperial forces. Not much more than halfway to that goal, he had earned a maximum positive reputation with the Empire, +5000 reputation points, and the maximum negative score of в€’5000 points with the Rebel Alliance. Simula’s final reputation with the Rebels was +4995. She did many missions for the Rebel Alliance, but she did so without going officially on duty, so the missions were directed against local criminals rather than against the Empire, thus earning only a modestly negative -166 Imperial reputation and achieving a positive +5000 reputation with local townspeople. Incidental to his work for the Empire, Socio also fought local gangs, but less often than Simula, earning a reputation of 1760 with townspeople. Simula also had a +5000 reputation with CorSec, having done many missions for them on Corellia, but Socio’s was an insignificant в€’10 because he seldom visited that planet. To do the early stages of the Legacy Quests and reassemble that droid, Simula needed to cooperate with Jabba the Hutt, and at one point she had a positive reputation with him, identical to the 5000 that Socio wound up with. She found this distasteful, and after delivering the droid to the Rebellion, she harbored some embarrassment about this positive reputation with a crime boss. So she began occasionally waylaying his minions in the vicinity of Wayfar, the town nearest to his place, getting her reputation with Jabba down to в€’1390. Socio was happy to work with Jabba, and indeed his patron, Boba Fett, tended to hang out at Jabba’s Palace. Jabba’s chief rival in the crime scene was Valerian, and Simula wound up having a moderately negative в€’1805 reputation with Valerian, while Socio’s was a hostile в€’4840. In a well-organized society, an upstanding person opposes all criminals.Page 65 → But when society

disintegrates, the factions compete with each other and a person’s relationships to them will vary, often simply as a result of accidents of personal history rather than ethical principle. Thus, SWG reputation scores were a mixture of freedom and control. One must perform particular killings to change one’s reputation with a group, and if one understands the results of one’s actions, one can earn a desired reputation score by killing the specified enemies. But sometimes the result is complex, for example gaining positive reputation with one criminal gang by killing members of its rival, when one would have preferred negative reputations with both and was killing to gain positive reputation with a third faction.

Engineer and Entertainer Running Simula as a Jedi and Socio as a bounty hunter allowed me to explore qualities of combat classes, and I very briefly ran both a smuggler and a medic as well. To explore the noncombat crafting classes deeply, I ran Algorithma Teq as an engineer and Guzzlebooze as an entertainer. Because they did not fight, they did not have reputations with the factions. Algorithma had only one reputation score, в€’5 with the Empire for riding her speederbike too fast past a policeman, and Guzzlebooze had absolutely no reputation at all. Engineering Virtual Technology I ran Algorithma Teq all the way to level 90 as an engineer trader specializing in droids, and then was able to transfer her several times across other specializations. During Algorithma’s lifetime there were four distinct construction specializations, as described on the SWG website: Domestic Goods: Specializes in crafting various domestic goods including clothing, foods, drinks and desserts. Structures: Specializes in various large item construction including structures, decorations, furniture, spaceship hulls and spaceship components. Munitions: Specializes in making all kinds of military equipment including weapons and armor. Engineering: Specializes in high tech engineering including the construction and modification of Droids and some weapons.10 Page 66 →The assumption was that practitioners of any of the construction specializations would make money by selling the products of their labors, so collectively they were called traders. But in fact the market was not lively enough to support all the workers during their endeavors to gain experience, and Algorithma did a few trader missions that required delivering a product a great distance to an NPC customer, gaining little but money for her efforts. Therefore, she did most of her early construction work in practice mode, which earned her a little extra experience but destroyed the product. Then she became partners with Simula and Socio to explore the social significance of crafting classes. On the SWG forums, “A Quick Guide to Grinding the Engineer Class” by an expert player using the name Rasal suggested how Algorithma should plan her progress toward the maximum experience level of 90.11 Rasal had joined the SWG community in 2003 and was still active in its final days, having posted 12,362 messages on the forums by August 30, 2011, evidence of how dedicated some citizens of Tatooine had become. Rasal offered three different strategies, the most economical of which required making 7 survey devices, 56 crafting devices, 793 personal harvesters, and 3,343 advanced droid frame units. Doing so would consume 653,653 units of steel, 234,570 of fiberplast, 31,720 of low-grade ore, and 23,790 of aluminum. It takes about a minute to make one item after one already has the resources, so Rasal’s plan could take 70 hours. In fact, reaching level 90 took Algorithma 146 hours, factoring in time to collect the resources from the Tatooine landscape and do miscellaneous tasks that helped her learn more about the context of her craft. She chose to make a greater variety of products than Rasal suggested, but like labor in the physical world the tasks were extremely monotonous. Once Algorithma reached level 90, she was in a position to cooperate first with Simula and then later with Socio,

having the ability to make anything they might need and through cooperating with them to understand how the division of labor in SWG facilitated cooperation between players in general. In both of her partnerships, the other character would earn money with which to buy resources needed for Algorithma’s work. This freed her from the necessity of mining her own resources from the environment, which she was very skilled at doing but which required much time and effort, including traveling to other planets when a given resource could not be harvested on Tatooine.12 Some projects were simple but required large quantities of materials. For example, Algorithma could make two kinds of speederbike, the Star Wars equivalent of a motorcycle that levitated above the ground and thus Page 67 →had no need for wheels. The ordinary model required 1,200 units of nonferrous metal, for which Algorithma typically used aluminum but could have used copper, and 4,800 units of ferrous metal, which could have been iron but was usually steel. The fancier “Swoop” model required 1,600 units of nonferrous metal and 6,400 units of ferrous metal. Droids, by contrast, tended to require subcomponents as well as raw materials. For example, an R4 droid, similar to R2-D2 but with a different head and abilities, required 30 units of ferrous metal for the primary frame, 60 units of unspecified chemical for the body shell, and 40 units of steel for the leg struts. Since steel is ferrous—made from iron—70 units of steel would suffice for the metal. But an R4 also required four components that had already been manufactured, each from its own required materials: (1) droid brain, (2) manipulator arm package set, (3) droid motive system, and (4) droid sensor package. Optionally, a combat-capable service module could also be added. Speederbikes and R4 droids were among the many items Algorithma could make anywhere she wanted, using a portable crafting tool, although she preferred her home workshop because she had all the materials at hand and could transfer any item to Simula simply by placing it on the floor, where Simula could pick it up the next time she came home. But some complex projects required a public crafting station, and the nearest one was in Anchorhead, although sometimes she took the shuttle from there to Mos Eisley at a cost of 110 credits each way. A suitable public crafting station was right outside the Mos Eisley starport and just across an open space from the famous cantina. This spot was the center of social life on Tatooine, although it could become a bit raucous, especially when two players had a duel. One day she decided to increase her vehicle collection at that crafting station, showing off each one as she made it. Landspeeders were the Star Wars equivalent of convertible cars with the top down, but like speederbikes they lacked wheels. Star Wars technology is very much like that experienced by teenage boys in the 1950s, consisting of large mechanical devices assembled from mass-produced components. Algorithma already had a model X-34, not very different from Luke’s landspeeder in the original movie. So she made an X-38, an apparently improved model with more massive engine nacelles and a full glass top, then made a cute but stubby AB-1. All three had room for a passenger as well as the driver. Finally she built an even more massive and sinister-looking AV-35 that could carry six passengers and the driver in its open cockpit. The public crafting station had two disadvantages. First it was public, with swarms of people rushing in and out of the narrow alley it was on. Page 68 →The second disadvantage was that while the roster of things that could be constructed using it was larger than that of her portable crafting tool, it was still limited. She decided to get her own private crafting station. Algorithma searched the information of the bazaar system used for commerce between players and discovered they could be brought from only one structures dealer, on a distant planet. But he had three listed at a reasonable price, so Algorithma rushed there, returned to the house on Tatooine she shared with Simula, and began clearing out the largest room—which happened to be their living room—then began crafting droids of every conceivable kind. Secondary Avatars Naturally, the crown jewels of Algorithma’s droid collection were a protocol droid exactly like C-3PO and a robot-computer interaction model identical to R2-D2, whom some have called the real hero of the Star Wars saga.

Both droids could be given optional components, notably service, combat, or defensive modules, depending upon the type of droid and its desired purpose. The protocol droid could have a personality chip that determined what the droid would say when the primary avatar interacted with it, and there were six alternatives: geeky, prissy, sarcastic, slang, stupid, or worshipful. For her protocol droid, Algorithma chose the worshipful personality, which would say things like “It is an honor to speak to my master, a true paragon of wisdom. Do you wish to give me instruction?” “I will gladly hear instruction on any subject from your lips, o master!” “It is such an honor to be at your command, master. What command do you wish me to instantly obey?” “Of course! With alacrity! I merely need to know what command you will give me so that I can obey instantly.” In contrast, when she later manufactured a super battle droid for Socio Path, she gave it a stupid personality chip, making it says things like “Uh, what?” Depending upon the droid type and what modules had been built in, a droid could perform any of the simple functions of an avatar, notably using a weapon against an enemy or providing healing. One of the more interesting but not often useful droid capabilities involved patrolling an area. The user would tell the droid to follow the primary character, which would then go to a series of points in the local area marking the boundary of the patrol area, setting patrol points along the way. The droid could then be told to patrol this area, until diverted by a different command, such as stop or follow, or by attack from a nearby enemy. Socio chiefly used his battle droid to increase his own firepower, although he often assigned it the tediousPage 69 → job of destroying a Rebel flag after its defenders had been killed, leaving him free to go about other business. These droids could be called secondary avatars, representing the user just as the primary avatar does, and controllable separately from the main avatar. It is noteworthy that the fighter flown by Luke Skywalker in the movies is not really a solo spacecraft, because R2-D2 serves as Luke’s copilot. Eventually, Algorithma completed 14 different models of droid in working order, keeping 12 for her own experimentation and giving two to Socio, one an insect-like droideka destroyer droid that becomes a wheel and rolls when it needs to move quickly, and the more humanoid super battle droid. After that, she changed her specialization so she could manufacture spaceships rather than droids, making a series for her own experimentation and giving one of the famous Imperial TIE fighters to Socio. This specialization also allowed her to build houses, as described in the following chapter. Briefly she also tried making weapons. Thus, Algorithma experienced three of the four trader specializations, but another avatar was needed to explore the remaining, very different noncombat trade, entertainer, and also to learn the domestic cooking and tailoring trade. Song and Dance Guzzlebooze was a blond-haired female Wookiee, whose chief ambition was to become the girlfriend and possible bride of Chewbacca, the male Wookiee who features in Star Wars. I imagine that she became drunk at the Mos Eisley cantina, thereby acquiring the name Guzzlebooze, and discovered a talent for dancing. Of all SWG characters, Wookiees are the only ones that can strip entirely naked, so she did so and only once donned clothing for the remainder of her career. Of course her hair was so thickly matted all over her body that it hardly mattered. One of the early quests for entertainers sent her to a different town’s cantina, but when she arrived she found that it was the scene of a pitched battle between the Empire and Rebels, so she hid in a back room, where she discovered she could rapidly gain experience levels simply by dancing alone. Eventually, she learned a huge repertoire of dances and could combine various moods by my composing little macro programs for the game software to run. She also learned to construct and to play many musical instruments. The function of an entertainer is to temporarily increase the abilities of other players. For example, Algorithma did much of her later grinding up to level 90 at the Mos Eisley cantina, watching another player bumping and Page 70 →grinding in dance. Watching the dancer improved the dancer’s gains, and after watching for a while Algorithma would receive from the dancer a buff that improved the experience she gained from her crafting. This example of synergy between an entertainer and an engineer illustrates how the professions of Star Wars Galaxies supported each other.

Statistics from Censuses At the time I did my research, there were thirteen different versions of Star Wars Galaxies, each called a galaxy. They were identical but operated from separate Internet servers in order to accommodate a larger number of players than could fit on any one, and to group players by their geographic time zones. Originally there had been 25 galaxies, but 12 of them were shut down in 2009. During that transition, Sony allowed players to move avatars from galaxies scheduled for destruction to ones that would survive, without charging for that service. In 2011, players could again move their older avatars freely, chiefly concentrating them on four galaxies that had a significant number of players. Two of the 13 final galaxies were intended for European players: Chimaera and FarStar. Seven covered the eastern time zones of North America: Bloodfin, Chilastra, Eclipse, Gorath, Radiant, Shadowfire, and Starsider. Four covered the western time zones: Ahazzi, Bria, Flurry, and Sunrunner. In the first of my two phases of research in early 2009, I created two avatars, Simula on Bloodfin and Algorithma on Starsider, which appeared to be the most popular galaxies in my time zone. When I returned in June 2011 for a second phase of research, at first I contemplated creating an avatar in each of the other galaxies, but it soon became apparent that most of them were severely underpopulated. When selecting a galaxy for a new avatar, a player can see a list of the thirteen with a description of how populated each is at the moment. During July and August, whenever I did this, only four galaxies ever got above the bottom rank of “very light” population: FarStar, Chilastra, Starsider, and Flurry. I had a sense that Bria might be better populated than the other “very light” galaxies, but it never reached the “light” level. Of the four most populated, only Starsider often reached “medium” population, and the other three were “light.” Thinking it would be useful to have Simula and Algorithma explore the gameworld’s opportunities for cooperation, I moved Simula to Starsider. Later, I moved Algorithma to FarStar, then back to Starsider. I created Socio Path on FarStar and Guzzlebooze on Flurry, so I would have all Page 71 →three time zones covered. I also created other short-lived avatars in various galaxies when I wanted to do a census through the group recruiting interface of the game. On Chilastra I created a Wookiee smuggler named Piercethun, honoring James Pierce, who played Thun, king of the Lion Men in the original Flash Gordon serial, and who was the son-in-law of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I took him only up to level 20 of experience and used him chiefly to do censuses. Tables 3.1 and 3.2 show combined results of doing ten censuses in each of the four galaxies during the first weeks of July 2011. Inside SWG there was a system for finding other players to cooperate with, whether in doing joint quests, in recruiting to a guild, or in seeking customers for a trader’s Page 72 →business. Some players blocked their information and could not be searched through this system, but it appears that most could be. Each time I did a census, I would cycle through the ten races and two genders, because the output did not include these two variables, but they could be searched on. So that meant a minimum of twenty automatically created tables, which I would capture in a screen shot for later manual assembly into a unified spreadsheet of all characters I had found. Often, especially among male human characters, there were too many cases for the system to display, so I did multiple searches specifying profession or faction membership, then combined the results. Altogether the data covered 2,848 characters, and their species distribution is given in table 3.1. Table 3.1. Census of Characters by Species Race Sample (N) Percent of Total Percent Female Bothan 100 3.5% 18.0% Human 1,484 52.1% 25.8% Ithorian 57 2.0% 7.0% Mon Calamari 94 3.3% 9.6% Rodian 110 3.9% 17.3% Sallustan 37 1.3% 5.4% Trandoshan 98 3.4% 10.2%

Percent Jedi 13.0% 31.4% 19.3% 11.7% 14.5% 8.1% 21.4%

Twi’lek

321

11.3%

74.1%

24.6%

Wookiee Zabrak Total

102 445 2,848

3.6% 15.6% 100.0%

7.8% 18.7% 27.2%

26.5% 42.0% 29.3%

Class

Table 3.2. Census of Characters by Profession Percent Percent Percent Number Percent Twi’lek Percent Zabrak Percent Level 90 of Total Female Human

Combat: Jedi Bounty Hunter

834

29.3% 18.3% 55.9%

9.5%

22.4%

45.7%

241

8.5%

15.4% 53.5%

6.2%

17.0%

45.6%

12.3% 6.6% 6.6% 4.0% 4.1%

18.6% 31.4% 21.9% 26.5% 23.9%

60.3% 48.4% 62.0% 53.1% 43.6%

6.9% 9.0% 5.9% 14.2% 5.1%

13.7% 18.1% 11.8% 13.3% 23.9%

43.7% 71.8% 70.1% 46.9% 47.0%

2.7% 2.8% 2.8% 8.2%

44.2% 27.8% 21.5% 24.9%

64.9% 49.4% 41.8% 43.3%

14.3% 10.1% 7.6% 9.9%

3.9% 8.9% 8.9% 8.6%

87.0% 64.6% 72.2% 59.2%

12.3% 65.7% 39.1%

30.0%

9.4%

60.0%

Commando 350 Medic 188 Officer 187 Smuggler 113 Spy 117 Traders: Domestic 77 Engineering 79 Munitions 79 Structures 233 Artists: Entertainer 350

More than half of the characters were human, a reflection of the fact that the Star Wars movies emphasize human characters, which itself reflects the difficulty a human audience might have identifying with aliens. There are few Wookiees, even though Chewbacca was the most prominent nonhuman character in the stories. While they exist in the background, for example in the Rebel armada that attacks the second death star in Return of the Jedi, five of the species are quite unimportant in the movies: Bothan, Ithorian, Mon Calamari, Sallustan, and Trandoshan. A Rodian named Greedo appears briefly in the original movie, before Han Solo shoots him dead. Two Twi’leks appear in Return of the Jedi, notably Oola, a dancing girl. The ominous Sith enemy in The Phantom Menace, Darth Maul, is a Zabrak, resembling nothing so much as the devil. Apparently Oola gave the Twi’leks their popularity, because only among Twi’leks are female characters common. Sith are the evil equivalent of Jedi, so when a Zabrak is listed as a Jedi, most likely it was really a Sith. Table 3.2 tabulates the 2,848 characters by profession. Note that female characters are most numerous among nonviolent professions—medic, domestic, and entertainer—while the Zabrak are more common in combat specialties. Level 90 was the top experience level, which was measured within each of three broad categories: combat, trader, and entertainer. Algorithma reached level 90 in droid engineering but was able to transfer to structures at no cost and without loss of experience level. After the change, however, she could no longer make droids. When she wanted to shift to munitions, she had the option of paying 100,000 credits or waiting a month since her last profession change, at which point there would be no cost. But when Guzzlebooze switched from being an entertainer to a domestic trader, she started out at the bottom of the trader experience level and found herself making underpants that were too small to fit herself—not that she ever wore any—to grind up to level 15, at which Page 73 →point she got disgusted and paid 100,000 credits to shift back to entertaining, regaining all the singing and dancing abilities she had lost when becoming a trader.

Chronicle Quests

By the time it was fully developed, Star Wars Galaxies included two systems—Storyteller and Chronicles—that allowed players to create missions for each other that were comparable to the quests provided by the game designers. Here and in the following chapter I will analyze the Chronicles system, which allowed players to construct their own mission holocrons out of relics and fragments they collected as a matter of course while doing their ordinary work. For example, when mining for mineral resources or crafting droids, Algorithma would often gain one of these units. Socio would as well, but he would loot them from corpses of enemies he had killed. A relic is comparable to a module of computer code with associated data representing a particular task. Ten fragments can be combined, making a pair of identical randomly selected relics that are at the appropriate difficulty level for the avatar. A relic, in turn, can be deconstructed into fragments if it is not suitable for the avatar’s goals, which can be converted into other relics at some loss. To explore this system, I developed Algorithma’s skills up to the maximum Master level, with the help first of Socio, then of Simula. Playing Another Player’s Quest At the Mos Eisley bazaar, Socio obtained information that an interesting level 88 Chronicle holocron was for sale, called “Tao-Ni Compound for Quality 3 Relics R-B-B.” The description read: “Kill droids in the TaoNi Compound at /way 2559 644 on Endor. It’s a bit far off, but you loot Quality 3 relics thereВ .В .В . good for the grind :) Red—Blue—Beta.” To obtain one, he needed to travel to the home of Parsifal Lohengrin, a character clearly named after two operas by Richard Wagner, in which Parsifal is the father of Lohengrin. It was not on either Tatooine or Endor, but in the Plains of Dust on Lok, and it was in the imposing form of a huge Jawa sandcrawler vehicle. The price was only one credit, four of them were for sale, as were many other missions crafted by Parsifal Lohengrin, and other players had completed the mission 585 times prior to Socio. I deduced that Parsifal Lohengrin was the center of a large community that provided him with the Page 74 →relics required for this mass production after gathering them while doing the mission he had scripted. The Tao-Ni compound was infested with large numbers of renegade droids, and Socio was required first to kill 15 red ones, then 15 blue ones, then 100 security mechanized beta class droids. As he did so, he occasionally looted relics that could be used by Algorithma to create missions to kill the same range of droids. The particular kind of relic gained reflects roughly what the player did to obtain it. When Guzzlebooze was making underwear while practicing domestic crafting, she did not get relics associated with making underwear, but more general crafting relics, similar to those Algorithma got while she was crafting. Killing enemies tended to confer relics calling for the killing of more enemies of the same kind. Thus the player had some control over which relics were collected. At early levels of chronicling, a quest could contain no more than 6 tasks, but this increased to 12 at the Master level. Three kinds of task required killing: (1) kill a specific NPC, (2) kill a chronicler-decided number from 1 to 100 of a particular kind of NPC already defined by the relic, or (3) kill a player’s character of a specific rank in player-versus-player (PvP) combat. “Kill and loot” quests allowed the chronicler to say how many of a specified object need to be looted from the dead bodies of a kind of NPC already specified in the relic, and they also let the chronicler determine the percent of the time that item should drop from the victim. Crafting tasks required the player’s character to have the specific skill, and the chronicler could decide how many of the predefined item should be made. In addition to tasks that involved reading a message while an animated face appears on the screen, there were also simple message tasks. Creating One’s Own Quest Given one or more suitable relics, a player could create a quest, using a part of the interface called, appropriately enough, the Quest Builder. The first serious quest Algorithma built was called Tusken Revenge, using relics Socio had given her. In the original Star Wars movie, Luke Skywalker was knocked unconscious by a Tusken Raider, one of the Sand People. According to a Star Wars wiki, these desert nomads had existed on Tatooine for thousands of years but had only recently acquired the name Tusken Raiders after they raided Fort Tusken.13 They played a crucial role in turning Anakin Skywalker to the Dark Side of the Force by killing his mother, Shmi. The Wikipedia page for the 2002 prequel Attack of the Clones explains: “Anakin becomes troubled by premonitions of his mother Shmi in Page 75 →pain. Despite Obi-Wan’s orders to remain on Naboo, Anakin persuades PadmГ© to accompany him to Tatooine. After finding Shmi—tortured to death by a tribe of Tusken

Raiders—Anakin snaps and kills the entire tribe before burying his mother.”14 But there are many tribes of Tuskens on Tatooine, so Algorithma created this quest to kill some more of them. She used only two relics, but ones chosen to fit the story. The first one required killing Flesh Renders in the Tusken Cave, and the second required killing Tusken Elite Guards in their bunker at a different location. The Quest Builder interface fills the screen, with a list of the relics at the left and a big space in the middle where the details of each task are decided. At the top, she entered the title, Tusken Revenge. In a space just below she entered a description that would appear on the screen when Socio started the quest: “Help Anakin Skywalker achieve his revenge against the Tusken Raiders. First, kill 10 flesh renders in their cave at -1014 -6352 on Tatooine! Then kill 5 elite guards in their bunker at -1493 -208.” She actually need not have bothered to put the map coordinates, because each task automatically added a properly placed waypoint to Socio’s map. In the center of the screen were displayed the two tasks, both of the “kill creature” type. On each, there was a space to enter the number that must be killed, anything from 1 through 100. There also were spaces where Algorithma typed in a brief title of the task, which would be displayed by the Quest Helper part of the interface if desired, when that particular task was in effect, and a description of the task that would briefly appear on the screen when it began. On the right side of the Quest Builder interface were squares where Algorithma could drag items from her inventory that would be awarded to the player who completed the quest, and a space to put in a money award as well. When everything was all set, she clicked the “create quest” button and a holocron appeared in her inventory that could be given to another player by any of the usual means. To give it to Socio, she simply dropped it on the floor, where he could pick it up later. Nominally, this quest was suitable for a group of players at level 35 in combat experience, but Socio, at level 90, could handle it solo with a little help from the super combat droid Algorithma had made for him. Killing the flesh renders in the cave was trivially easy, and the droid could have done it alone, but the elite guards in the bunker were a different matter. An elite enemy has much greater health than a usual enemy and thus takes much longer to kill. The five Socio killed were standing in a group along with three lesser Tuskens, so it was a furious battle, yet he triumphed. Lower-level avatars would have needed to enter the bunker as a group, Page 76 →and there was an option in the Quest Builder to allow quests to be shared among several players. The next quest Algorithma made involved only a single task and required constructing a pistol, so she did it herself to see how crafting missions worked. Before seriously exploring the intricacies of quest building, I decided to get Algorithma to a fairly high skill level and to possess many different relics so that appropriate tasks would be in her collection. Pooling their resources, Algorithma and Socio had about 2,500 fragments, enough for her to make 500 relics to add to the couple hundred she had already loaded into the system. She followed the same strategy she had used in building her experience to level 90, making many meaningless quests and then destroying the result to increase her abilities as quickly as possible. Occasionally she made a real quest and tested it, either herself if it involved crafting or giving it to Socio if it required adventuring. When they began to run out of fragments, Socio went to a vendor on Lok, where he bought 1,000 fragments for 400,000 credits. At that point he had slightly more than 800,000 credits but wisely decided not to purchase any more until he and Algorithma could see how her work progressed. Algorithma and Socio were in the FarStar galaxy that served European players, while Simula Tion remained in Starsider, the most heavily populated galaxy, which chiefly served eastern North America. Simula checked the bazaar trade interface at Mos Eisley and discovered that the price for relic fragments on StarSider was less than a quarter of the price on FarStar. So Algorithma said farewell to Socio and rejoined Simula on Starsider. After setting up her crafting equipment again in their Tatooine home, this time in a back room because Simula had nicely decorated their living room, she jaunted to another planet, where she bought 6,000 relic fragments for a total cost of 450,000 credits, then returned home to complete her training.

Conclusion Players of Star Wars Galaxies enjoyed considerable freedom, much more than in typical MMOs. They did not

need to join a faction; they could switch from a combat role to a construction role and make whatever virtual items they needed before switching back, and they were free to take on predesigned missions or to ignore such stories and simply live on an alien planet. Significantly, players could create quests for each other, costly in terms of the resources required but quite complex and written in their own words. As in the real world, freedom had to be earned through hard work, Page 77 →but no electronic equivalent of a political dictatorship dominated the players. With all these virtues, it may seem surprising that Star Wars Galaxies was not more successful and that its total population was only ten or twenty thousand after eight years. At the same point in its history, World of Warcraft had nine million subscribers, yet it offered players neither their own houses to live in nor the freedom to create their own quest stories. While many explanations for this disparity can be suggested, we cannot easily dismiss the theory that humans in fact do not want much freedom and would be happy being ruled by a benign oligarchy. The technical complexity of life in this virtual world, however, invokes the Silicon Law more than the Iron Law. Whenever technology gives humans a new power, it simultaneously demands an increased degree of control over humans, implying that some natural law sets a balance between iron and silicon.

Page 78 →

4. Homes among the Stars The universe depicted in Star Wars is a mythologized version of the planet we live on. Tatooine seems to be an exaggeration of the southwestern region of the United States, and Naboo is an idealized version of Europe. The 1977 movie was subtitled A New Hope, but it could just as easily have been called A New Home. Whatever the metaphoric references, the movies and gameworlds imagine other planets to be hospitable worlds like Earth, rather than massive aggregations of rock and chemicals hostile to human life, as the overwhelming majority of them really are. The many worlds visited in the Star Wars universe are definite biospheres that possess indigenous life, as well as life forms imported from other worlds, and where humans can survive without wearing spacesuits and carrying oxygen tanks. Thus, each supposedly alien planet feels a lot like home.

Alien But Familiar Each of the Star Wars worlds is an accentuation of a specific kind of terrestrial environment. For the original 1977 movie, Luke Skywalkers’s home was filmed in Tunisia, but without benefit of the Mediterranean Sea. Call it Tatooine. At the end of the film, he is on Yavin 4, but the outdoor scene was filmed in Guatemala, without benefit of the American continents. The Ewoks’ forest on Endor was the Redwood National Forest in California. Of course, George Lucas could not really film “on location,” and there were economic advantages to postulating worlds where the wardrobe staff did not need to sew together dozens of mock spacesuits. Only Imperial storm troopers wear such armored uniforms, but more to express their grim lack of individuality than to protect them from the vacuum of space. But in the gameworlds as well as the movies, the general public would feel very much at home on earthlike worlds. The sense of wonder associated with science fiction, given that most of the public are not science fiction fans, was achieved through environments that were exaggerations of familiar ones, rather then being really alien. Page 79 →In The Science of Star Wars, Jeanne Cavelos reports the modern consensus of astronomers that planets abound in the cosmos and some small fraction of them must be earthlike.1 A small fraction of a nearly infinite number is a large number, so in principle a planet like each of the ones depicted in Star Wars must exist somewhere. The problem is that they are almost certainly vast cosmic distances apart from each other, and Cavelos explains that no practical means of rapid interstellar travel is currently known, and none may exist. Yet the stories involve hopping from one planet to another in a matter of what appears to be hours, and at most would be days. In Star Wars Galaxies, interstellar travel from a spaceport on one planet to one on another takes only seconds and is technically equivalent to the virtual travel hopping from a website in one terrestrial continent to another on a different continent, simply by clicking on a hyperlink. Constructing a virtual world is a great challenge. There must not only be vistas to view, but places to visit, where deeds can be done. Throughout the period of its existence, Star Wars Galaxies was the best example of a multiplanet virtual universe. Anarchy Online and Entropia Universe each offered only one complete world, while Tabula Rasa and World of Warcraft each had two. Star Wars Galaxies allowed a player to visit fully twelve, and even build a home on most of them. Two of them, Tatooine and Naboo, represented worlds where much of the action of the movies took place, and they were extremely well-developed virtual worlds. Corellia is mentioned but not visited in the original films, but it forms the hub of the interplanetary travel network and was quite welldeveloped in the gameworld. Seven others were similar but simpler: Dantooine, Dathomir, Endor, Lok, Rori, Talus, and Yavin 4. These were the ten worlds with which the gameworld launched in 2003. Two more extreme worlds were added in 2005, Kashyyyk and Mustafar. In this order we shall visit the dozen other Earths in Star Wars Galaxies.

Tatooine In 2011, astronomers reported they had discovered the first known planet circling a double-star system, and many news reports noted that Tatooine had two suns in its sky. Writing in Time magazine, Michael Lemonick expressed

the mundane perspective: The Star Wars movies weren’t especially big on subtlety. Their heroes and villains were cartoonishly one-dimensional, the aliens were grotesquely alien, and the action was over the top. One scene in the first Page 80 →film was a notable exception, though. It showed a sunset on Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home world—with not one, but two suns sinking in tandem toward the horizon. The essential strangeness of that image made it quietly but profoundly clear that you were visiting an utterly foreign world.2 Had Lemonick been a science fiction reader, or an astronomer, or indeed any kind of scientist, he would not have written this paragraph, because all the things he finds strange about Star Wars are very close to normal. The image of the twin suns was produced simply by copying our sun an extra time into the frames of film. Everything in Star Wars is just one step beyond our normal expectations for terrestrial adventure stories. Every detail is what Pascal Boyer calls minimally counterintuitive—very familiar but just different enough to cause a sense of mystery.3 Masahiro Mori calls this the uncanny valley, a slight difference from normality that seems all the more strange to mundanes, precisely because it is nearly what they expect, yet defies expectation.4 “Over the top” describes something very near whatever possesses that top, and all the aliens have the same arms and legs as humans, even though their faces are distorted. A Geography Lesson The planet where the Star Wars saga began is rather like the Wild West of nineteenth-century America, but drier, comparable to the Sahara desert, but apparently not as hot. Cavelos suggests that the gravity on Tatooine may be lower than on Earth, but greater than on Mars, because the planet has become depleted in water but still has a breathable atmosphere.5 In the upper atmosphere, the dissociation of the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen would allow the lighter element, hydrogen, to escape, while Tatooine’s gravity was sufficient to hold the oxygen. The clear implication of the 1977 movie is that all of Tatooine is a desert, rather than just the portion we see, because otherwise the costly system of “moisture vaporators” to collect water from the atmosphere would have been unnecessary. The two trilogies of movies depict two distant but very similar small areas on Tatooine. The distances between locations on a planet in SWG are large in comparison with many online gameworlds, including its successor Star Wars: The Old Republic, but small in comparison to the Earth’s geography. Let’s imagine Simula is sitting on a chair in a waiting area of the Mos Eisley starport. Across from her sits a humanoid alien NPC labeled Aurilian Contact, Page 81 →who refuses to talk with her unless she first visits Aurilia on the planet Dathomir to start a mission. She could do that, but Tatooine has no direct commercial flights to Dathomir, so she would need to fly to Corellia first and take a second flight from there. Well, she is feeling lazy, and if she were willing to do the piloting herself, she could go there in her starfighter, even though the movies depicted this kind of craft as limited to short-range flights. Truth to tell, she was not much of a pilot, and her fighter was really just a Z-95 Headhunter, the very first of the starfighter series, which evolved only later into the X-Wing used so effectively by Luke Skywalker.6 Instead of talking with the Aurilian, Simula opens up the planetary map in her user interface and tries to estimate the area of Tatooine that she has thoroughly explored. First she enters the following into her text chat: “/way yellow tatooine 0 0 Center;” and hits the enter key. This marks the center of the coordinate system on her map of the planet with a waypoint, and a yellow arrow pointing in its direction starts flashing in the tiny local map at the upper-right corner of the computer screen. Mousing over it reveals she is sitting exactly 5,943 meters from there. Now she opens her full-screen planet map and sees a flashing yellow marker labeled Center representing that waypoint. On the right side of her map is a list of locations, and she opens the category for Points of Interest. She selects “Lars Homestead,” the boyhood home of Luke Skywalker, and a new yellow marker appears on the map. She had selected yellow for the color of the Center, figuring it should be a Point of Interest, but ordinary

waypoints are blue, businesses located through the bazaar auction system are green, and many other colors may be selected for special purposes during missions. She activates the Lars Homestead waypoint and a second yellow arrow begins flashing on her local map. She discovers she is 6,202 meters east of it. Activating a waypoint she had created long ago to mark her home, she sees she is sitting 6,110 meters east of her front door. This suggests her home must be close to the home of Luke Skywalker. Indeed, she knows that she lives just 652 meters north of it, as she had placed her home as close as she could, given that building on that sacred site is forbidden. Each point on the map is identified by three numbers, and her current location in Mos Eisley starport is at 3576 4 в€’4745. The middle number 4 says that she is four meters above sea level. But of course the desert planet Tatooine has no sea, and altitude has little significance for travel, so it is usually ignored. Numbers increase going east and north, so 3,576 means she is 3,576 meters, or about 3.6 kilometers, east of the longitude of the Center point. Similarly, because it is minus, в€’4745 means she is about 4.7 kilometers south of the latitude of the Center point. Page 82 →Four of the larger towns have starports from which one can fly to a few of the other planets: Mos Eisley, Mos Espa, Mos Entha, and Bestine. Two smaller towns, one on either side of Simula’s house, have local shuttleports from which one can fly to many locations on Tatooine: Anchorhead and Wayfar. A sense of the scale can be gotten from the fact that the starport in Mos Eisley is 9.4 kilometers from the one in Mos Espa, which happens to be Darth Vader’s boyhood town. The flight distances to the other towns are Anchorhead (3.6 km), Bestine (5.1 km), Mos Entha (8.2 km), and Wayfar (8.9 km). There are also ten player-operated shuttleports. Each is the centerpiece of a player-created town, but also many player homes are spread out in the general area between and around Anchorhead and Mos Eisley. Using her planet map and cranking the resolution up to its maximum to find the exact edges, Simula can estimate the total area of the planet. The map extends 8,200 meters in all directions from the Center point, but she knows from personal experience that the territory is ringed by mountains, and she was unable to reach the edge of her map, either walking or riding her speederbike. But being generous, she figures that the map is a square 16.4 kilometers on a side, with an area no greater than 269 square kilometers, and probably closer to 250. That is quite small for a planet; for example the Earth has two million times that surface area. But it is large enough in the experience of a human being, and without the map system it is quite easy to get lost. Simula decides to go home, and she has several choices how to do so. Walking is slow, and her speederbike is not much faster. A shuttle to a nearby town usually costs only 200 or 300 credits, and at the moment, even after investing almost all her wealth in my research expenses, she still has 100,000 credits. She could, for example, grab a shuttle directly from the Mos Eisley starport to Bestine, then use her speederbike from there, but it might be even quicker to use one of the ten additional shuttleports set up by other players as part of the work building their own towns. She hops the shuttle to one of these, Hades Inferno, rides her speederbike home, and takes some measurements from her front door. The trip from Hades Inferno was 2,272 meters, but the ordinary Bestine shuttleport would have been closer, at 1,945 meters, and the large starport in Bestine is a trip of just 1,690 meters. But the closest shuttleport is actually a second private one, at -AI-’s Sparta, a distance of only 1,329 meters. The flights are comparable in expense, although some credits from every outbound ticket from a player-created community go to the player-operated town hall. To put an important analytical point in colloquial language, advanced MMO players tend to be nerdy. They really do pay attention to measurementsPage 83 → like latitude and longitude, and careful calculation improves their ability to wield the best weapons and wear the most protective armor. Rigorous, quantitative thinking can be a great advantage, especially in sandbox MMOs like SWG that emphasize crafting. Thus, as this chapter describes in what may seem like excessive detail, that is precisely the level on which much of the action takes place in this and many other MMOs. Tourist Sites The southern half of Tatooine covers locations visited in the original trilogy of movies, and the northern half covers locations from the prequel trilogy. Now standing at the Lars Homestead, Simula discovers that the escape pod in which R2-D2 and C-3PO reached Tatooine is 1,746 meters northwest. Ben Kenobi’s house is in the

same general direction, 3,765 meters north-northwest. Those locations feature in the original 1977 movie Star Wars: A New Hope. The headquarters of Jabba the Hutt featured in the third movie, Return of the Jedi, in which Jabba meets his doom near the sarlacc monster at the Great Pit of Carkoon. Jabba’s headquarters are 3,348 meters almost due west of the Lars homestead, and the sarlacc dwells 4,166 meters away. From personal experience, Simula knows that Jabba’s establishment is a huge mazelike facility where many criminal missions can be obtained. The sarlacc sickens anybody who approaches, but approaching it allows one to collect sample of sarlacc bile, the mysterious liquid that takes a thousand years to digest anyone foolish enough to fall in the pit, or be thrown. The -AI-’s Sparta shuttleport is nearest to the Lars homestead, just 973 meters, and the number reminded Simula how lucky she was to buy her own homestead more than 300 meters closer to the Tatooine equivalent of Mecca. From Sparta, a ticket to the Mos Espa starport costs 300 credits. But Mos Espa also has two public shuttleports, Shuttleport East (205 credits) and Shuttleport West (also 205 credits). Had Simula been headed offworld, she would have gone directly to the starport to save a long walk on the twisting paths between the irrationally placed buildings of a Tatooine town. This time she bought a ticket to Most Espa Shuttleport West. Of the 205-credit price, 105 credits went to the Galactic Travel Commission and the remaining 100 to Sparta’s player-operated town hall. Several quests involved Watto, the junk dealer who owned the young Darth Vader (Anakin Skywalker) and his mother Shmi as slaves in The Phantom Menace. He flies in the air behind a counter in his shop, exactly 316 meters north of the waypoint in the Mos Espa starport. With him are two assistants, a Human junk vendor and a Rodian quest giver and jack-of-all-tradesPage 84 → named Wald. The street on which Anakin and Shmi lived begins just east of Watto’s shop, and their home was only about 80 meters from him. A key event was when Anakin won a hot-rod-like pod race, and the start/finish line is 5.9 kilometers roughly northeast from Watto’s shop. The race course winds through canyons and around obstacles, first toward Mos Espa, then away from it. Leg 8 of the 16-leg race is Beggar’s Canyon, 3.3 kilometers northwest. This canyon is mentioned by Luke Skywalker in the 1977 movie as the place where he hunts womp rats, although these less-than-charming creatures can be found all over Tatooine, including immediately outside Mos Eisley. Three of them often congregated in the back yard of Simula’s home. She did try duplicating Anakin’s pod-racing feat, and the best that can be said is that she did not crash. Years ago, perhaps 35 years if Anakin and Luke age at the same rate as earthlings, this track was the scene of pod races, but after the end of the Old Republic it had fallen into disuse until amateur swoop racers had starting using it for their own competitions. Unfortunately, the swoop Algorithma had made for Simula had been damaged in a battle, so she would need to use her ordinary speederbike. The current daily track record was 432 seconds, achieved by Orcaf Vafe, so Simula determined to complete it faster. There was no audience, unless you count the protocol droid that manages the race, but Simula still felt the eyes of the universe were on her. Unfortunately, a number of people had built their houses directly along the race track, so there were many obstacles to get around, but Orcaf had circumvented them as well, so that was no excuse. Simula’s spirits fell when she learned that her time for completing the course was 512 seconds, a full minute and 20 seconds slower. She wondered what Anakin’s time had been, perhaps a billion seconds ago, and she contemplated that the universe cannot be measured merely in latitude and longitude, but has at least four dimensions.

Other Worlds The eleven remaining worlds will be described in the order Simula first explored them thoroughly, an order that resulted largely from the level of experience she needed to defeat the local enemies. Technically speaking, three of them are moons, not planets, yet their environments are all terrestrial in quality. Endor and Yavin 4 are both satellites of very large planets comparable to Jupiter in our own solar system, four satellites of which would count as planets or dwarf planets in their own right if they were not Page 85 →in orbit around a body that already had planet status. A planet-sized moon would probably not have a favorable environment for the evolution of life on its surface, because there is likely to be a heavy radiation field as in the case of Jupiter, lunar orbits may not have been stable over long periods of time, and tidal forces may constantly remake the surfaces of the satellites. But at

least it is plausible that some satellites of very large planets are the size of Earth. It is less plausible that a habitable planet would have a habitable moon, simply because they would be very different sizes, yet Rori is the moon of Naboo, and their terrains are impossibly similar. One page of the Sony website was a “planet tour,” with a description of each world, beginning with keywords describing its terrain.7 Setting aside issues of scientific plausibility, all eleven additional worlds are very earthlike, as suggested by the planet tour keywords, which will be in parentheses after the name of the world in the following paragraphs. With the exception of the sulfur pools on Lok, the environments are familiar to earthlings and usually hospitable to our kind of life. The last two we shall consider, Kashyyyk and Mustafar, are the most extreme exaggerations of natural phenomena found on Earth, added to SWG later and following different design principles. The Original Worlds Naboo (swamp, hills, cities, mountains, grasslands) is as wet as Tatooine is dry. In the Star Wars mythos, Naboo is not entirely solid, being an aggregation of planetoids that somehow have not fused together under the effect of gravity and the vast heat of the high-speed impacts that assembled them.8 This is quite unrealistic, and SWG does not depict Naboo this way, but rather as a flat area equal to that of Tatooine. Although Queen Padme Amidala was long dead at this point in history, visitors can enter her great palace in the capital city, Theed, stand on the steps at the great promenade where she and Gungan king Nass stood to celebrate their triumphant alliance, or even trek out into the swamps to meet Nass himself. This is also the site of Naboo’s most beautiful natural wonder, the great waterfalls, where Socio owned a vacation home closer to the base of the falls than any other private dwelling. Corellia (fields, forest, seas, cities) is mentioned but not seen in the Star Wars movies. This hub of galactic commerce is depicted as an earthlike planet with substantial cities, but like all the others largely countryside lacking in industries and small towns. The capital, Coronet, is a large city with huge buildings in a modern architectural style. Here was where SimulaPage 86 → earned her paltry 150 Galactic Civil War points by putting up Rebel posters and tearing down Imperial ones on Remembrance Day in 2011. This is the anniversary of the moment in the first Star Wars movie when the emperor dissolves the Senate and is celebrated by Imperials as Empire Day. Socio, who earned his 27,630 GCW points by actually killing Rebels, had a second summer home just across the river from Coronet, with a beautiful view of the city skyline and the ocean. Yavin 4 (jungles, lakes, streams) is where the first Star Wars movie ended, at the secret Rebel base where Luke and Han were honored for destroying the Death Star. Except for the shapes of some tree trunks and the color of some bushes, it is a very terrestrial environment. At the Temple of Exar Kun can be found Luke Skywalker, standing next to his starfighter, presumably just minutes after returning from his historic mission. Yavin 4 is a pleasant place, with quiet beaches and few monsters in the jungles, yet it was not possible to set up a home there. Algorithma was able to place a mineral extractor on the seashore within easy walking distance of a mining outpost five kilometers west of the temple, and in its first week the extractor garnered 24,847 units of amorphous gemstone. Endor (forest, mountains, desert, savannas, lakes) was the setting for the conclusion of Return of the Jedi and two television movies, An Ewok Adventure (1984) and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985). On a hill overlooking one of the four Ewok tree villages on Endor, Algorithma had built a wind-powered energy generator that she visited every week or so to pick up a container of energy to run a structure factory she had built on Tatooine and the mineral extractor on Yavin 4. During the year-long hiatus when I was not in SWG, Simula had stayed with the Ewoks. Their villages are built in and around giant trees, with some of their huts on aerial platforms connected with primitive bridges, and others on the ground beneath. Perhaps out of deference to the Ewoks, it was not permissible to build a house on their moon. Lok (red deserts, sulfur pools, mountains, lava lands) had only one starport, at Nym’s Stronghold. Simula got to know the place very well, doing many missions for Nym and his cronies. Socio had placed one of the houses

Algorithma built about two kilometers south of the starport, directly on the bank of the river that flows past Nym’s Stronghold, on the outskirts of a player-created town called Soulless Reborn. Through the window, he could gaze to his heart’s content on the river and the mountains beyond. When he left for the last time, two Bloodrazor bandits were lurking outside, so he shot them both in one combat, losing 1100 points of Bloodrazor faction reputation but gaining 550 points of Nym faction reputation. Page 87 →Dantooine (grasslands, steppes) is very earthlike except that the ground cover is purple flowers more often than green grass. This planet is mentioned in the original Star Wars movie by Princess Leia when she falsely tells her Imperial captors that the hidden Rebel base is there, and it features in the novel connected to SWG.9 Simula visited the site, finding that it indeed had been only recently abandoned, and she encountered some Rebel commandos who had returned to check out whether the Empire had occupied it, which they had not. Although the place was a mess, with malfunctioning machinery and overturned furniture, a Rebel recruiter and two Rebel pilot trainers had set up shop, NPCs hoping to enlist any sympathizers who visited out of curiosity. Visiting many famous sites near the end of her life, Simula happened to encounter a veiled Jedi Master player named Ikara Hlaarin, who was asking the recruiter what she would gain from becoming a commander in the Rebel Alliance in the final battles in the Galactic Civil War. Brooding about the coming destruction of both factions, Simula rode her speederbike the eleven kilometers to a ruined Jedi temple. She learned a sad lesson there: the monumental stairway leading to the temple was broken, and even on her speederbike she could not leap the gap to the enlightenment she felt sure could be found within. Rori (swamp, hills, cities, mountains, grasslands) is hardly distinguishable from Naboo, and Algorithma had built a summer house there in Naboo style. It was just a kilometer north of Narmle, a small city in exactly that style, with warm and attractive buildings reminiscent of Renaissance Italy. It was a small, round house with rose-colored walls inside and ornate stained-glass windows that appeared reddish from outside but blue inside and framed by draperies. Its neighborhood was laced with tiny waterways, not a dismal swamp but a bright, suburban Venice, with houses like hers widely scattered on some of the islands. Socio visited there only after Algorithma had departed the FarStar galaxy. In a nostalgic ritual, he took the rewards from the quest she had given him out of its holocron data storage unit, a needler carbine and 10,000 credits, while in the Rori house. He reverently placed on the floor all the holocrons he had that contained player-created quests, feeling he was done with questing and would never return to this galaxy again. Talus (fields, forest, seas) is one of five habitable planets in one solar system, which includes Corellia, according to the extended Star Wars lore. This is implausible in the extreme, given that each planet’s orbit would be at a different distance from its star, giving it a very different surface temperature, and if the orbits were very similar their gravities would cause great orbital instabilities. Talus is described as a twin of Tralus, although Page 88 →the latter is not found in SWG, implying they somehow share an orbit, which for large objects is a difficult feat. On the banks of a stream that ran through a town near the Imperial starport on Talus, Socio had placed a small house that had been built in Corellian style by Algorithma. Dathomir (canyons, forests, jagged mountain peaks) is a forbidding place, misty and consisting of dense jungles of gnarled, vine-meshed trees punctuated with escarpments, and it is the only one of the places permitting player construction where my avatars did not buy property. It is impossible to build a house, and extracting natural resources seemed quite unprofitable. Socio got to know the place best, first of all because he did a quest series for a fellow who wanted nice pictures for a tourist brochure that would totally misrepresent the planet as safe and pleasant. In fact the planet was infested with ferocious monsters, including even a sarlacc. Then he got involved with the Nightsisters, one of a set of witch groups whose occult practices harnessed the Force, but entirely outside Jedi or Sith orthodoxy. The Expansion Worlds Kashyyyk (forests, jungles, lagoons), the home planet of Chewbacca the Wookiee, is dominated by trees, some of them seemingly a mile high. While containing the usual assortment of dangerous enemies, it is an exaggeration of an exceedingly pleasant terrestrial environment, a dense forest in a temperate region. There is no evidence that

like dry Tatooine it was influenced by the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, yet his 1934 novel Pirates of Venus describes a similar damp forest world, presumed to exist on the cloudy planet Venus.10 Structurally, Kashyyyk is quite different from the other SWG worlds because it is divided into a number of instances, separate regions of the database connected by the equivalent of teleport hyperlinks. For example, the Rryatt Trail is a chain of five instances, and the whole trail exists multiple times to accommodate large numbers of players. This heavy instancing gives a certain claustrophobic feeling, despite the soaring majesty of the trees, which is increased by the fact that many areas consist of narrow valleys between hills that cannot be climbed. The fact that part of The Force Unleashed also depicts Kashyyyk drives home the fact that this SWG planet constrained the player’s movements far more than any of the other eleven. Mustafar (lava and volcanoes) is an exaggeration of an exceedingly unpleasant terrestrial environment, a hot and active lava flow. At first, it Page 89 →seems constraining, like Kashyyyk, until the player gains a droid or a giant flea that allows travel over the many rivers of molten lava. From a pedestrian point of view, the planet represents the extreme in mining, and the reason anybody goes there is to harvest rare minerals churned up by the volcanoes. From a more poetic point of view, the planet’s heat may represent passion, specifically the rage that boils inside Anakin Skywalker and drives him to attack his two best friends, Padme Amidala and Obi-Wan Kenobi, when they meet on Mustafar.

A Simulated Home MMOs differ in whether they provide players with the equivalent of a home in which to store virtual items, to display trophies and decorations, and to meet friends. Players in Lord of the Rings Online can rent houses as individuals or kinship halls as members of guilds, clustered in friendly neighborhoods. After its first decade World of Warcraft added isolated military garrisons for individual players, but previously completely lacked this feature. Star Wars Galaxies took it to the extreme, letting players build a variety of architectural structures and assemble them into cities. Housing Developments Three substantial buildings were used as headquarters for this research: (1) Simula’s home in the Starsider galaxy, (2) the dance studio that served as a home for Guzzlebooze in the Flurry galaxy, and (3) the Mustafarian bunker that was the “Mountain Retreat” for the phase of research done by Socio Path with the help of Algorithma in the FarStar galaxy. Simula purchased her large Tatooine house on the auction bazaar from an avatar named Dagny Taggart, named after the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s influential science fiction novel Atlas Shrugged.11 Such a purchase puts a deed for the structure in the buyer’s inventory, and a free plot of ground must be found to place it. Once the structure has been set up, the owner must prepay maintenance fees, which for this house were 26 credits per hour. Simula immediately put enough in the maintenance fee account to last until December 15, when the universe would end, giving her one fewer thing to worry about. The real estate story for Guzzlebooze was very different. As she was dancing in the cantina, a remarkably nice guild named Vixen recruited Page 90 →her, gave her a nice “small windowed Tatooine house,” made her a citizen of New Emberlene city, and bequeathed her 550,000 credits! She was fixed for life. The Mustafarian bunker was a reward to me for purchasing the complete game. Only one was available for each account, so I held it in reserve for a long time before deciding which of my characters would use it and where. Represented above ground only by a small entryway, it consisted of two large, brightly lit underground levels, apparently made of shiny metal and marble, connected by an elevator. Both Algorithma and Socio possessed Sorosub luxury yachts, veteran rewards for players who had subscribed for at least 180 consecutive days. These were spaceships that could function as homes because they possessed many rooms, connected by stairways and an elevator, and could hold as many as one hundred items including furniture. The Primary Residence As depicted in the movies and in Star Wars Galaxies, the homes of Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi are

structures that aesthetically harmonize with the Tatooine desert. Luke’s home is actually underground, consisting of a set of rooms that open into a central court several meters below ground level but open to the sky. Luke’s workshop is a separate domed building apparently made of stucco, and that is how Kenobi’s home was depicted in SWG. Simula’s home was similar in style but much larger, tan colored outside like stucco and with three domes on the roof, but a gray color having the texture of cement inside. The house really was large, capable of storing 500 objects and possessing six rooms on two floors, covering an area about 34 meters on a side. The rooms were arranged in a complex pattern that Simula always found confusing, connected by three hallways and three flights of stairs, not counting the two stairs to the balcony in the huge living room. One flight of stairs led from a back room on the first floor to an open porch on the second floor, but without a connection to the two rooms on that level. As soon as she took possession of the house, Simula began setting up furniture. When Algorithma moved in, the building quickly became a chaos of machinery, raw materials, and odd junk neither of them wanted to keep in their inventories. Unlike the case for many gameworlds, Star Wars Galaxies treated every item in the inventory as a physical object that can be placed on the floor, seen, and picked up by any other resident of the house. Once Algorithma Page 91 →moved out to help Socio Path with his part of the research, Simula faced the daunting task of getting her home in order. She decided to focus on the now-empty living room. First, she placed two Huj Mat rugs next to each other in the center of the floor, one of which had been a going-away gift from Algorithma. The one thing that did not need to be moved was the armoire in the corner, which had held a mixture of artifacts and raw materials but now could house Simula’s collection of small trophies. They included several kinds of lightsabers, mystical tomes, anthropological artifacts, and a bobble-head doll of an Imperial deathtrooper. Along the back wall she placed five uniforms any Jedi would be proud to wear: an acolyte’s robe, an initiate’s robe, two apprentice robes of different colors, and a Mustafarian mining suit. She tended to wear her Jedi’s Padawan robe even when not engaged in a quest. In the center of the opposite wall she placed the four trophies she had earned becoming a Hero of Tatooine: the golden marks of altruism, honor, courage, and intellect. They could be assembled into a gold sphere, but she preferred to display them separately to suggest there was room for debate whether they were really compatible with each other. Some might say, for example, that only a person lacking intellect could exhibit courage in this dangerous world, and honor was a form of selfish pride only superficially compatible with altruism. Immediately beside the front door was the reassembled droid Simula had kept after completing the original Legacy Quests, looking exactly like R2-D2 but useless because it lacked a memory and spewed sparks as if to light the way to the exit. One of Simula’s stranger possessions was a deluxe garbage can containing a baby sarlacc. As big as Simula herself, this creature waved its five tentacles in the air. When she placed it at the bottom of the balcony stair nearest the entry hall, she realized it needed to be fed. She checked through her belongings and discovered it did not want either the jar of sarlacc bile she had collected, nor a jar containing 17 meals of meat substitute. In the end, she gave it a huge container of gold plating for use in making Nabooian sculptures, which Algorithma had left behind. After a few weeks, Algorithma returned from her sojourn in the FarStar galaxy—or in Europe, as FarStar was a European server—and got into the spirit of Simula’s decorating binge. At this point, Algorithma had traded in her engineering skills for structure architecture skills, so she quickly crafted many monumental decorations intended for placement outdoors in player-created cities, but now crammed into their house. The living room, which Page 92 →already contained a huge krayt dragon skull, was now dominated by a pair of sculpted symbols, one for the Empire and the other for the Rebel Alliance. Between a stuffed bantha head and a Sayormi mobile incorporating a human skull, both of which Simula had obtained on Kashyyyk, Algorithma placed a regal battle statue, whose head nearly touched the ceiling in this two-story room. In a side room, Algorithma placed two huge, blue display objects she had earned while becoming a master chronicler, plus a Fountain of Heroism. Yes, this fountain was intended to be placed outdoors, and it gushed water. It was so tall, that the upper portion was in an upstairs room, gushing water up there too.

Constructing Buildings Soon after settling into the Mountain Retreat in FarStar, completing her droid construction, and beginning to build spaceships, Algorithma had decided to get serious about architecture. Spaceships and houses required the same skills, and when she shifted her skill set from droids to structures, she was able to maintain her level 90 status, so with the correct raw material and components she could accomplish a wide range of projects. The first step was to build stations for constructing starships and architectural structures and set them up at opposite ends of the largest room on the lower level of the retreat. She then used the information in the structures station to plan her work. Each avatar can build on 10 lots of planetary land, which meant 20 between her and Socio, and their huge residence already took up 6 of them. But this left ample space for a few more structures. Earlier, back in the Starsider galaxy, Simula had bought for her an equipment factory, a separate building she used to mass-produce some droid parts. Now Algorithma realized she needed a structure factory, and she resolved to make it for herself. It would mass-produce components, such as wall modules, for the larger structures, but it needed components and raw materials itself: Load bearing frame and reinforcement: 300 units of steel Body shell and casing: 3 similar wall modules Structure foundation: 250 units of low-grade ore Page 93 →Thermal noise and charge-proof shielding: 400 units of low-grade ore Power supply unit: 1 generator turbine Output storage unit: 1 structure storage module Semiautomated assembly mechanism: 1 manufacturing mechanism Note the Silicon Law vicious circle here. The factory could manufacture wall modules, but its construction required wall modules. Each wall module required 10 structure modules, which could be made by the factory or with great effort by Algorithma’s original equipment. The generator turbine and manufacturing mechanism presented different challenges. She could make both of them, but the manufacturing mechanism required its own generator turbine, and in turn required unusual raw materials. Among other things, a generator turbine required 200 units of reactive gas, and she owned only 244 units, not enough to manufacture two turbines. Also, her supply consisted of idaneevyl electron reactive gas, which was low quality, only 459 out of 1,000 quality points. This train of logic inspired Algorithma to return to the work gathering resources that had dominated her early stages of development and survey the territory around the Mountain Retreat to see what natural resources could be found. Obsessive person that she was, and realizing her considerable supplies of other raw material might run out, she decided to look first for high-quality reactive gas and then to catalogue more ordinary ores and metals. But the

local resources were low-quality, so many components were bought, either from the public bazaar or from private stores set up by players on several planets. From the structures factory ultimately came many of the components for the houses she and Socio placed on all the planets where it was possible to have a home.

Authoring Quests When Algorithma reached Master’s level as a chronicler after returning to Starsider, she decided to create a stupendous quest arc that she and Simula could perform, with all the bells and whistles. As she had worked her way up in experience,Page 94 → she had carefully saved certain relics, and she developed the plan for this quest arc along the way. Here is what she entered into the Quest Builder: Quest Title: Farewell, SWG This expedition to many places in the Star Wars universe will reward you with wisdom, as well as with a Trader’s Friend pistol (937 DPS), a Wind Power Generator, a Mustafarian Panning Droid, and 2,000 units of amorphous gemstone from a different galaxy. Tasks: 1. Go to location X: в€’585, Y: 18, Z: в€’102 on kashyyyyk_main Seek advice from an old friend. Go to Kashyyyk and speak with Chewbacca. Name: Chewbacca 2. Comm. message from: Chewbacca A message from Chewbacca Prepare for a long journey! “You can understand my words, because I am a dweller in your imagination. Our universe is about to end, so visit sacred places, and gain wisdom.” 3. Go to location X: в€’2830, Y: 5, Z: 2470 on tatooine Go to Anakin’s boyhood home. On Tatooine, seek the street in Mos Espa where Anakin Skywalker lived. Recall the innocence of childhood. Name: Anakin’s street 4. Go to location X: в€’5828, Y: в€’156, Z: 86 on naboo Go to Amidala’s beach. On Naboo, seek the place where Anakin and Padme fell in love. Is wisdom possible for those who love? Name: Amidala’s beach 5. Go to location X: в€’2476, Y: 230, Z: 1628 on mustafar Go to Mustafar Stand where Anakin did, and remember how he behaved toward Padme and Obi-Wan. Are you, yourself, on the path to the Dark Side? Name: Anakin’s doom 6. Go to location X: в€’2583, Y: 0, Z: в€’5505 on tatooine Go to the Lars homestead. On Tatooine, visit the boyhood home of Luke Skywalker. ImaginePage 95 → the life he would have had if the droids had not arrived. What is fate? Name: Lars homestead 7. Go to location X: в€’4493, Y: 35, Z: в€’2276 on tatooine Go to Ben Kenobi’s hut. As you remember the meeting between Luke and Old Ben, meditate on how your own life might be transformed by such a meeting. Name: Ben Kenobi’s hut 8. Go to location X: 3468, Y: 5, Z: в€’485 on tatooine Go to the Mos Eisley cantina.

Remember the next meeting, with Han Solo and Chewbacca, and contemplate the significance of teams in our lives. Name: Mos Eisley cantina 9. Go to location X: 5098, Y: 73, Z: 5560 on yavin4 Go to the Temple of Exar Kun on Yavin 4. Speak with Luke, who has had a premonition that he needs to know more about Jabba the Hutt. What premonition do you have about your own future? Name: The Temple of Exar Kun 10. Go to location X: в€’5860, Y: 90, Z: в€’6176 on tatooine Go to Jabba’s palace. There is a spy inside Jabba’s palace, near Wayfar on Tatooine, and she will meet you just outside the palace with secret information! Do you trust appearances? Name: Jabba’s palace 11. Comm. message from female Twi’lek A message from Oola. Listen carefully; she is smarter than she seems. “I am a dancer, but also a spy. Warn Han Solo that Jabba is sending a bounty hunter named Boba Fett to bring him back dead or alive!” 12. Go to location X: в€’2530, Y: 0, Z: в€’4850 on tatooine Go to Simula’s house. Simula will send a message to Han, and you will get your virtual rewards. The real rewards are good memories, wisdom, and a new hope. You may visit the house, and lament the coming deaths of Algorithma Teq, Simula Tion, Socio Path, and Guzzlebooze. Name: Simula’s house Page 96 →Technical Details Ten of the tasks involve going to a precisely defined location, often on Tatooine, but also on Kashyyyk, Naboo, Mustafar, and Yavin 4. Of worlds that feature prominently in the movies, it would have been possible to add Endor, because Algorithma’s task inventory included sending the player to an Ewok lake village there, but the Ewoks entered the story after the current point in time, so that seemed inauthentic on historical grounds. Five of the location tasks were in Algorithma’s inventory because she had collected relics for them: Amidala’s beach, Lars homestead, Ben Kenobi’s hut, the Temple of Exar Kun, and Jabba’s palace. Because she intended to make two versions of the quest arc, one for herself and one for Simula, she needed to have two of each of these tasks in her inventory. The five other destinations used undefined location tasks; luckily her inventory held eleven of these, because she needed ten. To set each of the five locations, she was required to actually travel to the exact spot and click a “capture location” button in the interface. Jabba’s palace at altitude 90 units is highest of the quest destinations on Tatooine because it is on a hill, but at 230 the landing stage of the mining outpost on Mustafar is even higher, on a promontory overlooking a river of molten lava. The beach where Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala fell in love is actually a little island in a lake deep in a valley, near a fancy complex of buildings that must be her vacation home. The location statements do not capitalize the names of the planets because they are commands for the computer to follow rather than for people to read. The first place identified, kashyyyyk_main, is different in form because Kashyyyk is heavily instanced and multiple versions of its peripheral areas exist, even in a single galaxy. Deeper Meanings In terms of philosophy and aesthetics, the quest arc draws lessons from the Star Wars movies. Anakin’s love for his mother, contrasted with the aggressive ambitions that even as a child motivated him to leave her, and magnified by his love for Padme, turned him to the Dark Side of the Force. After harming her and confronting his teacher, Obi-Wan, he became Darth Vader. For Luke, the story was different. He also was ambitious and longed to leave home, yet he was able with Obi-Wan’s help to find his way to the Light Side. However, both Anakin

and Luke were ensnared in their sagas by a chance visitation by beings from outer space, perhaps symbolizing Page 97 →fate. By nature, Anakin and Luke were not ordinary people, so the visitations did not strictly cause their subsequent life histories, yet without an apparently random event, the history of the galaxy would have been radically different. Some of the lessons learned during the quest arc concern the conditions of ordinary people’s lives. The deepest lesson concerns how anyone can transcend the exceedingly narrow constraints the universe places upon us. When a player completes a quest arc, the rewards become available. Given that they expected to die soon, Algorithma and Simula would not have much use for them, so Algorithma selected things that would express her own life story. She had received one “trader’s friend” pistol when she reached experience level 62, but her complex journey across galaxies and professions had given her an extra one. She had never used them, however, because the goal of her life was to create things, not to destroy them. At 937 DPS—damage points per second—it was powerful enough to defend her if she were attacked, but she preferred to zoom past enemies on one of the many vehicles she had built for herself. Simula could not use the gun because she was a Jedi and the weapon fires only when held by a trader. The wind power generators were duplicates of the one Algorithma had placed on Endor, and they suggested how technology could be designed in harmony with nature. The Mustafarian panning droids duplicated the ones she had given Simula, who used them as vehicles to ride safely over the lava on Mustafar, suggesting that technology may also be used to insulate us from nature. Algorithma had mined the amorphous gemstone on Yavin 4 using energy supplied by the wind generator on Endor, all in the European FarStar galaxy, but now she had returned to the North American Starsider galaxy. The gemstone was even labeled “FarStar,” suggesting the possibility that even distant regions of nature may be related to our lives by appropriate technology.

The End of a Cosmos It was easy for my virtual research team to document that much would be lost when Star Wars Galaxies ended, because real people had established many homes away from home in this virtual universe. On September 15, 2011, the last day players could get a subscription account that would allow them to participate in the final three months of SWG, one of my avatars in each of the four populated galaxies (Starsider, Flurry, FarStar, and Chilastra) toured all planets where players could set up their own homes and Page 98 →cities. By opening the planet map of the user interface, I could count how many player-established shuttleports there were on each world and how many “player placed factional bases” for each of the two factions. There were a total of 355 shuttleports and 562 bases, for the 7 Г— 4 = 28 planets. Each shuttleport served as the hub of a player-created town, with a city hall and other facilities. The Rebellion was strongest on Chilastra, where 70 percent of the 92 bases swore allegiance to them. Rebels held a slight advantage as well on Starsider (53 percent of 152 bases) and Flurry (52 percent of 157). Only in the FarStar galaxy did the Empire hold sway, because only 35 percent of its 161 factional bases were in Rebel hands. Forum Activity In addition to censuses of characters like that reported in the previous chapter, there is a different way of gaining insight into the activity in each of the galaxies: looking at the communication patterns in the online forums, outside the game but oriented toward it.12 Table 4.1 shows that fully 6,350,339 messages had been posted in the galaxy-specific forums prior to midday on July 1, 2011. SWG was about 8 years old at this point, so, ignoring the 12 galaxies shut down in 2009, a rough estimate of the posts per week would be 15,000. In the week of July 1–7, immediately after the announcement that SWG would be terminated, only half this number of posts were added. Weekly postings dropped to just over half this number by November 1–7. Strikingly, the posts associated with Starsider rose from 17.0 percent of the total to 65.6 percent, clear evidence that players were indeed concentrating their activity in the most populous galaxies, whether by moving characters or by shifting their play time to avatars they already had in those galaxies. FarStar became the focus of European activity, Flurry of the west coast of North America, and Chilastra dropped heavily but remained in fourth position.

Festive Holidays In late October 2011, SWG held one of its very last holiday events, essentially a Halloween party, first held in 2008 and originally announced thus: “In an effort to gain more support from the planets Naboo and Tatooine, Jabba the Hutt has decided to throw the first annual Galactic Moon Festival so everyone can celebrate the horrifyingly awesome haunts of the season. Jabba has grown tired of all the love festivals, celebrations of life, and other Page 99 →saccharine events. Thus, it is my duty to report to you that he has taken it upon himself to throw the scariest festival of the year!” Each of my four main characters visited Mos Eisley and obtained a costume from an NPC named Z’ozpheratu, clearly a play on Nosferatu, the classic 1922 vampire film. Algorithma magically transformed into a droideka combat robot, which was a lot of fun because when she walked she became a great wheel rolling along the ground. She rolled gleefully outside the city trying to shoot rill lizards with the droideka’s two formidable-looking guns, but the guns proved to be mere dummies that could not hurt a fly, suggesting that she herself might be a droid-obsessed dummy. Simula was chagrined that she also became a droideka, perhaps from spending too much time with Algorithma, whereas Guzzlebooze was mortified by becoming Salacious B. Crumb, the Kowakian monkey-lizard employed by Jabba as a court jester. Socio’s costume transformed him into a giant slug, looking like Jabba the Hut himself but purplish. He found moving difficult but was able to wriggle over to the Mos Eisley cantina, where he offended the customers by sidling up to a dancing girl while she was performing. Bumps and grinds he could not do well in this ponderous form, but he shook the dance floor. Many MMOs celebrate holidays, adding to their claim to be considered virtual worlds. The MMO blogsite, Massively, reported that SWG was among 22 MMOs celebrating Halloween in 2011, explaining, “While many real world holidays receive digital treatments in MMOs, it always seems Page 100 →like Halloween is the most popular. Perhaps it’s because MMOs are already into the spirit of the season, with characters dressing up, вЂtrick or treating’ mobs [NPCs] for their candy, and tackling spooky, scary areas where doom is sure to lurk. Or perhaps developers just really like pumpkins and haunted houses. Who doesn’t?”13 But since Halloween celebrates departed spirits, this holiday was especially appropriate for SWG, which was destined to die soon. Table 4.1. Forum Activity During the Last Months of Star Wars Galaxies In 2011, First Week of: Galaxy Before July 1 July September November Ahazi 9.5% 6.0% 4.1% 1.2% Bloodfin 10.7% 2.0% 8.9% 0.1% Bria 14.1% 11.2% 3.9% 0.9% Chilastra 9.1% 28.6% 11.9% 3.2% Chimaera 8.4% Eclipse 3.7% FarStar 5.9% Flurry 8.9% Gorath 1.5% Radiant 4.3% Shadowfire 4.1% Starsider 17.0% Sunrunner 2.9% 100.0%

1.2% 0.5% 3.2% 0.8% 15.1% 12.5% 14.1% 12.0% 0.2% 0.1% 0.5% 0.1% 1.8% 0.6% 15.4% 44.4% 0.7% 0.2% 100.0% 100.0%

1.1% 0.6% 17.9% 9.0% 0.0% 0.1% 0.1% 65.6% 0.1% 100.0%

Total

6,350,339

7,506

5,861

4,001

It was not the last holiday, however. The last one, optimistically enough, was Life Day. This was a Wookiee holiday held at Thanksgiving but having qualities of Christmas. It temporarily lifted the spirits of my Wookiee character, Guzzlebooze, who rushed from her home to nearby Wayfar, the one town on Tatooine where it was held. Wayfar stands on a plateau, surrounded by desert, but for Life Day it was covered in snow, which also fell from the sky constantly but only at that location, and an immense life tree exuded colored lights. A character had the choice of decorating little life trees, of which there were many in town, thereby earning Rebel points, or stomping on piles of gaily wrapped gifts to earn Empire points. Guzzlebooze decorated 126 life trees, earning 630 Rebel points, which she used to buy many Wookiee souvenirs, which she immediately set up in her little home, including two life trees, a duplicate of the bar set in the Kashyyyk cantina, and a Wookiee fireplace to keep her warm. She also bought a Wookiee Life Day jacket, the only piece of clothing she was willing to wear, and she wore it until the day of her death. Guild Parties Many players joined together for farewell gatherings, often simply visiting the cantina in Mos Eisley on Tatooine, the classic location for informal meetings. On December 11, Algorithma participated in a formal convocation in the Mos Eisley auditorium organized by the Unity guild, led by Nubius. He described himself on his in-game profile as an “elder politician” and listed five positions he held: retired mayor of New Anchorhead, Rori; architect, founder, and first mayor of New Aldera, Lok; retired mayor of Prometheus, Lok; retired mayor of Imladris, Rori; architect, founder, and incumbent mayor of Centre Point, Naboo. Nubius opened the meeting with these nostalgic words: Tonight will be Unity’s final events night in SWG and we hope you enjoy our final flurry with us :). Sadly, next week SWG comes to an Page 101 →end and I know everyone here shares each other’s sadness that this great game comes to an end. Over the last 7 years we in Unity Guild have had so much fun and have built up a fantastic community which we will be taking to other games in the future, all based upon the Unity we know and love here in SWG. Many of you will be going to TOR [The Old Republic] and hopefully we will all meet there and continue our friendships. We have all been taking screenshots, videos and recordings over the last few months to immortalize our time in SWG on Facebook, YouTube and our Guild website so we will always have before us reminders of the great times we have had in SWG. It has been a great honour and privilege for me to lead Unity over the past 5 1/2 years and I want to thank every member of the Guild, past and present, for their contributions and for helping to make Unity such a fantastic community. So let’s go out as we came in—having a great time with friends—and begin tonight’s activities. The current mayor of the Prometheus player town, Ziso Erho, then led the assembly through a 25-question multiple-choice quiz about Star Wars Galaxies, starting with which month in 2000 plans for SWG were announced. Algorithma opened her web browser and frantically hunted for answers. Some required assembling data from several sources, for example figuring out which of the following creatures could not be found on Endor: Merek, Roba, Gurreck, or Gnort. Then all three dozen participants stood on the auditorium stage for a group photograph; Algorithma can be seen at the far left in the pictures posted by Unity the next day on YouTube.14 Everyone then flew to Lok and gathered at Prometheus for a magnificent final battle against hordes of virtual enemies. Over the years, Unity had extensively used SWG’s Storyteller system for staging events, which required buying props and other components from NPCs called Storyteller Vendors. Now, in one final event, all of Unity’s huge and costly inventory of virtual drama resources would be expended in an orgy of destruction. Waves and waves of battle droids invaded Prometheus and were annihilated by the town’s defenders, including Algorithma, who was accompanied by a friendly battle droid she had built herself. At one point, a spaceship crashed into the very midst of the assembled throng. Once the invaders had been defeated, Algorithma followed the Prometheus army in a counterattack against hundreds of enemies situated out in the desert. An

amazingly complex battle ensued, Page 102 →culminating when all the defenders gathered in an arena-like space where they were attacked by immense rancors, like the one Luke Skywalker killed in Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi. Official Climax The SWG game-designer oligarchs also offered rituals of resignation to the players. Sony prepared them for the end of their cosmos, first by bringing the Galactic Civil War to a climax, then by setting up four special events for the gameworld’s last day. For a long time, Imperial forces battled the Rebellion on many of the planets, and one or the other might seize temporary control of a particular town on the basis of GCW points the players on the winning side had earned. When the game closed to new players in September 2011, the system of counting points became more complex, and new points were counted until December 14, when a victor was announced in each of the 13 galaxies. Overall, the Rebels won, with 56 percent of the points and dominating in 9 of the 13 galaxies. Only one of the four events on the last day was designed for Neutrals, and the other three were battles between the two factions. Any character could visit the sarlacc pit on Tatooine, where Jabba and his retinue had assembled. Oola danced and Max Rebo played strange music on an organ-like nalargon. For the first time, players could challenge Boba Fett to a duel, but he proved invulnerable. Bib Fortuna gave out costumes the player could wear, and magic spells to turn players into giants or midgets. Two of the other events involved defense of Theed city on Naboo by the Empire, and Coronet city on Corellia by the Rebels, allowing player-versus-player combat but chiefly encouraging players to battle nonplayer characters. The most extreme event was held in a PvP region of Yavin 4, where Imperial and Rebel players fought to the death over the shield generator that was the crucial target of the land battle in Return of the Jedi. Many players gathered at Mos Eisley, either in the cantina or just outside the starport, for the final moments of the last day. Some expressed sadness and others anger. A few spoke about what gameworld they planned to colonize next. Then two official messages appeared on the computer screen: “You will now be disconnected so the server can perform a final save before shutting down.” “RIP SWG. You had a long road and a ton of memories. People can hate all they wantВ .В .В . but we love you.” After this second message was repeated a few times, the final one came: “Connection to SWG lost!”

Page 103 →New Legacy Quests Gone but not forgotten, Star Wars Galaxies continues to influence gamer culture and the gaming industry. One of the new AAA gameworlds, Guild Wars 2, has a system similar to that of SWG for changing one’s crafting occupations, in which abandoning cooking to take up tailoring has costs but does not diminish one’s cooking skills, allowing one to return to cooking in the future without having to grind one’s way back up the skill ladder.15 In March 2013, the Massively blogsite asked its readers “What’s the best Star Wars MMO?” While 930 readers voted for Star Wars: The Old Republic, fully 2,096 voted for Star Wars Galaxies.16 Many SWG players migrated to SWTOR, but others found different homes, sooner or later. Socio Path, the least sympathetic of my four main SWG characters, was the only one to survive the December 2011 cataclysm, using all his ill-gotten wealth to bribe his way to a different continuum. On June 21, 2013, he finally arrived at what he hoped was his final destination, the planet Dathomir, which existed in SWG but not in SWTOR. Wait, how could he reach a planet that had been destroyed? His new Dathomir home was in Second Life. Hearing rumors that it might exist, he had attended the annual science fiction convention in Second Life and found an exhibit hall belonging to the Consortium Alliance, a group of SWG refugees who had built a role-playing simulation based on Dathomir. One display gave him information plus a landmark to Dathomir, and another gave him a CA application form. The member at the reception desk, Mariea McMinnar, chatted with him, while two Ewoks from a different Star Wars group pranced around. When Socio told one to show more respect for Mariea, it took a prayerful pose and began bowing to her. She put Socio in communication with the CA’s leader, Maroth Gravois:

Maroth Gravois: Hello and thank you for your application in the Consortium Alliance. I noticed you are interested in the Religious Caste and the Worker Caste, correct? Socio Path: Thank you. Well, I like to make things, but am interested in religion. What do you suggest? Maroth Gravois: Hmm, the Religious Caste is in need of members since it is a rather new concept, and it generally has a free range of outfits. Mostly being robes of any kind. Worker Caste, has a multiple role system from doctors to maintenance. And we do allow alt identities in our system, or alt accounts, so whichever you like is good with us. Page 104 →Socio Path: Religious, then, and perhaps I can craft things within that context. Maroth Gravois: Sounds good. Religious Caste it is. If you wish a transfer though, let us know anytime and I can set that up. Socio Path: Thank you. The destruction of my world gave me such a shock I have become religious. A new path. Maroth Gravois: Welcome to the Consortium. Now it will be up to you to choose what role in the CA from Scribe, Priest, or if you feel you can be the Arch Priest let me knowВ .В .В . Err Chronicler not Scribe, lol Socio Path: What would a chronicler do? Maroth Gravois: The Chronicler records the Consortium’s battles and stories and then saves them to the Archive. It’s a small role, as it is being worked on. But the Larger roles will be the Consortium Alliance priest/arch Priests. As they preach about the CA gods, marry couples, etc. Soon, Socio Path had flown to Dathomir, landing at a small spaceport, and begun his exploration. Across a bridge he inspected several buildings of an alien city. In one, a simulated television news display linked to a website where Star Wars role-playing news is updated frequently, as if it were all real. He checked the map in the Second Life interface and saw that two other people were nearby. On the bridge, he bowed to a Twi’lek woman, who spoke: Mountain Temple Maid: Greetings, Noble One! Socio Path: Greetings! How are you? Mountain Temple Maid: I feel like a moon today. What are you doing in Dathomir? Socio Path: My spiritual wanderings have only just now brought me here, so I am exploring. Mountain Temple Maid: Is your spirituality along the Light, Dark or Twilight side of the Force? Socio Path: I fled the disaster on Tatooine three years ago, and have only now found my way to Dathomir. Mountain Temple Maid: Are you looking for the Witches or the Nightsisters? Socio Path: I am not sure, because I was a mere bounty hunter, and lost all my ill-gotten wealth in the disaster. I seek enlightenment about the meaning of it all. Page 105 →Mountain Temple Maid: I think the Witches might be able to help you. They can read you inside and tell you about your spiritual needs

Socio Path: Before, when I visited Dathomir, I met the Nightsisters, but was simply seeking bounties. How would I meet the Witches now? Mountain Temple Maid: The Clan Mother should be in the Temple later today. Socio Path: Thank you. I shall seek her later. Where is the Temple? Mountain Temple Maid: The temple is to the West, behind the city. I can show you the way but it is locked now. Follow me. [She walked into the city, but he was startled to see a sinister figure standing on the spaceship ramp above him.] Darth Tur’jolv: Darth Tur’jolv overheard bits and pieces of a conversation as he made his way down the ramp of the landing pad, “If you speak of the clan mother so freelyВ .В .В . perhaps you could be of use to me.” Smirking as he approached the pair, “I seek the Sith that hold to this cityВ .В .В . I was told to check back to take them up on their offers of hospitality.” Mountain Temple Maid: This is the Temple. Socio Path: Thank you. There was a strange Sith Lord back near the ship. Mountain Temple Maid: The doors will be open when the Clan Mother is there. I’ll go check the Sith Lord. Socio Path: Will it be safe to wait here? Mountain Temple Maid: Siths know Dathomir is neutral. But they insist in getting Dathomir on their side for the imminent war. Socio Path: Whew! You have been very helpful. I shall meditate now. A very different player-created legacy for Star Wars Galaxies was the extensive collection of videos taken inside it still available on YouTube. Searching on June 25, 2013, for the exact name of the game turned up about 31,800 results, and I viewed many examples. Remarkably, the moment it was announced that SWG would be shut down, SuperVaderMan started an 86-episode exploration of all aspects of this virtual universe, generating a tremendously valuable archive, concluding with an hour-long record of the ending that had been viewed 4,297 times. John Doe and TheWiNiZ produced brief but aesthetic farewells, one a collage music video and the other silent except for quiet background sounds of alien birds and insects about Page 106 →to become extinct, viewed 21,531 and 50,777 times respectively. Videos by BloodBurger1 and Kuokka77 document the last moments at some of the special final events created by the game designers, viewed 24,987 and 20,211 times when I myself watched them.17

Conclusion Over the final six months, the massive SWG online forums debated whether everybody would immediately move over to Star Wars: The Old Republic when it was born five days after SWG passed away. A wide range of feelings were voiced, with several players expressing anger that all the work they had invested in SWG would be lost. Exactly a month before the end, one player who had written 1,480 posts since joining six years earlier said she would “build a time machine so I can go back to June 26th, 2003, and play SWG all over again.” The guild Guzzlebooze belonged to was one of many that established prelaunch guilds for SWTOR, doing so on July 3, 2011, nearly six months in advance of the gameworld’s launch. Unfortunately no Wookiees were allowed as main characters, so SWTOR could not serve as an afterlife for poor Guzzlebooze. The new MMO was set thousands of years before the Star Wars movies, in the midst of which Star Wars Galaxies existed, so the tyranny of time prevented Simula Tion and Algorithma Teq from being reborn before their births, and only Socio Path survived, precisely because the Iron and Silicon Laws meant nothing to him. One other near death occurred,

because in early 2015 Sony sold its online game division, and the viability of the new Daybreak Game Company remained in doubt throughout the year. At the risk of only slight exaggeration, many blogs mourned the death of Star Wars Galaxies over the years, considering it the most successful MMO devoted to enhancing player freedom within a culturally significant mythos.

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5. A Long Time Ago Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) depicts a galaxy very much like the one in the Star Wars movies, but in a time period about 3,500 years earlier. Even at that point in history the Galactic Republic was 20,000 years old, which implies that both society and technology had become remarkably static. But stasis does not imply stability, because SWTOR takes place ten years after a Sith attack devastated the Republic’s capital world, Coruscant, and at present a precarious truce holds galaxy-wide, while bloody conflict erupts locally as the rival Republic and Empire prepare for general war.1 Two supernaturally empowered religious sects, the Jedi and the Sith, guide the Republic and Empire respectively, providing homes for half the player-operated characters, while the other half serve the factions in more mundane ways.

The Cold Galactic War The primary reason that technocultural stasis exists in SWTOR is so that the stories can be like the ones in the Star Wars movies but not constrained by the particular events depicted on the screen. Yet there seems a deeper symbolism. Perhaps our own world had entered a similar phase, in which hostile forces face each other under conditions of sociotechnical stasis, each seeking an advantage over the others during an unannounced cold war, holding back from full-scale hostilities because of the costs each side would suffer, yet ultimately locked in a death struggle. MMOs differ in how they treat the conflict between factions, but the popular ones depict worlds either where open conflict has broken out, as in Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online, or where a fragile peace prevails between world wars, as in World of Warcraft and Age of Conan. Two repeated themes in SWTOR are the threat of stupendous weapons of mass destruction and the transformation of entire planets into concentration camps. While science fiction thrives through exaggerations, these twin horrors are not entirely unrealistic. Page 108 →We can date this dire situation from the Second World War, sometimes justly called the Wizard War because of all the transformative technologies developed for it. The Americans developed nuclear weapons and, controversially, used them. The Germans developed long-range strategic rockets, incidentally applicable to space exploration. All advanced nations employed “strategic weapons,” a euphemism for civilian-slaughtering weapons of mass destruction, the victors more effectively than the vanquished. The British developed the world’s first supercomputer, Colossus, to crack the German codes, and computers are the precondition for all the phenomena described in this book. After the war, and for the rest of the twentieth century, hopes abounded that the entire globe would evolve into a democracy based on free market capitalism restrained just the right amount by wise governments. To the extent that MMOs simulate the real future, many of them imply these were vain hopes! Star Wars: The Old Republic is a sequel to a solo-player game, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, developed by the same company, BioWare.2 Highly regarded by players and critics alike, this earlier game was innovative for offering much richer story lines than the usual game, comparable to those in a novel. In a sense, this constrained the player even more than in the usual videogame, and BioWare compensated for this loss of freedom by offering secondary decisions, for example whether to be helpful to incidental non-player characters or to exploit them selfishly. Social dimensions of freedom and control will be analyzed in the following chapter, and here the focus will be on the constraints imposed by the stories. One way to phrase the central question is: Who is boss? For years, most solo-player role-playing videogames have been structured in a series of levels, each of which ends with a battle against a boss enemy who is difficult to defeat. Given its origins in such a solo-player game, SWTOR also has bosses, and this fact has some implications for the degree of freedom versus control experienced by the player. Often as a practical matter, I had to delay completion of an important quest arc because my character was simply not strong enough to defeat a boss alone. Two players cooperating generally could defeat one of the main bosses, but a solo player often needed either to have reached a higher experience level than nominal for the mission’s rewards or be especially well-

equipped. Other tasks, such as collecting the datacron relics hidden in remote locations and conferring increased powers, also could be frustrating. Justin Olivetti noted these difficulties in SWTOR on the popular blogsite, Massively: The other night I was sitting on my couch watching my wife tackle a particularly hard boss solo—the game wouldn’t allow her companionsPage 109 → or other players—in Star Wars: The Old Republic. And she died, many, many times. I gave her a few pointers and watched as she continually struggled to overcome this challenge. After 14 attempts, she succeeded and was giddy from the victory. But I could tell she was growing close to throwing her laptop across the room right before that point. I could identify, as a week earlier I had spent an hour and a half trying to master a tricky series of jumps to get a datacron on Nar Shaddaa, only to land it right before I lost my sanity.3 This is not at all the case in sandbox games. Even most theme park MMOs allow players to progress satisfactorily without battling any bosses, simply because they include enough subsidiary quests and do not use completion of a boss battle as the entry ticket to the next stage of the game. The Legacy Quests in Star Wars Galaxies constituted a single huge quest arc, yet it was possible to enter the arc at several advanced points, without doing the preceding quests in the expected sequence, and choosing to ignore the Legacy Quests had no serious consequences. Put simply: Can a character progress satisfactorily in SWTOR without beating the bosses? Perhaps one can reach the top level of experience, but one will lose out on any of the complexity of the stories unless the main story arcs are completed exactly as they were written. Indeed, it is from following the plot line at least for the first ten levels that one acquires a main companion secondary avatar necessary for defeating even ordinary enemies at higher levels. A character’s main story plays out across a dozen of the planets, each of which has its own local quest arcs as well as minor missions. Thus, it makes sense to survey the planets, to understand the background for the stories.

Eighteen Worlds Interstellar physical distance in the SWTOR galaxy has no real meaning because the player’s spaceship instantly travels thousands of light years. When preparing to travel from one planet to another, however, the spaceship navigation system gives a plausible distance in parsecs, a unit of measurement employed by astronomers equal to about 3.26 light years. In the original 1977 movie, Han Solo referred to a parsec as a unit of time, not distance, although fans have been able to interpret this odd usage as reflecting very special astronomical conditions, rather than a lack of technical understanding on Han’s part.4 In SWTOR, the distance from Coruscant, the capital of the Republic, to Tatooine, where Luke Skywalker grew up, is 21,104 parsecs. From Tatooine to Hoth, where he battled snow monsters,Page 110 → is 16,022 parsecs, and from there back to Coruscant is 19,500 parsecs. A triangle this size would cover a considerable fraction of our own galaxy. There is no public system of interplanetary transport in SWTOR, as there was in SWG, but one is not needed because every character commands a space ship from the moment it completes the main missions on the starter planet. Starter Planets As was the case in Star Wars Galaxies, the planets in Star Wars: The Old Republic match regional environments on the Earth rather than being truly alien. When SWTOR launched, seventeen planets existed, and Makeb, an eighteenth, was added months later. A third of these worlds were accessible only to one of the two factions, because they were hospitable to low-level players. The starting planet for Jedi in the Republic was mountainous Tython, while players whose characters would lack magical powers began on Ord Mantell, which consisted of slightly hilly plains. Once they reached level 10 of the original fifty levels of experience, both types would converge on Coruscant, the entirely urban capital planet, and leave at about level 16 for the jungles of Taris. Sith players in the Empire began on desert Koriban, while nonsupernatural characters began on Jabba’s swampy home planet, Hutta. These two categories of Imperial players went to their faction’s jungle hideout on Dromund Kaas at level 10, and moved to the plains of Balmorra at level 16. Characters in the Empire experience Taris and Balmorra in the opposite order as those of the Republic, the tardy faction getting to one of these about level 32, and this pair is the only case where the levels of the factions are not

matched. The remaining worlds go in the same order for both: urban Nar Shaddaa (level 20), desert Tatooine (24), mountainous Alderaan (28), swampy Quesh (36), icy Hoth (37), icy Belsavis (41), mountainous Voss (44), urban Corellia (47), and icy Ilum (50). In April 2013, an expansion added the strangely disjointed Makeb and raised the experience level cap from 50 to 55. Coruscant is one vast city, many blighted neighborhoods of which have decayed into chaos, including some very close to the government buildings. The Sith attack a decade earlier left the Jedi temple in ruins and caused the Jedi Order to withdraw to Tython. Coruscant was featured in several of the Star Wars movies and is described thus in the franchise’s official online encyclopedia: Page 111 →Situated in the heart of the galaxy, Coruscant was the seat of government for the Galactic Republic and the Empire that followed. Over centuries of civilization, the planet has been entirely covered with cityscapes and urban sprawl. Immense skytowers reach high into the atmosphere, and stretch down deep into the dark shadows. Crisscrossing the skyline are unending streams of speeders and ships. At night, Coruscant is alive with glittering lights and rivers of traffic, a bustling megalopolis that refuses to sleep.5 The “unending streams of speeders and ships” flowing along traffic lanes in the sky may have been taken from the 1930 science fiction movie, Just Imagine, which depicts an unrealistically futuristic New York City in 1980. Given the fascination with aviation around 1930, it was not uncommon to imagine that each person would fly his or her own aircraft as part of everyday life, the logical next development after the automobile. Coruscant’s Wikipedia article speculates: “Star Wars’ concept of a city planet which is the capital of a galactic empire was evidently inspired by the ecumenopolis planet Trantor in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.”6 The chapter-long article on Coruscant in a Star Wars wiki provides some evidence that Trantor really was the model for the Republic’s capital world.7 The capital of the Sith Empire, Dromund Kaas, is quite different from Coruscant. It is a jungle planet on which the Empire holds only one large town, and even the route to the spaceport is unsafe. The reason for this precarious situation is that the planet was a refuge for the remnants of the Empire after a defeat. This is one of the chief dramatic functions an alien planet can serve, a temporary alternative home where a wounded society can regain strength before counterattacking its enemies. Thus it becomes the launching place for revenge, almost the exact opposite from the complacency of Coruscant. Shared Planets The ten planets on which characters of both factions climb from level 16 to 50 all represent distinctive concepts. Three appeared in SWG: Tatooine, Corellia, and Hoth, although the last of these was only a battleground instance rather than a complete world. Thus they conform to the expectations of the standard Star Wars canon. Tatooine is a desert and includes just one of the towns depicted in SWG, Anchorhead. SWG depicted Corellia as an Earthlike planet with much open space, although dominated by Coronet Page 112 →city, while in SWTOR all we see is Coronet, entirely filled with urban warfare. Hoth is an ice planet, as depicted in The Empire Strikes Back, with the interesting addition of a spaceship graveyard, where wrecked starships provide the setting for many missions and suggest the wreckage of old science fiction dreams. Alderaan is depicted briefly from a distance in the first Star Wars movie, just as the Death Star destroys it. The home of Princess Leia Organa, it must have been a world of aristocrats, and indeed SWTOR presents it just as Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe depicted a region of the planet Mongo called Arboria back in 1939, as a reflection of Europe that idealizes its feudal past. The SWTOR atlas says that if Coruscant was the heart of the Republic, Alderaan was its soul.8 In the first chapter, we noted that the physical environment of Tatooine was partly based on Arrakis, the focal point of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. Alderaan reflects the social environment of Arrakis, where a long-standing feud boils over between House Atreides and House Harkonnen. Similarly, the aristocratic families on Alderaan are called houses, and they are feuding in the context of a galaxy that is descending into open warfare.

Nar Shaddaa is not actually a planet but the moon of Hutta, experienced only as an enclosed city ruled by Hutts, immense slugs with gigantic frog faces, like the infamous Jabba. Quesh is also in Hutt space, but the Hutts occupy only one portion of its landscape. Quesh has a naturally toxic environment, which has been worsened by industries exploiting the local chemicals as poisons and performance-enhancing drugs. War three centuries ago left the planet Taris in ruins, and semihuman biologically modified monsters called rakghouls roam the swamps. Despite its naturally pleasant environment, Balmorra has been wracked by conflict between the Republic and the Empire because it is the galaxy’s most significant manufacturer of weapons and war droids. Although categorized as an ice planet, Belsavis has warm geothermal regions. It has been used as a prison planet, both in ancient times by a mysterious species called the Rakata and today by the Republic. Some of the ancient technology still functions, but chambers that for many years held extremely dangerous criminals in stasis have begun to break down, liberating mayhem. For Republican patriots, Belsavis was profoundly disillusioning because they discovered that the Republic had been experimenting with the prisoners, making them fight each other to the death to learn which species would make the best soldiers in the growing war against the Empire. Voss is a politically neutral planet, where members of the Republic and Page 113 →Empire use the same cantina as their resting place, yet it is wracked by conflict between two indigenous intelligent species, the Voss and the Gormak. The Voss are few in number but advanced spiritually, led by mystic adepts who apparently use the Force for prophecy but do not have a concept of the Force. The numerous Gormak are violent and technology-oriented, and at first are simply treated as enemies by both the Republic and the Empire while they try unsuccessfully to forge an alliance with the Voss. Eventually, the player discovers that the Voss and Gormak are really different variants of a once-unified species that have gone down different paths, withdrawn and spiritual versus aggressive and technological. They are reminiscent of the angelic Eloi and monstrous Morlocks in the classical 1895 novel The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.9 Like Coruscant and Nar Shaddaa, Corellia is purely urban, although huge and mostly outdoors, whereas Coruscant and Nar Shaddaa were entirely enclosed. It is not possible to walk the entire width of Corellia, because its districts are separate instances, but they are connected by a monorail train system, which provides a spectacular ride. Intended for avatars of levels 47 to 50, Corellia was the highest regular world in the original release of SWTOR. Ilum, an eleventh shared planet designated for level 50 avatars, was primarily intended for player-versus-player competition and other group missions, and even as late as the summer of 2013 was almost entirely lacking in soloplayer missions. The twelfth shared planet, Makeb, as explained below, was something of a chore, taking the level cap to 55 on a world with a strangely disorganized terrain, each fragment of which was like an ordinary Earth environment, but broken up into scores of tiny plateaus. Space Stations In addition to a headquarters planet, each faction owns a fleet, which is centered on a huge circular space station. Just now, I have logged into my Isaac Asimov character, who has spent the last couple of months resting on the Imperial Orbital Station over Makeb, and I want him to visit the much larger station in the Imperial Fleet. He enters his X-70 Phantom spaceship, and sets course for the fleet, which is 18,973 parsecs away. In the company of his robot companion, Scorpio, he disembarks into the station’s spacedock, then takes an elevator to the main deck. It is shaped like a wheel, resembling the designs for real space stations of the 1950s that would create artificial gravity by rotating, as depicted realistically in the 1968 movie 2001, but it does not spin, and its source of gravity is mysterious. Page 114 →The center of the station is a cantina, with an upper deck accessible by elevator where a quartet is playing popular music. Around the cantina on the main deck are mailboxes and interfaces to the character’s bank, conceptualized as the ship’s cargo hold but remotely accessible. Four spoke-like passageways lead to quadrants of the wider wheel, where NPC vendors offer many facilities and resources: the Galactic Trade Market, Combat Training, Crew Skills, and Supplies. Asimov heads to one of the auction access terminals in the market, where he stands with the avatars representing a dozen other players, and searches the database for a new speeder vehicle he might buy from another player’s character. Zacke was selling a variety of uninteresting types, like

the Czerka Patroller and Rendili Watchman, for 20,000 credits each, which at least were affordable. At the top end of the price range, Andarta was asking an astounding 30,000,000 credits for a Korrealis Commander. More reasonable were eight speeders Fi’ona had placed up for sale, ranging from 50,000 for an Ubrikki Crimson Claw to an Aratech Nethian for 275,000. Now, he pondered, where would he obtain the necessary credits?

A Quartet of Heroes In my research I planned to explore this far galaxy by running four characters based on real people who possessed very different systems of values, including a range of perspectives on individual freedom. All four were science fiction authors whose work I knew well: Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988), Isaac Asimov (1920–1992), and Alfred Bester (1913–1987). I had met Asimov and Bester in real life and had already written about the ideological orientations of all four.10 All reached the original experience cap of 50, and in June 2013 I brought Burroughs out of retirement to explore Makeb and raise his experience to 55. Dark and Light Especially in the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back, but throughout the series, we learn that the Force that binds the galaxy together has both Light and Dark sides. One distinction is that Jedi seek to follow the Light Side and Sith follow the Dark Side, but in SWTOR either can turn to the other side without changing factions. Superficially, the Light Side might be defined as good and the Dark Side as evil. But The Empire Strikes Back offers a Zen Buddhist conception of the Light Side as requiring emotionalPage 115 → detachment, while any strong emotion might turn someone to the Dark Side. Naturally Wikipedia has an article about the Force, which says, “The Force has a вЂDark Side,’ which feeds off emotions such as anger, jealousy, fear, and hate, but the Jedi are only supposed to use the Force for peaceful purposes. The series’ villains, the Sith Order, embrace the Dark Side in order to seize power. The Jedi’s compassionate and selfless use of the Force has come to be known by inference as вЂthe Light Side,’ although that term is not used in the films.”11 In SWTOR, a Force-using character who goes very strongly to one side or the other gains access to powerful equipment, and neutral lightsabers are not available at high levels of power. When they reached the original experience cap, my four research characters had very different scores on the two ethical measures. Burroughs had earned 5,700 Light Side points and just 150 Dark Side points. Heinlein’s pattern was similar, but with some greater tendency on occasion to behave in a way not approved by the Jedi, 6,277 and 1,382. Bester, the psychopathic Sith, had the opposite pattern from Heinlein, 1,700 Light Side points and 6,050 Dark Side. Asimov, always the intellectually detached debater, had much higher but essentially equal scores of 7,558 and 7,557. Class Divisions We already saw in Star Wars Galaxies that one mode of free will concerned which kinds of characters to use, such as an entertainer or trader who did not need to fight NPCs or other players, and the freedom to remain neutral in the conflict between the Republic and the Empire. SWTOR does not permit nonviolence or neutrality, but it does offer choice among classes with different stories as well as different abilities. There are eight main classes of characters in SWTOR, each containing two subclasses, and each subclass contains three skill paths which can be combined to some degree. Each of the two factions, Republic and Empire, however, has just four main classes that are similar to those in the other faction. My four main characters represented all four functional types, two in each faction, which meant that one would explore each of the four starter planets designed for characters up to level 10. Burroughs was a Jedi knight, and Heinlein took the Trooper role given his novel Starship Troopers, which was made into a popular movie.12 Asimov was an Imperial Agent because of the intellectual quality of this category of spies, and Bester became a Sith Inquisitor because of the psychotic quality of the main characters in his novels. Because I needed my four main characters to be able to cooperate Page 116 →with each other by sharing resources via in-game mail, I put them all on one of the 217 initial SWTOR servers, Kath Hound, devoted to role playing in the Star Wars mythos. I

did censuses of that server over the first four weeks and saw that many new characters kept starting even though the server was already full and hardly any had reached level 50. This indicates that, like me, players tended to try a variety of characters. A colleague of mine, Joseph Schweitzer, was also playing SWTOR, and had been active in the prelaunch beta testing, so I asked him about his own multiple characters. By January 27, 2012, he already had six, four of which were on the Republic side. He had two characters in the Jedi Consular class, but in different subclasses. A Jedi Consular Shadow had reached level 11, while a Jedi Consular Sage had gotten to level 42 and was his highestlevel character. These two subclasses can both do damage to enemies, but the Shadow is a tank that engages the enemy in melee combat as the player’s friends provide healing and additional damage, while the Sage is a healer. The online instruction manual places these technical abilities in a mythic context: Wielding double-bladed lightsabers, Shadows embrace the synergy between melee and Force combat, enabling them to strike down enemies of the Order with deadly efficiency. Sages are famed for their wisdom as much as for their powerful healing and defensive skills. In troubled times, Sages bring together the insight of the past with raw power to change the flow of galactic events.13 Joe’s two other Republic characters were a level 38 Jedi Knight Guardian and a level 24 Trooper Commando. On the Empire side he had a level 28 Sith Inquisitor Sorcerer and a level 11 Sith Warrior Juggernaut. I asked him why he had already six characters rather than concentrating on one or perhaps two, one in each faction for sake of maximal variety. He answered: I decided to roll multiple characters because I was in the beta and I focused on one class on each side, the sage and the juggernaut. After the beta ended and the game went live I wanted to test out each of the different classes and advanced classes. When I was running around with my guild mates after the game first came out, we wanted to try a bunch of different classes so we made them, ran to 11 or 14 and moved back to whatever main classes we were playing. The only reason I have the level 28 sorcerer and 38 knight was at the Page 117 →start of the game my guild was going to run on the Empire side, then we changed our mind and moved over to the Republic side. Once we moved to the Republic side I started with the Jedi Knight (guardian) just because during the beta I played the Jedi Consular and was burned out with the class. I played the Knight to level 38 and got bored with the “tank roll,” and not getting a healer companion until after Balmorra I decided to change back to the Jedi Consular (sage) class. As for the level 24 commando, that was a guild joke night, 3 of us in our guild decided to see what amount of damage we could do with 3 commandos running with the same spec. We ran those toons [characters] to level 24ish for the 3 of them and moved back to our mains. By late summer 2012, when my four main characters had reached level 50, fully five of Joe’s characters had accomplished this. Clearly, a player’s decisions about what characters to run are shaped by many factors, including the decisions of their friends, their own prior experience, and their personal feelings about elements of the Star Wars mythos. Five of Joe’s six initial characters are strong with the Force, and only the trooper lacks the ability to wield a lightsaber. As we saw in the case of Star Wars Galaxies, classes vary in popularity, but the emphasis on class-specific story lines in SWTOR undoubtedly evens out the distribution over time, as players select a new class when creating an additional character, in order to experience a different story. Three Censuses Table 5.1 offers three very different sets of data about class distribution. The first consists of English-language forum posts on the official SWTOR website, from the distinct forums for the eight classes, a total of 500,374 posts as of June 18, 2012.14 The second and third datasets are the results of censuses taken of characters online at 4 p.m. local time, Sunday, June 24, 2012, on two servers then having “heavy” populations, Ebon Hawk

serving the eastern part of North America, and Bergeren Colony serving the west. Within their geographic region these were the most popular ones emphasizing role playing and de-emphasizing player-versus-player combat. The logic for this choice was that these two servers encouraged the players to experience the story as real and not to worry so much about the details of choices affecting performance in competition. The censuses were done by using the in-game system for finding mission partners: tally all subsets of Page 118 →characters in all subclasses and experience ranges, then summing the results by class. Two new low-level characters were created in Bergeren just for its census, because the search must be done through a character and is limited to that character’s faction. In our research in Star Wars Galaxies, we found that Jedi characters were more popular than other classes even though they had become insignificant at that point in galactic history. By placing its events 3,500 years earlier, during a limited cold war, SWTOR justified a much larger fraction. Jedi and Sith are both elite, Force-using magical characters, monopolizing 56.9 percent of the Republic posts and 52.3 percent of Empire posts. On Ebon Hawk the two factions were almost identical in their emphasis on magical characters, with 57.3 percent of the Republic characters being Jedi and 57.8 percent of the Empire characters being Sith. The comparable numbers for Bergeren Colony were similar, 57.3 percent and 58.4 percent. Given the big difference between characters who wield the Force and those who do not, the two groups need to start on different planets that offer quite different training missions and environmental styles. Both kinds of Jedi start on the planet Tython, the place where the Jedi Order began many centuries earlier. Troopers and smugglers begin on Ord Mantell, a scene of political discord but of little supernatural significance. Sith start on Korriban, “a sacred planet for the Sith Order, housing the tombs of many ancient and powerful Dark Lords of the Sith, and containing immense Dark Side power and maybe, a few light side secrets.”15 Imperial agents and bounty hunters both begin on Hutta, a spiritless planet dominated by criminal cartels. My research strategy was to have the works and personality of each Page 119 →author in mind as I ran the character based on him. SWTOR presents many difficult moral dilemmas, and each of the authors—so it seemed to me—had a different archetypal moral theory. Often, none of the choices were the right one for the given author, and in those cases he was forced to select the lesser of two evils, whether Light or Dark. The most general question for all for was exactly freedom, in a gameworld structured around narratives that offered small choices but placed great barriers in the way of anyone who wished to escape the narrative altogether. Table 5.1. Character Classes in Star Wars: The Old Republic Forum Posts Ebon Hawk Bergeren Colony Republic Classes: Jedi Knight 13.9% 14.3% 16.6% Jedi Consular 11.0% 13.4% 12.0% Trooper Smuggler Empire Classes: Sith Warrior Sith Inquisitor Bounty Hunter Imperial Agent Total Cases

9.2% 9.6%

10.9% 9.7%

10.2% 11.1%

15.8% 13.6% 13.0% 13.9% 100.0% 500,374

13.7% 16.2% 11.9% 9.9% 100.0% 2,733

14.0% 15.1% 12.2% 8.6% 100.0% 1,388

Burroughs Edgar Rice Burroughs, as we saw in chapter 1, directly influenced Star Wars through his ten Mars novels. John

Carter was the lead character of five of them and also served as narrator, telling the story in the first person and thereby expressing his personality in great depth. He lacked any strong connection to any society, yet he followed high ethical ideals and was capable of love and loyalty toward other individuals. John Carter’s Wikipedia article provides his background: His character and courtesy exemplify the ideals of the antebellum South. A Virginian, he served as a captain in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. After the war, Carter and his companion Powell, who was also a captain in the Civil War, became prospectors looking for tons of gold. Carter and Powell struck it rich by finding gold in Arizona. While hiding from Apaches in a cave, he appears to die; leaving his inanimate body behind, he is mysteriously transported by a form of astral projection to the planet Mars, where he finds himself re-embodied in a form identical to his earthly one. Accustomed to the greater gravity of Earth, he is much stronger and more agile than the natives of Mars due to its lesser gravity.16 Two points deserve emphasis here. First, earlier in his life, John Carter embraced the ideals of the Old South, but its defeat in the US Civil War left him adrift and disillusioned. Today, we think only of the slavery practiced in the Confederacy and dismiss the aristocratic pretentions of the southern upper class as merely a screen to hide the depravity of their social system, which exploited not only slaves but poor free people as well. Yet the Iron Law of Oligarchy says that oligarchs will always exploit the masses, doing so by different means in different societies. The second point in the WikipediaPage 120 → quotation is that an Earthman might be physically superior to a Martian because his body was adapted to a heavier gravity on our planet. In SWTOR, some of a Jedi knight’s most powerful moves involve leaping a long distance onto an enemy, which John Carter could also do. When John Carter first arrived on Mars, he at first reacted as best he could to the strange events taking place around him, but then developed a friendship with Tars Tarkas, arguably the first well-delineated extraterrestrial character in literature. His Wikipedia article notes, “A great warrior and leader among his people (the brutal and mirthless Tharks), he possesses a sense of compassion and empathy uncharacteristic of his race.”17 Tarkas is a Green Martian, gigantic and possessing four arms, while Carter’s second close friend, Dejah Thoris, is portrayed as a perfectly human, beautiful woman, alien only in the minor fact that when she bears John Carter a son, she does so by laying an egg. Her Wikipedia page says, “She plays the role of the conventional damsel in distress who must be rescued from various perils, but is also portrayed as a competent and capable adventuress in her own right, fully capable of defending herself and surviving on her own in the wastelands of Mars.”18 Thus, Burroughs the Jedi will resist demands from any societal authority, especially if it becomes morally suspect in his mind, but he will develop loyalty to selected individuals. When Burroughs the Jedi first arrived on Tython, he also at first accepted the situation, perplexed but adjusting to circumstances. Several missions sent him to the ruins of an ancient Jedi temple, where enemies lurked, but the quest that impressed him most required no combat but rather spying on two Jedi in training, a man named Spanios and a woman named Moracen, who had become secret lovers. Jedi are not supposed to develop personal relationships lest their desires corrupt their magic powers and turn them to the Dark Side of the Force. Yet Burroughs lied to his superiors and pretended there was nothing forbidden going on between the two lovers. For him, there were two fundamental moral principles. One comported with Jedi philosophy: Always deal with strangers fairly. The other was diametrically opposed to Jedi teachings: The only basis for commitment to a group is a powerful personal relationship with an individual member of it. The main story line for Jedi knights in SWTOR naturally mimics the original Star Wars plot. The original 1977 movie and the Return of the Jedi second sequel in 1983, both ended with the destruction of a Death Star, and many SWTOR missions involve seizing or destroying enemy superweapons. The climax of A Princess of Mars by Burroughs is equally intense, but it involves not the destruction of a weapon but repair of technology needed to sustain life, so my character Burroughs was not comfortable with these Page 121 →SWTOR missions.19 The belligerents in the Second World War all followed the total war doctrine, established in modern times during the US Civil War, when Sherman’s March to the Sea was designed to destroy the economy of the Confederacy by burning farms and otherwise terrorizing the population.20 Perhaps sensitized to this issue by John Carter’s

Confederate background, Burroughs rejected the total war doctrine that civilians were proper targets and believed that warriors should fight only each other, following a code of chivalry. The more he experienced of the Republic, the more he realized that many of its leaders were unconstrained by any kind of moral code. The Star Wars mythos also features relations between teachers and students, between Jedi masters and apprentices. Burroughs acquired an apprentice named Kira Carsen, and their relationship will be described in the following chapter. She had earlier been the disciple of Bela Kiwiiks, a Jedi master who had disappeared on a secret mission. Part of the Jedi knight story line required Burroughs to rescue Kiwiiks on Tatooine, the planet modeled on the Mars where John Carter had his adventures. The master who had taught Burroughs, Orgus Din, was killed during his attempt to prevent the Sith lord Darth Angral from gaining a superweapon, but he returned as a departed spirit to guide Burroughs, just as Obi-Wan Kenobi had returned as a spirit to guide Luke Skywalker. The death of Orgus Din severed the personal relationship Burroughs had with the Jedi Order, and once he reached level 50 in experience, he and Kira were happy to settle down on Tatooine, just as John Carter and Dejah Thoris had on Mars. I called Burroughs back from retirement in June 2013 to explore the newly discovered Makeb, and he indeed reached experience level 55 on it, took his three crafting specialties to the new 450-skill maximum, and explored every area of both Ilum and Makeb, earning special distinction medals for doing so. Indeed, one of the ways SWTOR sought to motivate players to keep subscribing was to earn many such honorifics. Frankly, I found Makeb to be a real grind, and I was a little dismayed when Burroughs earned an award for killing fully one thousand enemies there. I rewarded Burroughs with a flashy pod racer, with which he could zoom around Tatooine after he returned to retirement there.

Heinlein Robert A. Heinlein was often described as the dean of science fiction writers, and arguably he was the best and most prominent of the writers of the Page 122 →so-called Golden Age during the 1940s, who published in Astounding Stories magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr.21 As was the case with many men of his generation, futuristic technology was associated in Heinlein’s mind with military weaponry. A graduate of the US Naval Academy, Heinlein had served on the aircraft carrier Lexington a decade before the US entered the Second World War, and he was familiar with military command structures despite never having served in combat. Many of his stories extol military virtues, and for decades a debate has raged in the science fiction community over the degree to which he was a distasteful militarist.22 The Right to Be Right With some care for the sensitivities of the reader, I must state a perplexing fact about fictional and academic perspectives on the future: Science fiction is energized by intellectual leaders who are politically both left-wing and right-wing, whereas sociology and related academic communities attempt to soar on but one of these wings. Heinlein’s exact political position reveals a major and interesting ideological tension. Individual freedom is a primary value, yet many of his characters were military personnel required to follow orders unconditionally that were issued by superiors. In the future militaristic society described in his novel Starship Troopers, all citizens have basic rights, but only those who have served in the military can vote or hold public office.23 As noted in the first chapter, his juvenile novel Space Cadet, which influenced Star Trek via the Tom Corbett television program, presented a military organization as the exemplar of perfect virtue in a chaotic solar system.24 Yet if doubts arise about the morality of superiors in one’s military organization, what is one to do? Several of Heinlein’s other novels explore radical answers. Farnham’s Freehold concerns a man who builds a fallout shelter in which a few people can survive a nuclear war that shattered society’s command structures.25 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress glorifies a Libertarian revolt with the motto, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”26 Stranger in a Strange Land concerns a countercultural religious messiah, based on the principle of grokking, in which the observer merges with the observed.27 Perhaps Heinlein was telling us that the individual is the moral unit of humanity, but at times individuals must combine in a larger unit, often but

not always represented by the military, at both levels taking decisive action. Heinlein was not the insensitive, selfish person many people on the political left imagine right-wingers to be. The web page of the Heinlein Society displays a picture of him donating blood while making the Vulcan “live Page 123 →long and prosper” salute from Star Trek. The society notes that Heinlein lived according to the motto, “pay it forward.”28 Yes, there is a Wikipedia page even for this obscure concept, tracing it back to the ancient Greeks, but noting that Heinlein publicized it in his 1951 juvenile novel Between Planets.29 If we owe a debt, often we should not pay it back, but pay it forward. Debts come from the past, but human action creates the future. Any debt the younger generation owes to its parents must be paid to the next generation of children and not wasted on the older folk. This principle is future-oriented and thus relevant for science fiction, yet it can be considered conservative because it intentionally builds a future based on the past. A Non-Player Team When the SWTOR Heinlein character arrived on Ord Mantell, he had little idea what he had gotten into. He found himself on a transport vehicle with five NPC members of Havoc Squad and discovered he was the latest recruit. Lieutenant Bex “Gearbox” Kolos explained to him that a group of Separatist rebels was trying to take the planet out of the Republic and had seized an extremely powerful orbital strike bomb. Heinlein assumed the Separatists were “bad guys,” but Gearbox admitted they had popular support. Heinlein assumed that the Republic was always right, but the fact that the population of the planet supported the rebels did worry him. Suddenly the driver of their vehicle was killed by a missile, and only after a skirmish and the team’s arrival at the local Republic base did Heinlein get properly introduced to the other members of Havoc Squad. Commander Harron Tavis led the team. A woman named Captain Zora was his assistant and the squad’s infiltration and assassination specialist. Lieutenant Ryler “Needles” Dorant was the medical officer, while Lieutenant Vanto “Fuse” Bazren was the demolition expert, and of course Gearbox was an engineer. This was a highly cohesive team of people with distinctive skills who had relied upon each other for a long time as they undertook dangerous missions far from the heart of the Republic. Groups that are socially separate from society and develop strong cohesion are susceptible to groupthink, a process in which they develop a consensus that is deviant from the perspective of outsiders.30 Heinlein never bonded with the five original squad members, because he was sent on several solo missions, but then he was ordered into the stronghold of the Separatists to find them. The squad had been sent on a dangerous mission to recover the stolen orbital strike bomb, but communications were lost. Heinlein battled his way into the stronghold and used a coded signal to disarm the bomb. Then Page 124 →he discovered Havoc Squad, who were alive, well, and defecting to the Empire. Tavis explained that Republic bureaucrats had merely used Havoc Squad for their own purposes and had never shown proper respect to even the best warriors who repeatedly risked their lives for the Republic. Successful teams like Havoc Squad fired up the imaginations of the citizens of the Republic, so they were denigrated by the bureaucracy, which wanted to control the populace. Heinlein briefly tried to dissuade Havoc Squad from its treasonous course, but they would not listen. Heinlein never considered joining the squad in its defection to the Empire, nor did SWTOR give him that option. The five original members of the squad had exercised their collective freedom, within the context of their groupthink, to shift allegiances. Heinlein had no freedom, and yet logically he should have faced fully four alternatives: (1) He could do what SWTOR forced him to do, remain loyal to the Republic. (2) He could defect with the rest of his nominal team to the Empire, but he was not allowed to take this obvious second choice. (3) He could have joined the Separatist rebellion in principle, but he lacked friends among the Separatists who might have welcomed him to their cause. (4) He could have left military life altogether and become a merchant or taken some other civilian job, but at that point he had no means of escaping to a planet far away from the cold war that was then beginning to heat up. Had he been in Star Wars Galaxies, he could easily have remained neutral in the conflict between Republic and Empire, but in Star Wars: The Old Republic, that was impermissible. A Player Team

When he reached level 10 on Ord Mantell, he helped Xarama and Avery, the characters of two other players, but after finishing some quests they parted, never meeting again and not becoming a cohesive team. Later he joined a role-playing guild called The Republic Loyalist and returned to Ord Mantell at level 20 as part of a role-playing event. At that point the guild had 167 members, although that number is a count of characters, not players, and the total number during the entire life of the guild who registered on its website was 22. Twelve were online at the beginning of this complex, self-scripted mission, and nine members ultimately participated, coordinating by means of the guild channel of the text chat. The player-scripted story began with five Loyalists on Coruscant, starting from the capital of the Republic because they were pretending to be a Page 125 →delegation of diplomats. Heinlein and Eplphanen were sent ahead to Ord Mantell, where the action would take place, because they were troopers securing the arrival point for the delegation. The leader of the mission was Zoca’la, a level 35 female Jedi sage holding the rank of colonel in the guild. Heinlein was a mere member, while Eplphanen, at experience level 23, was a private whom Zoca’la promoted to sergeant as the action was beginning. Zoca’la also created an ops group, so the role players could see the locations of team members on the active maps in the computer interface. From the moment he joined the ops group, Heinlein could read four interwoven chat channels: (1) the gray local chat that was limited to nearby characters and did not exclude nonmembers, (2) the regular guild chat in green, (3) the guild officer channel he could read but not post in, which was purple on his display, and (4) the ops channel, where ordinary posts were yellow but where Zoca’la’s posts were orange. The group loitered at the Ord Mantell spaceport for a while to see who else might join the original seven in the operation. The mission was part of a sequence of scenes in a drama the Loyalists were creating for themselves. The original plan was for the group to escort the ambassador of House Organa to a meeting with leaders of the Separatist movement on Ord Mantell to begin a process of reconciliation. The role players all knew the backstory, which had been provided by SWTOR, but now they were trying to build upon it with their own creativity. It was interesting for Heinlein because he had grudging respect for the Separatists, and it resonated with his issues about loyalty: Corellian colonists settled Ord Mantell nine thousand years ago, and the planet became a staging point for Republic military operations in the Outer Rim. Ord Mantell’s strategic value waned over the centuries, however, and after a corrupt admiral sold off the local fleet, the military all but abandoned the planet. Ord Mantell soon became a haven for smugglers, pirates, and bounty hunters, and the local government fell under the sway of the crime syndicates—a dynamic that remains in place to this day. Though largely uncontested during the war between the Republic and the Sith Empire, things changed after the Treaty of Coruscant. Though many star systems withdrew from the Republic, Ord Mantell’s corrupt governors decided it was better business to stay loyal. Not all of the planet’s populace agreed, however, and a separatist movement began and quickly escalated into an armed conflict.31 Page 126 →Unfortunately, the Loyalist team found itself temporarily stymied because the player who was going to act as ambassador was unavailable. Since the Separatists did not know the identity of the ambassador, Zoca’la asked Widgey, a level 23 Jedi sage, to serve in that role. Merci, a level 33 smuggler of the “scoundrel” specialization, lived up to that class name by saying to Widgey, “May the FarceВ .В .В . I mean Force be with you!” The meeting was to take place at the Separatist stronghold, a good distance west of the Republic base at Fort Garnik and accessible only by a circuitous route occupied by many enemies and dangerous beasts. As the two troopers in the team, Eplphanen and Heinlein took point and led the forty-minute march across the contested terrain. Two other Loyalists who logged in later joined them to make a total of nine participants in the role play. The ordinary Separatist troops were not aware of the diplomatic mission, so the team tried to kill as few as possible to reach the rendezvous point. Pausing at a high bridge over a river of molten lava deep inside the citadel, they discussed their mission, looking across at Separatists they believed were the diplomatic welcoming party. Then Heinlein and four others stood guard, as Zoca’la, Widgey, Merci, and a level 33 Jedi guardian named Ragneed the Keeper of Truth walked across for the meeting intended to seek peace. But it was an ambush! Zoca’la was thrown from the bridge to her death, and then the Loyalists killed all the Separatists. Of course, the Separatists were in fact ordinary NPCs

guarding the bridge, and the guild had exploited this fact to simulate an ambush. Two hours of role play ended with the satisfaction of completing an interesting story episode, exploiting but not exactly following the assumptions built by the game designers in SWTOR. In deference to realism in the guild’s role playing, members actually debated whether Zoca’la would stay dead, or be resurrected at the nearest Republic medical facility.

Asimov Isaac Asimov was a biochemist who became an exceedingly popular writer of science fiction, as well as a prolific writer of science-fact books for the general public. He was especially famous for his three laws of robotics that sought to give technology morality: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. Page 127 →A robot must obey the orders given to it by human being, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.32 There is a growing body of research indicating that many people attribute moral responsibility to robots, whether or not we can really expect them to mirror human values.33 There is good reason to doubt that morality can be programmed in this manner, and many of Asimov’s robot stories indeed exploit logical contradictions between the laws under various circumstances.34 Two of his early robot novels assumed that human beings could be constrained by strict programming rules, just as his robots were. The Caves of Steel describes an immense, closed city, not unlike Coruscant in SWTOR, where people dwell who have never ventured outdoors and, in their extreme agoraphobia, would collapse psychologically if they ever tried to do so.35 The victim was killed in a place that could be entered in only two ways, through an entrance that would detect any weapon or by crossing a large open space, which no human being could do. A robot could have crossed that open space but, following the First Law, could not have killed the victim. The Naked Sun poses a similar puzzle, but following a different assumption about how humans are programmed.36 It describes a society in which people “meet” only as they do in SWTOR, virtually by means of information technologies, so a human murderer could not have psychologically tolerated being in the same physical location as the victim. When I created the SWTOR character based on Isaac Asimov, I naturally selected the cyborg choice, half-human and half-machine. This fit the story line for an Imperial Agent very well because at many points it concerns programming that constrains decisions. An agent like Asimov works for the Imperial Intelligence service, often returning to headquarters on Dromund Kaas to meet with the Empire’s spymaster and the office staff. Much of the time in the field the agent uses an assumed identity, and within the spy agency Asimov was given the code name Cipher Nine. One of the more interesting nuances concerns the accent of the voice actor who spoke for Asimov in the dramatic cutscenes. Following the tradition established in the original Star Wars movie, members of the Republic speak with American accents and members of the Empire speak with British accents. Cipher Nine’s accent switches back and forth, depending upon which faction he pretends to belong to at the moment. The first of the three chapters of an agent’s story in SWTOR begins with Page 128 →a terrorist attack, after which the agent tracks down the terrorist leader, only learning at the climax that the attack was not at all what it appeared to be. The agent’s minders back on Dromund Kaas are called watchers, and during this chapter Asimov met Watcher X, a genetically altered former intelligence officer who became unreliable and is currently being kept in solitary confinement on Nar Shaddaa. As part of his mission arc, Asimov sought the help of Watcher X, who gave him a droid disguise he could use to enter an enemy laboratory for the mission “Hostile Takeover.” To do this, Watcher X implanted three cybernetic units along Asimov’s spinal column, not as horrifying as it might seem because as a cyborg, Asimov already possessed many implants. Watcher X gave Asimov the choice of doing the surgery with or without anesthetics, but if he was going to complete the chapter and continue gaining companions, Asimov could not choose to avoid the implants.

The second chapter, titled “The Mind Trap,” expresses exceedingly complex tensions between freedom and control. Asimov was assigned the task of pretending to defect to the Republic, first accomplishing some missions for the Republic that superficially damaged the Empire. Despite all the rhetoric that a Republican form of government guarantees freedom, the Republic did not consider trusting Asimov but imposed mind control over him, using the code word onomatophobia, which means fear of a word. Thus he would willingly set out on a mission, but under a command reinforced by this code word so he could not have disobeyed the command even if he had wanted to. Is it freedom to be able to disobey a command if one would never want to disobey that command? Or is that only a subjective illusion of freedom, even before one asks how one came to want to obey that command? Then an inner voice, belonging to Watcher X, offers Asimov an entirely different set of missions, claiming that through great danger and uncertainty they might achieve liberation from the programming that empowers onomatophobia. Clearly, the implants inserted by Watcher X included part of X’s personality and gave him some degree of permanent influence over Asimov, even though now he helps Asimov free himself from another influence. The Republic, however, was not responsible for the covert programming triggered by onomatophobia; the Empire was responsible. How, then, did the Republic learn about that unlikely command word? A third force, neither Republic nor Empire, was responsible. Called the Star Cabal, for centuries it had been working to keep the Republic and Empire apart, ostensibly to prevent war but with the result that the two factions were not free to develop peaceful relations and possibly merge voluntarily. At one point, its Page 129 →agent, Hunter, is in grave danger and sends a message to Asimov begging for assistance. Asimov promised to come immediately and help Hunter, but, not wanting to trust Asimov, Hunter says “onomatophobia” and forces him to come, even though his free choice was indeed to come. Thus, total control totally obviates not only freedom but morality.

Bester Alfred Bester was the first author to receive the prime accolade of the science fiction subculture, the 1953 Hugo award for best novel, The Demolished Man, which artfully explores one concept from psychoanalysis and one from parapsychology: the Oedipus complex and telepathy.37 His second great novel, The Stars My Destination, followed the same pattern by pairing the inferiority complex with teleportation.38 My SWTOR character Bester was based on Gully Foyle, the protagonist of The Stars My Destination, with a few adjustments to fit the Star Wars context. I was far from the first person to resurrect Alfred Bester in fiction: he was a central character in the Babylon 5 television series, played by Walter Koenig, who had been Chekov in Star Trek, and a trilogy of novels detailed the imaginary life of that Bester.39 Bester was the author’s original name, but had it been a pseudonym it would have been aptly chosen. Unless some very recent author I do not know about has bested him, he was the best analyst of psychoanalysis in science fiction, and the protagonists of both great novels seek to rise above everybody else, driven perhaps by what Henry Murray called an Icarus complex, flying too close to the sun.40 Several literary critics have psychoanalyzed Bester’s characters. Donald Palumbo diagnoses Foyle as a victim of monomania, consumed by obsessive revenge, whereas Fiona Kelleghan’s diagnosis is claustrophobic paranoia, in which the mind itself is a space of imprisonment.41 I use the term inferiority complex, which was developed by Alfred Adler, the first of Sigmund Freud’s disciples to break with their master.42 Indeed, the best example of the Oedipus complex is not to be found in Freud’s case histories but in the rivalries that raged between him and several of his “sons.” Freud’s notion that sons wish to murder their fathers in order to sexually possess their mothers may have been nothing more than a slander to disparage the intellectual criticisms his smartest students raised about his theories. Thus Freud himself had an Oedipus complex, but from the standpoint of the father, and Adler himself had an inferiority complex.43 For a brief two hours in 1980, Alfred Bester and I were panelists on a session at the Norwescon science fiction convention in Seattle, Washington, Page 130 →where he was the guest of honor. At one point in the Norwescon panel, I believe in response to a question from the audience, I asserted that several real religions could emerge from science fiction. The audience naturally thought I was referring to Scientology and several flying saucer cults. Then I turned toward Bester and proclaimed that already a science fiction author had published two great religious scriptures, The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination.

In SWTOR, Bester began as a slave on the planet Korriban, excavating ruins in search of powerful relics for the Sith. He was a member of the Zabrak species, and looked very much like Darth Maul from the 1999 movie The Phantom Menace. According to his Wikipedia article, Maul was intended by George Lucas to be “a figure from your worst nightmare,”44 looking rather like a devil with red skin, horns, and black tattoos across his face. Then the Sith discovered that Bester was strong with the Force, so they put him into the training program to become a warrior for the Dark Side, a series of extreme challenges that kill most students. At times the full-blood Siths express racial prejudice against members of other species, so Bester was constantly suffering insults as well as gratuitous dangers. Thus he suffered an inferiority complex as he struggled to free himself from the Sith control that imprisoned him in the agony of total subordination. Bester belonged to the Sith Inquisitor class, and the first chapter of its SWTOR story line recounts the events while he was the apprentice of a beautiful and ambitious Sith woman named Lord Zash, who strangely appears totally human, in her competition against other Sith in their constant struggle for personal supremacy. Early in this saga, Bester acquired his first companion, an ugly monster named Khem Val, who abhorred all users of the Force and who frequently threatened to turn on his master, which was especially worrisome to Bester because this corpselike creature was the first person he had felt superior to. Lord Zash seemed very fond of Bester and promised him a glorious reward if he could collect a set of magic relics through a series of missions. The climax comes in the Dark Temple on Dromund Kaas, where Zash begins a ritual focused on Bester. Only then does he discover that she is not in fact a beautiful woman but an ancient monster who must periodically find a new host body when the old one wears out, and it intends to take over Bester’s body. He struggles against Zash, who stumbles and mistakenly enters the body of Khem Val instead. Because Khem Val is immune to the Force, Zash becomes imprisoned inside him instead of seizing control of him, able occasionally to speak but no longer free to act.

Page 131 →Conclusion At the end of the third and final chapter of his SWTOR story, Asimov found himself strangely liberated, no longer under the control of Imperial Intelligence yet lacking any purpose that would give his actions meaning. He had defeated a conspiracy so vast it sought nothing less than the destruction of both the Empire and the Republic, along with annihilation of both Sith and Jedi, so that ordinary people could be free from dominance by any elite. At the same time, Imperial Intelligence itself had been dissolved, and his bosses had become friends seeking to create a secret force to assist the Empire in its struggle, but outside its command structure. He alone possessed the greatest secrets in the galaxy, and when his friends and former bosses begged him to share this crucial information with them, he politely refused and suffered no ill consequences. He was exactly neutral between the Dark and Light Sides of the Force, and while agents of the Republic would still consider him an enemy, he was no longer an agent of the Empire. He could justly say, “My freedom knows no bounds.” Yet that statement can be true under either of two conditions: when freedom is infinite or when freedom does not exist at all.

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6. Companions The social life of an SWTOR player is split between real human beings, namely other players, and non-player characters designed to serve as companions. Over the first six months of SWTOR’s existence, the player population declined substantially, in what I call the Great Implosion, shifting the responsibility for providing friendship to the NPCs. Although a few chess masters have on occasion displayed their brilliance by playing two or more matches at once, and it is relatively easy to run two Monopoly or Parcheesi pieces simultaneously, games traditionally assumed that each competitor equaled one player. MMOs changed that fundamental assumption when they created different play experiences for characters of different classes, encouraging subscribers to stick with their game for many additional months by operating two or more characters. Initially, players could operate only one character at a time unless they were performing the difficult feat called multiboxing, running two or more computers with multiple paid accounts. Some recent MMOs, including SWTOR, essentially require the equivalent of multiboxing, but on just one computer and account.

Mains and Secondaries Standard gamer language distinguishes a main character from potentially several alts, on the assumption that players tend to invest more time in the single character they enjoy the most. In recent years, many of the most popular MMOs have added complexity in the form of secondary characters run simultaneously with the main characters. These are not alts because they are not alternatives to the main but assistants that work in consort with the main. In many fantasy games, such as World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online, these secondary characters are depicted as hunting animals and are called pets. In Star Wars Galaxies, the droids built by Algorithma Teq were exactly this kind of rudimentary secondary character. The player could give instructions to the secondary before or during combat, but it would Page 133 →operate independently during the peak moments of battle so the player could concentrate on the more important main character. In the following chapter we will find that Star Trek Online takes secondary characters to a much more complex level, giving the player four to operate simultaneously. Such avatar teams are central to several other MMOs, notably Dungeons and Dragons Online and Guild Wars. Indeed, they constitute one of the reasons we tend to use the word character in this book as well as avatar, because if a person is represented by multiple avatars simultaneously, the poor player could suffer from multiple personality disorder, at best a neurosis and perhaps in some cases a psychosis in which the person loses all sense of individual identity. Star Wars: The Old Republic avoids this hypothetical psychiatric issue by giving the player only a single secondary at any given time and imbuing that secondary with a definite personality and story connected to but also separate from those of the main character. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, each primary character begins with some easy solo missions so the player can learn how to handle the particular class and environment, then gradually gains five secondary avatars called companions. Only one companion can accompany a character on a mission, but others can perform crew skill work at the same time in the background. Each of the 8 character classes has its own set of 5 companions, so the total available is 40, although each faction adds an additional but incomplete protocol droid who lacks a personal story and serves relatively minor functions, bringing the total to 42. Of the 40 who perform full functions, three are droids and will be discussed in a section below. An especially interesting subset of the 37 others consists of aliens, nonhuman companions through which we can learn about their extraterrestrial cultures. Most interesting are the companions of opposite gender to the main character, with whom a romance can develop. SWTOR’s complex matrix of freedom and control is best illustrated by the five romantic female companions of the four virtual science fiction authors. Romantic Companions A Jedi knight like Burroughs gains these five companions in this order: T7-O1, Kira Carsen, Doc, Sergeant Rusk,

and Lord Scourge. Each has different strengths and weaknesses in combat and is slightly more proficient in practicing particular crew skills. For example, Doc is a healer who wears medium armor and can wield guns but chiefly supports the Jedi knight by healing damage, although generally slower than the enemy inflicts it. Despite being a physician, he has some orientation toward the criminal underworld,Page 134 → performing the underworld trading crew skill slightly better than the other companions and enjoying gifts of underworld origins. He is also slightly better at the biochem crafting skill than the other companions, which makes sense because it primarily creates healing or protective medicines. T7-O1 is a droid, Kira is a human female, and Doc is a human male. Rusk and Scourge are both males but belong to alien species. If the Jedi knight is a female, she can develop a romance with Doc. If the Jedi knight is male, his romantic partner is Kira Carsen. Wookieepedia explains Kira’s past: “Born a Child of the Sith Emperor, Lord Vitiate, she fled Korriban as a child and sought refuge on Nar Shaddaa. There, she met Master Bela Kiwiiks of the Jedi High Council on Tython and was taken up as her Padawan, all the while keeping her dark past in the Sith Empire to herself.”1 The phrase “Child of the Sith Emperor” did not mean she was his daughter, but rather that she had been taken from her parents at an early age because of her Force sensitivity and placed in a kind of child harem, where the emperor would possess her psychically from time to time, leaving her with memory gaps. After escaping while still quite young to Nar Shaddaa, the moon of Hutta dominated by criminal gangs, she lived by her wits and by building friendships with other refugees. One of the SWTOR wikis calls her “kind-hearted, confident, brassy.”2 Burroughs and Kira met on Tython, and she became his dutiful assistant, usually standing behind him except when there was a fight and gazing at him with what appeared to be admiration. At one point in her story, her hidden past came to light, but Burroughs defended her honor and she remained a Jedi apprentice in good status. Burroughs recalled how he had failed to inform on the two Jedi lovers back on Tython, Spanios and Moracen, and he allowed himself to fall in love with Kira. Kira Carsen and Heinlein’s romantic partner, Elara Dorne, were similar in that both were decent, competent women who had begun life in the Empire but defected to the Republic. Elara Dorne had defected while an adult, so she had the British speech patterns possessed by all regular citizens of the Empire, an accent Kira had lost while a girl fugitive on Nar Shaddaa. Elara was exceedingly rule-oriented, so her defection was more rationalistic, like a bipolar switch that had exactly two positions, Empire versus Republic, exactly following the rules of one or the other. She is not trusted in the Republic despite her perfect service record, and Heinlein even comments on her accent when they first meet. She is “fairly unpopular with her fellow soldiers” and “regarded as a cold, asocial killjoy.”3 Yet this rigidity exactly fits Heinlein’s emotional needs, as he struggles to assemble a new Havoc Squad to which he can be completely loyal, composed of teammates Page 135 →he hopes will be loyal to him. In time, Elara and Heinlein marry, planning even to settle down and raise a family if both survive military service, presumably producing very obedient children. Like Kira, Bester’s romantic companion, Ashara Zavros, was in training to become a Jedi, but Bester tricked her into defecting from the Republic. Frankly, she was not fully committed to it and would have considered a third path, neither Jedi nor Sith. Wookieepedia explains, “While a capable fighter and knowledgeable of the Jedi Code, Ashara always believed that Jedi should be pro-active against the Sith and that she deserved better. These traits brought her close to the dark side.”4 Bester encountered her during his mission to add the ghost of her ancestor to his collection of possessing spirits, and required her help. Since a Jedi apprentice would certainly not help a Sith kidnap the spirit of a member of the Jedi’s family, Bester needed to corrupt her, and in preparation for this dastardly deed he accessed four different data streams concerning her personality. Rescuing her from a fake ambush and giving her an information-rich Sith holocron as an enticement, Bester gained a little help from her, which climaxed when the defenders of a Jedi shrine attacked Bester and he killed them. Suddenly Ashara realized that while Bester tricked her, she herself willingly betrayed the Jedi and could not return to her former life with them. Although originally founded on deceit, their relationship rapidly evolved and significantly transformed both their personalities. Bester found he must continually adjust to Ashara’s moral code and play the role of an increasingly committed partner. Each companion valued gifts of a particular kind, and her affection for him increased whenever he gave her valuable Republic memorabilia, cultural artifacts, military gear, or weapons. Playing a role seriously enough transforms it into reality, and their spiritual quests will remain

entwined until they settle down on Voss, the ideal planet for completion of transcendent journeys. Asimov’s Triangle Asimov was in the unusual position of having two potential lovers, Kaliyo Djannis and Raina Temple. Kaliyo was his first companion and Raina was his fourth, so he did not face the implications of this complex situation until late in his career. Kaliyo sensed Asimov was ambitious and said the same was true for herself, asking only that she got her appropriate “cut” from any profits they made together. Needing a companion and having no other options, he agreed to take her away from the dismal Hutt planet, first to Dromund Kaas, the Imperial redoubt, and then to other worlds. At first, Page 136 →Asimov did nothing to increase Kaliyo’s affection for him, making each decision about his words and deeds on the basis of his own calculation of long-term advantage and giving her no gifts other than an occasional piece of armor or a weapon to improve her usefulness in combat. This research, however, required learning as much as possible about the companions, and as they gained affection they would tell their life stories, so I had Asimov buy several companion gifts from a vendor, not only weapons but also luxuries and underworld goods. This method will only get you about halfway to the 10,000 possible points of affection because of a diminishing returns algorithm that progressively discounts the value of purchasable gifts, and I needed to get to that level of maximum affection. Asimov’s mission crew skill, however, was diplomacy, which can garner high-value gifts, so by that means he eventually built up her affection and developed an erotic relationship with her. Thus he was not forced to adjust his behavior during missions to earn her affection, so the diplomacy skill gave him greater freedom in that respect. Many companions merely tell their life stories, but Kaliyo did more than that, dragging Asimov on her own missions and at one point insulting him by bringing a young man to Asimov’s ship for a sexual encounter. Kaliyo boasted of having had many partners in the past, with the implication that she had seduced them all, exploited them, then abandoned them. As their relationship deepened and it seemed possible she might actually commit herself to Asimov, she demanded that he go with her to kill four enemies who were tracking her, three former partners and a mysterious bounty hunter. Asimov was able to avoid violence with two of the four, convincing a card shark and an arms dealer to leave Kaliyo alone, but he was forced to kill a Wookiee pirate. The bounty hunter turned out to be a senator’s daughter named Ona Querit, who had been “seduced” by Kaliyo and then abandoned by her. Asimov tried to make peace between them, but when Kaliyo refused to apologize the two women fought, until Kaliyo fell unconscious and Asimov was forced to kill Ona to save his companion. Kaliyo is an extremely controversial character, described in SWTOR’s first companion developer blog as “a femme fatale” and “an anarchist at heart.”5 As of August 21, 2012, 142 threads in the official SWTOR online forum had her name in the title of the first post, having a total of 1,856 comment posts and 271,056 views. Brief descriptions of the 5 threads receiving more than 10,000 views can sketch the debate. The thread containing the most comments, 130, with 11,364 views, was titled simply, “I hate Kaliyo.” Page 137 →The thread with the most views, 22,679, and 92 comments, “To people who think Kaliyo is useless,” began with a boast that she had helped a player win a difficult duel, and this thread may have been more popular to view because it offered playing advice. With 85 comments and 11,689 views, “Kaliyo is too squishy” discusses how to select the right stance and equipment to make her the most effective tank in combat. A thread simply titled “Kaliyo” with 89 comments and 10,624 views debated her selfishness and promiscuity, with some commenters finding her liberating because there seems no need to be nice to her. In second place by both numbers, 98 comments and 21,117 views, was another negative flame, “Anyone else unhappy with Kaliyo?” One problem for Imperial Agents was that they could not get their second companion until late in the leveling progression, and NPCs are frequently introduced into the story who seem as if they might become companions but fail to do so. When Asimov met Raina Temple on the ice planet Hoth, he immediately saw that she was very different from Kaliyo and too easily trusted her. Each companion has specific values, called likes and dislikes. When the main

character takes some actions in the presence of a secondary, it will increase the secondary’s affection and thus the quality of help it provides, while acting in ways that are disliked will reduce affection. Kaliyo’s likes were “disrespecting authority, casual violence, and anarchy for the fun of it,” and her dislikes were “selfsacrifice for the greater good, sincerity, obedience, patriotic spirit and being taken advantage of.” In contrast, Raina’s likes were “loyalty to the empire, helping others, and honor,” and her dislikes were “greed, disloyalty, cruelty, and casual violence.” Raina belonged to the Chiss Ascendancy, an organization of blue-skinned aliens allied with the Empire, but she was not herself a Chiss. In time, Asimov discovered that she was totally loyal to the Empire but kept her distance from it because she possessed some Force powers and knew the Empire would enlist her into Sith training if they discovered her paranormal talent. She was convinced the Sith trials were too demanding for her to survive. At this point Asimov had already married Kaliyo, and as he developed an affair with Raina, Kaliyo spied on them. Just when Asimov felt he had found an ideal mate in Raina, she reported that she must go off on a personal mission of her own to kill her own disloyal father. Asimov, who always calculated his actions rationally as if playing a game or solving a puzzle and did not think in terms of good or evil, realized he could not trust Raina any more than Kaliyo. One was too immoral, the other was too moral, and neither valued him above their principles.

Page 138 →Alien Companions Eight male companions of my four main characters belonged to alien species and formed relationships with the main based on their very different natures. Burroughs had two, Scourge and Rusk. Lord Scourge was an extreme case. He had been the emperor’s chief executioner, responsible for the deaths of about a hundred Jedi and a thousand Sith. He had dealt with all the most important figures in the Empire, including Revan, an imposing but distant figure in Star Wars lore, who founded a cult that both Bester and Asimov joined and whose chapter in Wookieepedia is far longer than any of the chapters in this book.6 Scourge was so useful to the emperor, that he was made immortal through a combination of advanced technology and arcane Dark Side magic. Scourge was not only a pure-blood Sith but disliked the Republic and the Jedi, which made him a difficult companion for a Republic Jedi, quickly developing negative affection toward Burroughs, something that never happened with any of the other nineteen companions. Sergeant Rusk was superficially the opposite of Scourge, a loyal soldier of the Republic. He had grown up in a pacifist colony of Chagrians, a species not known outside the SWTOR sector of the mythos, who were constantly being abused by more aggressive outsiders. He reacted against this mistreatment and became a dedicated officer in the Republic military. But because he was consumed by anger and because his early life had not prepared him to be a warrior, he was impulsive and took too many chances with the lives of the men under his command. He told Burroughs that in one important mission all his men had been wounded, but none killed, and strangely—so he thought—he had lost touch with them afterward. Some research revealed to Burroughs that they were in a Republic military prison for having committed war crimes. The story raises the complex issue of the rules of war and whether it is really logical to set any limits on behavior when the goal is to destroy the enemy. Burroughs suspected this was yet another case in which the Republic’s self-image of being more ethical than the Empire was a morass of hypocrisy. Aric Jorgan, Tanno Vik, and Yuun were alien companions of Heinlein and thus three-fifths of the reconstituted Havoc Squad, each playing a different role on the team. Aric was the most honest and straightforward member of the regular military that Heinlein met at the beginning of his career, but he had failed to imagine that most of the original Havoc Squad was planning to defect. He represents someone who is perfectly content with the norms of the group to which he belongs and thus for whom questionsPage 139 → of freedom versus control do not naturally arise. At one point, he expresses resentment that Heinlein promoted Dorne to be second in command, rather than himself. But then Heinlein helped him rescue members of Aric’s prior unit, the Deadeyes, from Imperial bases in remote and hazardous locations on Tatooine and Hoth. The Deadeyes had been pawns in a plot by the Republic’s intelligence service, so this mission arc ended with both Heinlein and Aric even more distrustful of Republic leadership, yet trusting each other completely.

Tanno Vik in contrast was totally amoral and sinister, but his expertise in explosive demolition made him a valued assistant by reason of technical competence. He had joined the military merely to escape Nar Shaddaa and did everything possible to evade the rules imposed on him by military service. He exploited Heinlein, using him as cover to shield him from retaliation for the extortion, thievery, and outright murder he committed in pursuit of money. Yuun came from a species so alien he could not breathe the same air as Heinlein, and yet he was totally honest, reliable, and modest, serving as the team’s intellectual, and technically competent but in more peaceful ways than Tanno. He was a Findesman among the Gand, able to discover the path to a worthy goal through perception and analysis. The Gand are a hive mind species, and most members do not even have individual names. As a Findesman discovers his own path, however, he becomes a separate person, gains a name, and ascends a ladder of levels of ever-greater ability. Yuun provides a subtle cognitive definition of freedom, because by finding a path he is liberated, and yet the path must be discovered, not created. As Asimov was half human and half machine, his companion Vector was half human and half insect. On the planet Alderaan, where the Empire and Republic were exploiting the ongoing competition between rival feudal houses of humans, there also existed a humanoid insect species called the Killiks. Intelligent but possessing a hive mind, most Killiks had long ago left Alderaan and established nests on unknown distant planets, leaving behind just a few nests in remote areas. The term vector is used in epidemiology to refer to any agent that transmits an infection, such as a mosquito that carries disease from one animal to another. Thus it seems an appropriate name for Vector, who was the human Imperial ambassador to the Killiks, seeking to form an alliance with them as with some of the human houses of Alderaan. Pheromone chemicals, which were central to Killik social life as well as their technology, transformed him into a member of a Killik nest. The only physical sign was the fact his eyes had turned black, but in speaking he always used the pronoun “we” rather than “I.” After Page 140 →joining Asimov’s crew, his story consisted of two ambassadorial successes, developing the beginning of a formal alliance between the Killiks and the Empire, and re-establishing contact with the long-lost Killik nests that had voyaged far across the galaxy. Bester’s two male alien companions, Xalek and Khem Val, were both brutish monsters, but quite different in the complexity of their tales. They also differ in that Xalek was a Sith-like wielder of the Force, whereas Khem Val was resistant to Force powers and wished to destroy all Force wielders, Bester included. Xalek’s Kaleesh are a reptilian species, cold-blooded in all senses of the term. Kaleesh believe that they can become gods at death if they have fought well and gained sufficient power. Xalek’s story is the shortest of any of the twenty regular companions I studied closely, chiefly consisting of brief chats about how he and Bester could both become gods. One hint of sentimentality was when he left briefly to bury his father, uncertain whether dad was powerful enough to become a god, but knowing that without the proper burial he would have no chance. Bester gained Khem Val as his first companion on Korriban by liberating him from a stasis field, where he had been imprisoned for centuries. His species, the Dashade, had been rendered nearly extinct by the Great Sith War, and with their Force resistance were natural enemies of Sith as well as Jedi. But Khem Val had become the assistant to a Sith lord named Tulak Hord despite his natural antipathy to Sith, and in the previous chapter we learned he later was possessed by the departed spirit of Zash. Xalek’s dull story postpones any issues about freedom to the afterlife, while Khem Val’s intense story paints every moment as a struggle against control.

Droids Three droids can be full SWTOR companions, two others can perform crew skills but not do much else, a few mission givers are droids, and many enemies fall into that category as well. They illustrate interesting issues about freedom and control, because droids—or robots as they are called outside the Star Wars mythos—are humanoid machines and thus under greater apparent control than are people. As we saw in the previous chapter, the fact that Asimov was a cyborg human with added machine parts gave his struggle for freedom added challenges. Cyborg means cybernetic organism, and originally the technical term cybernetics meant exactly the science of control systems.

Page 141 →Conventional Robots T7-O1, the first companion for a Jedi knight like Burroughs, is an astromech droid very similar to R2-D2 from the movies and speaks with beeps, which we however can understand because they are displayed on the screen as ordinary written text. His likes are “Jedi, morally correct actions, and defeating the Empire,” while his dislikes are “bullying, killing innocents, and disrespecting authority.” The life story he tells as he gains affection concerns worries that he may not have been a perfect servant for his prior owners. M1–4X, the male war droid who is Heinlein’s third companion, speaks with a resonant male voice, constantly expressing enthusiasm for the Republic and optimism about his own ability to serve it well. His likes are “destroying the Republic’s enemies, pro-Republic messages, and courage,” while his dislikes are “anything against the Republic’s goals.” His story is not a reminiscence but is increasingly implausible reports about how well he is doing in special missions combating the enemies of the Republic. T7-O1 is shaped like a squarish version of R2-D2, as one might expect for an earlier model of the same general type, while M1–4X looks like a football player with huge shoulder pads but constructed from plumbing. Both are enthusiastic and competent servants because that is what they were constructed and programmed to be. The Fourth Law of Robotics Earlier we considered the Three Laws of Robotics proposed by Isaac Asimov way back in 1942 that set constraints on the freedom of robots, binding them to ethical principles that serve the benefit of human beings. Five years later, science fiction writer Jack Williamson wrote a story, titled The Humanoids in its book-length form, that turned these principles on their head.7 Highly advanced robots had been programmed to do everything possible to preserve humans from danger, and the net result was that they seized control over society, forced humans to avoid taking any kinds of risks, and thus threatened the extinction of humanity. This leads me to suggest a Fourth Law of Robotics: 4. Robots must never develop intellect superior to that of humans, or attempt to decide what is in the best interests of human beings. SCORPIO, Asimov’s fifth companion, is a different story altogether, possessing total contempt for all living beings and seeking only to increase her Page 142 →own capabilities to the point of infinite knowledge and ability to dominate biological organisms. She has evolved one step beyond Williamson’s humanoids, no longer considering human needs even from their distorted viewpoint. While M1–4X speaks with a normal human male voice, SCORPIO’s voice is a computer-distorted female voice, sounding erotic but radioactive. Her likes are “learning and gaining new tech, selfishness, and killing threats,” and her dislikes are “self-sacrifice, duty, and wastefulness.” Wookieepedia provides some of her backstory: At some point, Scorpio was recruited by the secret conspiracy known as the Star Cabal. She was tasked with safeguarding their vault at Megasecurity Ward 23 located on the planet of Belsavis. Her mission was to protect the variety of weapons, technology and other valuables that the Cabal kept at this underground vault. During this time, the droid was referred to as the Scorpio Sanctions. Her integration into the machinery allowed her complete access to the contents of the ward and she kept its secrecy as well as maintained the contents.8 Her goal is absolute self-improvement. Ignoring the slight detail that Asimov had control over her, she asserts that she already is far superior to any biological being. The Four Laws of Robotics are not part of her main program. If she could, she would destroy humans with no regret. Her story does reveal some adjustment to her relationship with Asimov, however. With his help she uploads herself into the Imperial archives so she will have far more memory capacity and power and achieve evolution to an even higher level of function. While inside the archive, she transmits a hologram of herself to Asimov, appearing as a sensitive human woman rather than the silvery statue that is her normal form. At the end of this episode, she decides that further personal evolution requires her to accompany Asimov on his missions, at least for the time being.

Asimov also had a small collection of very different droids. In combat, he could use one interrogation droid that circles the enemy for 18 seconds doing 2120 damage. For defense, he had the option of using a shield probe that absorbs damage for 15 seconds or, to increase his ability to use advanced weapons, an adrenaline probe could recover 50 units of energy over three seconds, and he could even arrange to have both of these small probe spheres circling him briefly in opposite directions. A training droid sphere can be sent to circle an enemy for 30 seconds, doing no damage but marking the target. When Asimov used the healing command “recuperate”Page 143 → immediately after combat, a small spherical droid levitated a meter in front of his face and projected a holo-interface on which he uses his right hand to scroll through several data files with pictures of faces, perhaps checking the database a member of the Imperial intelligence service would have. He also had a Collector’s Edition Minimech mouse droid pet, a cute little device that scooted along the floor and accompanied him in safe areas, vulnerable to enemies and incapable of fighting back if attacked. All four main SWTOR characters faced many enemy droids, of varying lethality and appearance. The Robot Heritage Artificial humans have been imagined since the first doll was made tens of thousands of years ago. Hephaestus, the Greek god of technology, built metal automatons to work in his divine forge. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 story “The Sandman” has a neurotic young man commit suicide after falling in love with a robot girl, and this story was set to music in LГ©o Delibes’s 1870 ballet CoppГ©lia and Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann.9 Robots abound in L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, notably Dorothy’s mechanical friend Tik-Tok.10 No major religious tradition explicitly addresses the spiritual status of artificial intelligences, unless perhaps the golem of Jewish folklore qualifies as a kind of robot. There has been much discussion, however, of the possibility that Japanese enthusiasm for robots may reflect the animism of Shinto or pantheistic sentiments in Buddhism that conceptualize all reality as having spiritual dimensions. In contrast, the monotheistic Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition appears to draw a clear line between the soulless material world and the spirituality of supernatural beings that possess free will and moral responsibility. We do not actually have good social scientific data to test these ideas, but it is plausible to suggest that East Asian religions are more favorably oriented toward robots than are Western religions. The case was most clearly made by Japanese robotics pioneer Masahiro Mori, who argued: The robot’s relationship to me is like my relationship to the Buddha. I, like all other human beings, was created by the Buddha (by the Void). Every movement of my hands or feet, every blink of my eyelids, is the result of the Buddha’s will. There is no way in which a human being’s body or mind can separate itself even momentarily from the Buddha’s laws. To express it differently, men are appearancesPage 144 → brought into being by the Void.В .В .В . How is it with machines? Reason dictates that they too must be “appearances brought into being by the Void.” .В .В . Specifically, since I myself was created by the Buddha, the machines and robots that I design must also be created by the Buddha.11 In his critical book about Yoga and Zen, The Lotus and the Robot, Arthur Koestler saw a very different connection between Asian religion and robotics: Religious beliefs and rituals can dehumanize people and turn them into the traditional stereotypes of robots that lack creativity or full self-awareness.12 He suggested this is particularly true of Asian religions that he thought seek to escape the world of the flesh, notably Zen Buddhism, which is a Japanese variant that takes Buddhist detachment to its logical extreme. Whether through meditation, years of dedication to an often tyrannical Zen master, or the study of paradoxical parables, one of the goals is to achieve no-mind. This mental state can be defined naively as the peaceful lack of anxiety and self-consciousness, more moderately as an unconflicted openness to experience, or more radically as the destruction of the self altogether. Numerous science fiction authors have compared future robots with humans, largely unencumbered by religious conceptions and thus foreshadowing a possible future secular culture. In so doing, they have developed a model of human spirit that is simultaneously humanistic and atheistic. Karel Capek’s 1920 drama R. U. R. is an allegory of the class struggle in which robots represent the oppressed working class who have gone into revolt and are in the process of exterminating the ruling-class humans.13 This was the literary work that introduced the word

robot, derived from the common Slavic word for work, and thus meaning a worker who at least initially lacks all free will, but that might liberate itself through revolution. At the end of the play, there is a hint that once they have become free, the robots will become human. Until recently, it was reasonable to assume that artificial intelligences would be mechanical in the sense of operating in a rigid manner with no semblance of free will. In the mid-1980s, however, computer scientists developed effective neural networks, as well as other techniques of machine learning and parallel processing methods like genetic algorithms, that were far more subtle in their operation.14 Visionary Ray Kurzweil has argued that in the future machines and humans could merge into a future species, advanced both spiritually as well as intellectually.15 Robert M. Geraci has surveyed the considerable literature, both scholarly essays and fiction stories,Page 145 → that explore the possibility that humans will feel that advanced computers are godlike.16 Yet inside the Star Wars mythos, droids cannot be Force wielders, and nearly all humanoid characters deny personhood to them. Luke Skywalker’s affection for R2-D2 was a sign of how atypical he was both as a Jedi and as a citizen of the galaxy. While the movies treat the two droids as central characters, capable of expressing emotions and building emotional links with the audience, the overwhelming majority of the people in the movies fail to accord droids any sympathy. They are considered machines, not persons, neither possessing nor deserving freedom.

Crew Skills There are 14 different crew skills in SWTOR—comparable to professions in other MMOs—but one character can practice only 3, so my four high-level characters ignored 2, armortech and armstech, which seemed the most prosaic. Gathering skills harvest resources from the environment, whereas mission skills send members of the main character’s crew off on simple quests that pay off in terms of other kinds of resources. Crafting skills use the resources from the two other kinds of skills to make useful virtual items. The top experience level for crew skills was originally 400, and I achieved that level in all 12. To the extent possible, the skills were selected to harmonize with the particular science fiction author. Asimov, for example, was a biochemist in real life, so naturally he practiced bioanalysis and biochem. Diplomacy does seem to match Asimov’s personality, but it also harvests resources useful for biochem, so it completed his triad of skills. This skill set is the best example for consideration here. All four gathering skills allow a player to take resources from nodes in the environment, which may be guarded by an enemy but are themselves inactive. While he roamed planetary wildernesses, Asimov always kept his eye open for medical plants on which he could exercise his bioanalysis skills and gain raw materials for his biochem crafting, but a main source was the bodies of beasts he killed. Diplomacy, like other mission skills, sends companions away on missions that the player does not see. As soon as Asimov had Kaliyo as his first companion, she would accompany him on regular missions. Simultaneously but unseen, his ship droid 2V-R8 could do one of the first diplomacy missions. When logging out of SWTOR, I could send both Kaliyo and 2V-R8 on separate diplomacy missions, which they would have finished when next I logged in. More such missions became available as Asimov’s diplomacy skills increased, and at level 50 in Page 146 →general experience he could send as many as five companions at once. Each diplomacy mission costs money, more costly the higher it is, and it is entirely text-based, beginning with a brief paragraph and ending with a sentence reporting results. Here are two at the extreme high end of the spectrum: Neutrality is Relative 26 minutes, 31 seconds Cost: 2,125 energy credits The Noonar Confederacy holds a key stretch of territory between the Republic and the Empire, but its policy is one of pacifism. Send your companion to twist its leaders into granting military access. Rich yield: rank 5 companion gifts; Dark Side points

Using the System 1 hour, 1 minute, 12 seconds Cost 1,780 energy credits The parliament of Illodia will soon host elections, and a number of Imperial sympathizers are up for seats. Send your companion to help them get into office. Abundant yield: grade 6 medical supplies; Light Side points. The diplomacy interface window would offer a selection among as many as a half-dozen such missions at a selected difficulty range, and Asimov could select one, based on cost and likely return. The companion gifts might or might not be wanted by any given companion, but Asimov could mail the gifts he did not need to one of my other research characters. The medical supplies could be used in his crafting skill, biochem, which manufactures medicines. Note that the first of the two missions above rewards Asimov with Dark Side points, and the second with Light Side points, depending upon the style of diplomacy. Asimov liked to joke that of all four main characters, he had the strongest Light Side score, 7,558 to Heinlein’s 6,277. But he also had the strongest Dark Side score, 7,557 to Bester’s 6,050. Indeed, the way he amassed all these points was through diplomacy, and the way he wound up with exactly one more Light Side point than Dark Side points was by carefully selecting the right diplomacy missions. The trios of crew skills possessed by Burroughs (archaeology, treasure hunting, and artifice) and Heinlein (scavenging, investigation, and cybertech) were similar to Asimov’s, although frankly his seemed more useful.Page 147 → Bester was the only one of the quartet whose three crew skills did not fit together well: slicing, underworld trading, and synthweaving. Thus he illustrates the various ways characters could help each other with crafting. The reason was that somebody had to do slicing, one of the four gathering skills, and since it was a form of burglary, he seemed the right man for the job. Slicing primarily gathers money, in the form of credits used by the economy, but not the resources needed for synthweaving, the crafting skill that seemed best for an Imperial Force wielder. Synthweaving requires resources gained through archaeology, the gathering skill Burroughs practiced, and through underworld trading, the mission skill Bester had. For a time Bester was able to count on Burroughs for archaeology resources, trading him Imperial secrets for them. But then the Great Implosion began, a population collapse that will be described below, and Burroughs moved from Kath Hound to the Ebon Hawk server, leaving Bester behind. The Worst of Times The galactic market on Kath Hound was practically empty because the population had been low for many weeks. After checking it several times, Bester realized he would never get the resources he needed from it. Given that he was a thoroughly selfish person, Bester had never bothered to join a guild. Now he joined one named the Dark Order in order to have trading partners. This was a Sith-oriented guild and thus theoretically composed of monsters like himself, but he discovered that it actually was a very nice group of friends, none of whom charged him very much for resources they happened to have. A couple did not even want him to pay them, feeling that guild members should always help each other. This is one of the ironies of role-playing games. Often the nicest people play the nastiest characters, but their niceness often bubbles up through their sinister facade. Resources from the guild took Bester up about 150 of the 400 steps of skill advancement in synthweaving, but he doubted they could take him all the way to 400, and the Great Implosion disrupted the guild as members began migrating. Once Bester had moved to Ebon Hawk, he had access to a well-stocked market, through which he could buy most raw materials at affordable prices. But when he reached the point at which all the crafting recipes required many hypertech artifact fragments, he discovered to his dismay that none at all were available in the market for several days running. His guild had not completed its migration from Kath Hound, so fellow members could not help. In Star Wars Galaxies, if Algorithma Teq lacked an essential Page 148 →resource, she could not make something that required it, but she usually could make something else that required different resources, thereby moving her

crafting experience forward. But in Star Wars: The Old Republic, at each level of progress in developing skill, some resources were essential to make anything, and as Bester was passing up through skill levels just above 300, he had no choice but to obtain hypertech artifact fragments. For the first time in weeks Bester was on the same server as Burroughs, who had the archaeology skill required to gather hypertech artifact fragments, but Burroughs possessed none and thus had to voyage to Belsavis into the gloomy Tombs area, where the resource could be found but was thinly distributed across a wide area. Heinlein joined the effort by sending Burroughs enough money to pay for the training required to ride a speeder, so Burroughs got his first opportunity to zoom around on one of these levitating vehicles, watching his map for evidence of nearby resources and trying to avoid enemies along the route. Synthweaving also required some resources from Bester’s mission skill, underworld trading, but often he used that to obtain gifts for companions, mainly to trade with my other three characters. Each underworld trading mission costs credits anyway, so he began buying them from other players through the Galactic Market. Economic exchange was only one of many ways in which game-operated companions could substitute for other players in completing many kinds of missions. One big difference was that companions and NPCs were always available, but partnering with other players became very difficult when the population of SWTOR dropped significantly.

The Great Implosion When SWTOR launched with a reported 1.7 million accounts, much hope was expressed that its population would increase, but after the first month the numbers began to decline. As the “multiplayer” part of the name clearly implies, MMOs intend players to partner with each other, and that certainly is the case for SWTOR. But four related design features worked against partnering with other players. First, the heavy emphasis on cutscenes telling the game’s many stories weighed against some kinds of partnerships. For example, only one player of a given class could enter class-specific instances under the default preference settings, yet partners who did not belong to the class might not feel they gained to the same degree by doing the quest. For example, four Jedi knights might want to do a Page 149 →Jedi mission together but would be discouraged from doing so. It was possible to check a box in the preference window that let more than one Jedi enter the instance, but this would cause a less-than-ideal dramatic scene, since it was designed to show just one Jedi conversing with NPCs. Second, because the action was heavily instanced, people had less opportunity to come into contact with each other. A search tool allows a player to see a list of all other players in the same faction on the same planet, and I used it for the censuses reported here, but that is not the same as knowing who is nearby. In World of Warcraft, for example, which uses instances only for special “dungeon” group activities, the environment is open, and one has the opportunity to cooperate with strangers repeatedly, developing sufficient mutual trust to become “friends” and for one to invite the other to join a guild. That informal relationship building is more difficult in SWTOR. Of course once a guild has been set up, then it can function well, which means formal relations are not disadvantaged as much as informal relationships are, which is another way of saying there is more emphasis on control over the player in SWTOR. Third, the cutscenes were numerous and long, and many players found the dialogue uninteresting. A solo player could simply hit the space bar repeatedly to zoom past the voice acting, but a team might disagree about whether they wanted to savor the philosophical text that delighted players with literary interests but bored people who were more action-oriented. As the descendant of Knights of the Old Republic, SWTOR retains the flavor of a solo-player game in its story presentation. Fourth, the emphasis on visually complex environments meant that some fraction of the players were using machines with minimum technical capabilities, which made them less efficient in combat and thus worse partners. Before I switched from a low-end machine to a high-end machine, I found that some environments caused more lag than others, and, as the forums verified, these tended to be places where there were many other players. As the months passed and significant improvements for low-end machines did not seem to be introduced, presumably most players with minimally acceptable machines quit playing. This suggests a powerful feedback factor affecting

partnerships between players, namely the population density of players per planet. Demographic Shifts Players can usefully cooperate only if their characters are at roughly the same level of experience, so the experience distribution is important for Page 150 →social interaction, in addition to the overall population. Table 6.1 shows the distribution of characters on the Kath Hound server on the first four Sundays after SWTOR’s launch. Since level 50 was the experience cap, once characters reach it they tend to collect, so that level is given its own row in the table. The remaining 49 levels are conveniently arranged here in 7 groups of 7. As with most MMOs, the early levels can be completed quickly, while later levels take increasingly longer. I typically was able to get characters to level 7 in one evening, while later on each level takes much of an entire afternoon. In analyzing the patterns in table 6.1, we can suggest meaningful interpretations that illuminate the dynamics of MMO populations without really being able to test competing hypotheses against each other. For example, the population of the survey increases from December 25 to January 1, which could represent the early influx of new players. More likely, I think, is that December 25 is Christmas and many players would have had family obligations that day, whereas January 1 was New Years Day, a holiday but with few ritual obligations. The two later censuses were done on ordinary Sundays, but it seems plausible that the lower population compared with January 1 could really reflect a tapering off of the original excitement in the days following SWTOR’s launch, reaching a stable level of around 1,660. The pattern of percentages across the experience levels shows two things. First, as we would obviously expect, players are working to ascend the experience levels over the span of time covered by the table. Even nearing the end of the first month since the December 20 launch, few had gotten past level 35. Second, even at that point significant fractions are at the lowest levels. These could partly represent latecomers who had only just started the game, but for the population to be stable at the last two censuses,Page 151 → many of the higher-level characters would need to be playing less advanced second or third characters. Table 6.1. Changing Character Distribution across Experience Levels Levels Dec 25 Jan 1 Jan 8 Jan 15 1–7 25.6% 16.2% 10.1% 9.7% 8–14 38.7% 30.6% 22.3% 21.0% 9–21 26.6% 27.7% 27.0% 23.0% 22–28 7.9% 16.0% 19.9% 18.2% 29–35 1.1% 6.6% 12.6% 13.9% 36–42 0.0% 2.5% 5.5% 7.9% 43–49 0.1% 0.4% 2.1% 4.1% 50 0.0% 0.2% 0.4% 2.2% Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% Players 1,038 1,836 1,658 1,663 One reason players often start a second character early in their time in an MMO is because they are experimenting with different classes and learning the game system. Given the importance of Jedi knights in Star Wars, I wanted to put my emphasis on Burroughs, but at first I spent a good deal of time with Heinlein, learning the game mechanics and figuring out the best ways to capture useful data, running Burroughs only when I was confident about what he had to do. After leaving their different starting planets, Burroughs and Heinlein often did the same quests, one several days before the other. Repeating quests with different characters can be good for players in general; the second time they can perform better because of what they learned, but waiting too long between repeats could cause them to forget. So for a while Heinlein went first, then Burroughs passed him after I understood the gameplay, reaching level 50 first. As in several other MMOs, resting a character gives a temporary

experience bonus later on for each defeat of an enemy, and in SWTOR this was maximized by leaving one character in a cantina until that character was well-rested, running others instead. At level 10, characters can begin crafting, so after that point there can be an advantage to running multiple characters with different skills, trading useful products with each other via the in-game mail system. Reasonably successful MMOs often lose subscribers after the first few months, and some players would be in multiple MMOs as well, investing less of their time in SWTOR after the early excitement wore off. As the spring of 2012 approached, the population of Kath Hound began to decline rapidly. Both Burroughs and Heinlein belonged to guilds, but often they would be the only members online. On June 12, SWTOR announced that characters could be transferred for free from some low-population servers to designated higher-population servers. My four characters were on Kath Hound, one of the low-population servers, and Ebon Hawk was the one destination server to which they could transfer. Migration Kath Hound was not one of the first wave of low-population servers to be included, but during the afternoon of Tuesday, June 12, a message appeared in the text chat offering free transfers to Ebon Hawk, the most densely populated East Coast server dedicated to player-versus-environmentPage 152 → role playing. Within two hours, I had transferred Asimov and Burroughs, leaving Bester and Heinlein on Kath Hound so I could watch the process from both sides. At 7 p.m., before many characters could have been transferred, I did a census, which showed there were 181 players on Kath Hound, compared with 902 on Ebon Hawk. By Sunday, June 17, at 4 p.m., the migration had progressed far, and there were only 87 players on Kath Hound, compared with 3,115 on Ebon Hawk, which at that level was listed as “full” at the login screen. Naturally, much of the influx to Ebon Hawk had come from servers other than Kath Hound, namely Shien, Rubat Crystal, Lord Adraas, and Sanctum of the Exalted, which were of the same type and time zone. After another week, at 4 p.m. on June 24, Kath Hound’s population stood at 71, while that of Ebon Hawk was 2,733. Table 6.2 compares the distributions of characters across the experience levels, using data from the June 12 and 17 censuses. The first thing to notice is that on June 12, nearly six months after SWTOR launched and essentially all active players would have reached level 50 at least once, only 14.9 percent of Kath Hound players were at level 50, compared with 40.8 percent of Ebon Hawk players. On a high-population server there were far more opportunities for player-versus-player combat, including in battlegrounds where large numbers of players in the two factions could battle each other. When they were not fighting, the players might be working to acquire better armor and weapons or socializing with fellow guild members. Thus, players who liked PvP, or players who belonged to cohesive groups of friends who wanted to keep their characters together, might stay at level 50. Acquiring better equipment is much easier if the population of the server is high enough to support an active market for crafting and selling. For all these reasons, low population on a server discourages continuing to run a level 50 character. Players who are particularly oriented toward the stories in SWTOR would quit running a character once its story had been completed. Some solo players consider reaching level 50 to be winning the game and might quit SWTOR at that point. The more story-oriented players would start a new character from level 1, in a different class to experience a different story. They might run their level character a while at level 50, for example to complete the stories of their character’s companions or to get good enough equipment to succeed in completing Chapter 3, at that time the final part of the story arc for their main character. But often they would concentrate on a new lowlevel character, revisiting their level 50 character only occasionally. Page 153 →The second thing to notice in table 6.2 is that on both servers the fraction of players running level 50 characters dropped, from 14.9 percent to 2.3 percent on Kath Hound and from 40.8 percent to 34.2 percent on Ebon Hawk. From the ethnographic research carried out by Bester and described below, we know that an occasional guild on a low-population server decided to stay where it was, but given the logic that level 50 characters do better on a high-population server, it was reasonable for more of them to move. Also, as I myself experienced, a solo player who cares about story often does better, or at least as well, on a low-population server,

because other players are not competing for resources like enemies to kill and crafting materials to gather. Such players would be distributed across all experience levels. The drop in the percentage at level 50 on Ebon Hawk simply reflects the fact that migrants coming from low-population servers tended to be below level 50. Yes, those level 50 characters that did exist on low-population servers were more likely to migrate, but they were few enough relative to lower-level characters that the level distribution on Ebon Hawk shifted downward. Player Reactions In the forums, a Jawa named Muskaan warned, “If you DON’T transfer, your toon will get thrown into the sarlacc pit in Tatooine and you will be slowly digested over a thousand years.” But initially, the Dark Order, to which Bester belonged, elected not to leave Kath Hound. The leadership of this guild asked for ideas, and Bester suggested sending representatives to the other eastern US role-playing servers to encourage their guilds to join Page 154 →the Dark Order on Kath Hound, building the population so it could rival Ebon Hawk, thereby convincing BioWare to make it a destination server as well. There was no proof BioWare was open to this idea, and indeed the forums were filled with complaints about the Great Implosion, notably the lack of information, the lack of freedom to select one’s own destination server perhaps at some cost, and the lack of clarity about what would happen to players who refused to move. Table 6.2. Populations of Source and Destination Servers During Migration Kath Hound Ebon Hawk Levels June 12 June 17 June 12 June 17 1–7 3.9% 11.5% 6.2% 4.6% 8–14 13.3% 14.9% 8.5% 10.7% 9–21 16.0% 17.2% 10.2% 11.4% 22–28 14.4% 17.2% 8.9% 11.4% 29–35 12.7% 11.5% 10.2% 10.1% 36–42 13.8% 17.2% 6.8% 8.8% 43–49 11.0% 8.0% 8.4% 8.9% 50 14.9% 2.3% 40.8% 34.2% Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% Players 181 87 902 3,115 Encouraged by the Dark Order leadership, I created additional characters on three of the similar servers—Shien, Lord Adraas, and Rubat Crystal—posting messages like, “Take control of your fate! On Kath Hound, start a new toon and join The Dark Order led by Barra and Suna. Together we can resist forced transfers—maybe even become a destination for all who resist the tyranny of Ebon Hawk!” On Shien, Bester’s identical twin joined a fine guild named the Renegades, which also resisted migration. On the Lord Adraas and Rubat Crystal servers, I sent messages like, “Hail, heroes! I am a representative of The Dark Order on Kath Hound, seeking an alliance. Is there a viable guild still operating here? We have formed an alliance with The Renegades on Shien, to resist pressure to go to Ebon Hawk, even to force creation of a new destination server, lower population and more free. The leaders of The Dark Order on Kath Hound are Barra and Suna, and on Shien the leader of The Renegades is Nalyd. In those galaxies I am called Bester.” Nalyd posted a defiant message on the website of the Renegades: Ladies and Gentlemen, a crisis is upon us. Populations are thinning and there is fear that we may be uprooted. The Renegades are strong, and we will not be defeated so easily. The Renegades are NOT transferring. The Renegades will stay together no matter what. I will stay with Shien server until the very end. If Shien server is to be destroyed, then we will regroup somewhere else. I want to ride this out though. If Shien gets people transferring into the server, imagine what opportunity that gives the

Renegades. A well established guild on a growing population server.В .В .В . But if this does not happen and we must regroup on another server, and if you wish to stay in the guild, sign up on the website. SIGN UP ON THE WEBSITE! That way I can give everyone invites back into a recreated guild on the new server. I will be posting updates as soon as I learn new information. I will inform everyone on the website what server we will be regrouping to if that is our last resort. Thank you for your time. Long live the Renegades.17

Page 155 →Bester did not, however, find a third guild for the alliance, and BioWare announced it was locking all the low-population servers down so that players who had not already done so could not create characters on them. The Dark Order and the Renegades began the difficult process of moving to Ebon Hawk. A guild and its bank could not be moved, so new guilds needed to be created on the destination server. Many characters lost their names because other players already had them, so furious communications through the in-game text chat and on the two guilds’ websites were required for coordination. Bester reconnected with the Dark Order, under its new name, the Order of Darkness. Asimov joined the Renegades, beginning with a marvelous reorganizational meeting in a hangar at a Dromund Kaas spaceport, in which he practiced flying off high ledges in his speeder and listening with rapt attention as Nalyd and his lieutenants spoke words of encouragement from the high wingtip of a spaceship. Both Bester and Asimov had their last contact with their guilds at 3 p.m. on August 26, 2012, simply logging into the database to do a census. The Order of Darkness had 61 members, 22 of whom had been online in the past 24 hours. The Renegades had 62 members, only 9 of which had been online in the past 24 hours, but this reflected the fact that the guild’s leadership was attending Star Wars Celebration VI in Orlando, Florida, on August 23–26, which called itself “the biggest party this side of the galaxy.”18 So both guilds had successfully managed the difficult migration forced upon them by the Great Implosion.

Conclusion When individuals bond together into a group, each loses individual freedom but is empowered through the group to gain greater collective freedom.19 Thus the availability of real versus virtual partners is a key determinant of the pattern of freedoms and controls experienced by any person. As my main phase of research was coming to an end, SWTOR had begun a painful transition to a limited free-to-play economic model, and it was not yet clear if the loss of players had ceased. Innumerable blogs and forums criticized SWTOR for overestimating the ability of a story-oriented MMO to hold its audience and for failing to rival World of Warcraft in the number of subscribers. With the exception of a couple of special events, no new story content was added during the eight months of primary research, but when Makeb was added sixteen months after SWTOR’s launch, a degree of population stability was apparent. Much of the online criticism accused Page 156 →SWTOR of being a solo-player game dressed up as an MMO and of relying too heavily upon the Star Wars mythos to give it popular appeal. Neither Star Wars Galaxies nor Star Wars: The Old Republic was a failure, however, and each was perhaps the best popular exemplar of one extreme type of MMO, an open-world sandbox and a drama-scripted theme park. Yet neither was a stunning success, and their problematic reception suggested that perhaps a futuristic mythos from the twentieth century was no longer as psychologically liberating now that a new century was far advanced.

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7. To Boldly Go Star Trek Online takes place in our own stellar neighborhood in the year 2409, and thus offers a vision of our own future, far more obviously relevant to our real world than the mythical past depicted in the two Star Wars MMOs. Before they are anything else, computer games are a business. During the period I studied it, Star Trek Online (STO) beautifully exemplified many of the issues faced by its industry during a period of transition. The economic issues most intimately related to the central theme of this book are two: (1) how players are induced to pay the producer for the products and services it provides, and (2) how the producers create an environment in which players can be of maximum benefit for each other. In particular, STO was evolving from a traditional subscription model of long-term profit making to a mixed economy based largely on purchase of virtual goods and services. At the same time, STO was encouraging players to provide more of the goods and services for each other.

Where No One Has Gone The tensions between control and freedom in Star Trek are most obviously reflected in the military authority of Starfleet, which provides a basis of contrast for the individual decisions that energize most episodes. But there is a second important dimension of control that most viewers may not notice and that marks Star Trek as very different from the first generation of science fiction TV programs: Hardly any stories take place inside our own solar system. Thus, STO does not depict our actual future, but an idealized one in which interstellar travel is a metaphor for liberation rather than a realistic description of a technically feasible freedom. Exactly the opposite was true for Captain Video, Space Cadet, and Space Patrol, fifteen years before Star Trek first broadcast, which primarily concerned adventures inside our own solar system and involved both exploration and the challenges of achieving cooperation among human colonists. Page 158 →Outside the Solar System In 1967, I was one of the Star Trek fans who sent away for a copy of “The Star Trek Guide” that Gene Roddenberry had written to instruct authors on the principles that would guide them in writing good scripts. It stresses the importance of good dramas about people, set in a future world that emphasizes the symbolism of science without being constrained by too many rigorous scientific details. Many of those people will belong to alien species, and the humans tend to be found on spaceships and space stations and will also constitute most of the crew of the main ship or station in the particular series. There are four possible explanations for the avoidance of our own solar system. First of all, when Star Trek first aired, space probes like the Mariner missions to Mars and Venus were beginning to explore our solar system without any human crews and giving the general public a correct impression that the solar system was inhospitable to human life. Second, the stories take place at a point in the history of space flight when colonization of the solar system had already been completed, so episodes about it would have been anachronistic. Third, for sake of variety, many episodes involved novel but human-friendly settings, each of which needed to be depicted independently of most others, so the canvas for this art had to be a large section of the galaxy, not our limited solar system. Fourth, Gene Roddenberry wanted to explore serious intellectual issues at a time when the television industry was narrowly controlled by three conservative commercial networks, even as the wider society of the 1960s was awash in radicalism. Thus he was forced to place the stories at a considerable poetic distance. In the 1967 guide for authors, he responded to a question about what Earth is like in the Star Trek era: For one thing, we’ll never take a story back there and therefore don’t expect to get into subjects which would create great problems, technical and otherwise. The “U.S.S.” on our ship designation stands for “United Space Ship”—indicating (without troublesome specifics) that mankind has found some unity on Earth, perhaps at long last even peace. If you require a statement such as one that Earth cities of the future are splendidly planned with fifty-mile parkland strips around them, fine. But television today simply will not let us get into details of Earth’s politics of STAR

TREK’S century; for example, which socio-economic system ultimately worked out best.1

Page 159 →Star Trek Online adds another dimension of control derived from the television programs, namely structuring everything in terms of episodes, which limits the use of almost every planetary setting to the mission that takes place there. It is quite different from both of the two Star Wars MMOs because it lacks open territories on planets that may be visited by any character at the right level of experience. In addition, the two original factions, Starfleet and Klingons, were asymmetrical, with far more missions designed for Starfleet. There are a number of space stations containing vendors and other facilities, notably three prominent ones for Starfleet: Earth Spacedock, Deep Space Nine, and Memory Alpha. Starfleet has one open ground area, Starfleet Academy just outside San Francisco, and part of the capital city of the Klingon Empire on the planet Qo’noS can be visited by Klingon characters. Many other areas open up temporarily during missions, but only for the players doing that mission together: small areas of planetary surfaces, rooms and corridors in space stations and ships, and the interplanetary space of solar systems. Given STO’s complex differences with the Star Wars MMOs, this chapter will cover the character system and the game mechanics of Star Trek Online, and the next chapter will cover the missions, emphasizing the many player-created missions using STO’s Foundry system. Both chapters stress the complex tension between freedom and control in STO and in the wider Star Trek mythos. Here the focus is on the degrees of freedom accorded the player’s characters in a complex yet constraining technical and economic system. The next chapter concerns the freedom to experience and even create stories, seeking a balance between the assumptions of the Star Trek universe and the player’s own preferences. Star Trek follows a very different tradition from that of Star Wars, in many respects far more egalitarian, sophisticated, and complex. For example, in his book The Meaning of Star Trek, Thomas Richards observes, “Star Trek differs vastly from the fantasies of most other science fiction in removing a deterministic structure from most of its stories. In the Star Wars movies Luke Skywalker is driven to act out his destiny as a Jedi knight.”2 A key theme of this book is the tension between freedom versus control, and Richards says that Luke lacked the freedom given to many Star Trek characters. Perhaps even more salient, most Star Wars characters are mere bit players, or extras, lacking any personal significance, let alone freedom, whereas many Star Trek characters play meaningful roles in their own personal dramas, although usually within a single one-hour episode. Game designers at Cryptic Studios, however, had great difficulty translating the Page 160 →Star Trek ethos into their own medium because of ordinary gamers’ tendency to love violent conflict. Outside America While the prominence of Japan in the videogame industry has meant that the industry has long been international, increased globalization has produced increased competition, with new entrants to the market constantly exploring new strategies. This rapidly changing situation was dramatized in 2011, when Cryptic Studios and thus Star Trek Online were purchased by a Chinese company, Perfect World Entertainment (PWE), that had already achieved high technical quality and market share with its MMOs in China and was now aggressively entering the international marketplace. As of September 2012, this company’s English-language website listed 14 MMOs, including STO, and three years later the total was 20. Its corporate strategy clearly involves getting players to become loyal to a suite of games, rather than to just one. Central to the PWE philosophy is allowing people to play the games for free, at least at the lower levels of experience, and making much of its money by selling virtual goods for use in the game, for example armor and weapons that would benefit the player’s character. PWE is not alone in this, and I had earlier experienced it with the American game company Turbine, which was acquired by the Warner conglomerate in 2010. First, I played Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online, which required buying the game and then paying a monthly subscription, which was the traditional payment method used, for example, by World of Warcraft. Then I explored Turbine’s other high-quality fantasy game, Dungeons and Dragons Online, trying its alternative free-to-play system and quickly finding that I could not advance far without buying many small game expansion packs and

magic potions. Before long, Turbine had moved Lord of the Rings Online over to the same payment system. One term used for the newer payment systems is freemium, a contraction of free and premium. In some cases, the game is free, but it is possible to buy various nonessential things. When STO launched, it required a subscription, but it also allowed players to buy pretty uniforms and other cosmetic enhancements that served no real function, paid for with Cryptic points, which could be bought for dollars. Dungeons and Dragons Online illustrated the opposite extreme, sometimes called pay-to-win, in which the free part was really just a free trial, after which one either had to subscribe or purchase many expensive virtual goods inside the game. Thus, an importantPage 161 → issue is the changing economic system of STO, which interacts in complex ways with the theme of freedom versus control. MMOs are expensive to create; they enlist artists and writers as well as computer programmers in the work. In order to hold its paying customers, the game company needs to provide new content, but prior to its purchase by PWE, STO simply did not have the money to add much, and commentators were quite vocal about how the game seemed to have stalled creatively. In several of its games, Cryptic has sought to deal with this problem by giving the subscribers tools with which to make their own missions, and STO’s Foundry will be the central theme of the following chapter. However good they are, player-created missions are highly instanced, existing only as small subgames within the larger game. Thus one hope when ownership of STO moved to China was that PWE would invest in producing some new content. I completed my main research before the ownership transition had been fully implemented, so in the summer of 2013 I returned briefly to check out major changes. In the original game it was possible to play as a Klingon character, opposed to the United Federation of Planets and thus unable to play any of the missions that assumed the player belonged to Starfleet. Cryptic had not created many missions for the Klingons, who started at level 25 of the original 45 (or later 50) experience levels and thus completely lacked early stories and training. On May 21, 2013, a major expansion of STO added a third faction, beyond the original Starfleet and Klingons, the Romulans. At the same time, the experience ladder for Klingons was completed, so I created a new Klingon, named Roddengene after Gene Roddenberry, and took him up to level 10 to verify that indeed substantial new material had been added. Thus, the Chinese purchase of this American game did seem to give it new life in the form of a stable financial basis. Before getting deeply into economic issues, however, it is important to understand the way the player is represented inside STO, not only through a primary avatar but also through secondary avatars. The economy then provides a transition from focusing on the individual player to the interactions with other players.

Cosmic Avatars To study Star Trek Online thoroughly, I ran four characters up to the maximum experience level cap, just as I had done for the two Star Wars MMOs. Each member of this quartet had a specific function for my research. Two Page 162 →explored in detail the mythos and society of the United Federation of Planets, one immediately after STO launched early in 2010 and the other eighteen months later when STO was mature and moving into its freemium phase. Naturally, I also needed a Klingon character because the Klingons face a very different cultural situation involving many different missions. These three were on the primary cluster of servers, Holodeck, and my fourth character explored Tribble, the test server where innovations were perfected prior to being instituted on Holodeck. Four Functions This time I decided to go more deeply than I had done in SWG into the meanings that characters can have and the various ways they may relate to the gameworld and to their owners. My SWTOR research had employed science fiction authors to connect the gameworld to the science fiction heritage, but this time I sought deeper abstraction. Here the Hindu religious term avatar may be especially appropriate, because each of the four represents a cosmic principle and one even represents a deceased member of my own family. While there are many ways to classify

avatars—at least as many are there are theories of human personality and social interaction—the following four categories constitute the reasonable ontology that I used in STO, with the names of my four avatars in parentheses: 1. Mythic: An avatar designed to explore the pre-existing symbolism of the gameworld. (Rho Xi) 2. Cultural: An avatar that symbolically links the mythos to related stories in the same general tradition. (Korbette) 3. Functional: An avatar that expresses one particular set of issues in the gameworld’s mechanics. (Paupera) 4. Transubstantial: An avatar that represents a real human being whose life harmonizes with the mythos. (John Bainbridge) There were aspects of all four in the eight Star Wars characters, with varying emphasis from one to another. Simula Tion was primarily mythic, while Algorithma Teq was functional, and the four SWTOR characters were cultural. But each STO avatar primarily represented one of the four categories. The first avatar I created, Rho Xi, a male Federation science officer, was designed to explore a part of the Star Trek mythos featured in the Deep Space Nine series: the complex situation experienced by the Bajorans. Thus to introducePage 163 → the mythos we can look closely at this avatar before more briefly introducing the other three. Ambivalent Science Bajorans were deeply committed to their traditional religion, which was based on a set of ancient Prophecies, so Rho Xi experienced some inner tension when he became a progress-oriented science officer. Peter Linford has pointed out, “Belief in the Prophecies is regarded as important not for an understanding of the universe, but as a mechanism by which Bajoran lives are given meaning.” He derives from this theorem the following corollary: “Believers must first convince others that it is necessary to have belief, and then that their own beliefs are the correct ones.”3 Psychologists might well argue that this logical framework does not fit the facts of human cognition, which begins with a large number of concrete memories and only derives general principles after a painful process of cognitive consolidation.4 Yet Linford’s logic is interesting here because it seems to assume a three-stage process of free decision making: (1) whether or not to require the universe to have meaning, (2) given that the universe does not clearly announce its meaning, whether or not to become a believer despite the lack of empirical evidence, and (3) which of several competing meaning systems to adopt for oneself. Bajoran beliefs have been transmitted from ancient times, so every newborn Bajoran has been taught the beliefs from infancy and does not really have these choices. In the Deep Space Nine mythos, the Prophets really did exist, but non-Bajorans understand them to be an advanced intelligent species from elsewhere in the galaxy rather than truly supernatural. Thus, for Rho Xi, who was drawn to the science of the Vulcans and Humans, there is a choice about how to consider the Prophets, one that might undercut the ability of Bajoran beliefs to infuse the universe with transcendent meaning. Furthermore, Rho Xi is in direct contact with many other sets of beliefs, imported from other cultures, a situation from which some earlier generations of Bajorans were insulated. Over history, Bajoran beliefs had, however, faced challenges. One was the alternative cult inspired by a different set of extra-Bajoran prophets, the Pah-wraiths. In a book on the religious implications of Star Trek, William Cassidy wrote, “Deep Space Nine presents the Pah-wraiths as parallels to Christian understanding of Satan and his league.”5 Thus they introduced evil into the world, opposing but not contradicting the standard beliefs. Page 164 →The same happened when the Cardassians conquered Bajor, imposing their will by brute force rather than converting Bajorans to Cardassian beliefs. But now that Bajor is free again, it finds itself embedded in a cosmopolitan universe, in which myriads of other belief systems may be chosen to provide meaning. Rho Xi’s response was the standard one in Star Trek, to boldly go where Bajorans have never gone before and seek knowledge with the hope it would eventually lead to meaning.

The Science Class As in most other MMOS, the key decision in creating a new character is what class it will belong to. In STO, there were three: science officer, tactical officer, and engineering officer. Within each class, during the early years of STO, there were three subclasses called professions or careers. During my research, the system of developing officer skills changed, but as ideal types of functional roles they provide a reasonably clear conceptualization. The online STO instruction manual said the goal of the science class was to “support your friends with buffs and heals while weakening your enemies.”6 By January 2012, the webpage footnoted in the previous sentence had been removed and instead one found this rather imperious message: “HALT CADET! You’ve entered an area of the ship that no longer exists or has been warped to another dimension. Better head back before you end up lost in the Delta Quadrant.” The now unobtainable online instruction manual said that members of the scientist profession within the science class could “support their allies by weakening enemies they come in contact with.” Those in the Researcher profession “can keep control in most any combat situation, while the Doctors are “responsible for keeping their team mates in tip top medical condition.” After the simplification of classes there still were choices within each of three classes, but they were not presented as distinct career paths. At that point the STO wiki described the functions of the three classes in the two kinds of missions, those in outer space, where players were represented as the ships they were piloting, and those ground missions on the surface of a planet or in a space station, where the player was represented by a humanoid avatar:7 Science: Space: Utilize technology to control and evade enemies, ensnare an enemy ship with a tractor beam, find cloaked ships, and even use holoprojectors to confuse enemies. Page 165 →Ground: Weakening or incapacitating the enemy over time, creating energy fields that damage or hinder and healing their away team from such effects. Engineering: Space: Help in reducing the amount of damage done to your ship, repair systems quickly, and even do things not in the Starfleet Operations Manual. Ground: Survivability, support generators, and controlling the paths of enemy advance with fieldworks. Tactical: Space: Increase the damage done by a ship, providing the ability to fire salvos of torpedoes and overload energy weapons for a massive attack. Ground: Make the most out of any weapon, and be able to mix it up in melee combat better than anyone. Like the two Star Wars MMOs, STO has an in-game system for finding other players whose class would help complete a team, but it offers less information and appears to have a limit on how many players of each rank can be displayed. I discovered this limitation when I was tabulating characters by rank from a census I had done around 8 p.m. on January 4, 2012, just before the switch to free-to-play began. I was surprised to see that there were 101 engineering vice admirals, 101 science vice admirals, and 101 tactical vice admirals. Setting aside the issue that Starfleet seems to have far too many admirals, the exact same number could not be a coincidence. Like many systems in traditional computer science, STO counts several things starting from 0 rather than 1. For example, having a rank called ensign that is level 0 of experience, whereas all characters in the Star Wars MMOs begin at level 1. So, apparently 101 is the equivalent of 100 in the Star Trek universe, and the search halted after 100.

Therefore, to get a picture of class distribution, I ignored the admirals and tabulated the 967 characters of lower rank. The warrior-like tactical class was most popular, with 45.5 percent of the total. Engineering came second with 31.2 percent, and science came in last with 23.3 percent. The system seemed designed for Starfleet, not for the Klingons, so this is the distribution across three classes within Starfleet. Given that Star Trek is science fiction, it is interesting that science officers are least common, whereas the tactical officers, who are comparable to traditional military personnel, Page 166 →are most common in this combat-oriented MMO. The three career paths can be tallied, but their functional differences are not as meaningful as they might be. The systems for gaining skills within each path were complex, changed during the time of this research, and probably were not wellunderstood by many players. In addition, the career path of the player’s main avatar was limited in its effect because STO included teams of secondary avatars that often balanced it. The three paths of officers differed cosmetically in terms of the color of uniform worn, which followed the original Star Trek tradition: blue for science officers, gold for engineers, and red for tactical officers. The ships they could best command had some differences in performance as well as in appearance: science vessels for scientists, cruisers for engineers, and escort vessels for tactical officers. Whatever the differences, clearly my four avatars would need to cover all three classes. I selected the science class for Rho Xi for symbolic rather than strategic reasons; while operating him I could ponder the meaning of science, especially in the context of Bajoran religion. Completing the Research Team The second primary avatar, Korbette, was a Klingon named after Corbett, the character at the center of the science fiction television program, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Until Kathryn Janeway took command in the 1995–2001 series Star Trek: Voyager, women almost never held command positions in science fiction military organizations, let alone in the real-world military, but Klingon women are at least as fierce as human men. So by imagining that Korbette was a female reincarnation of Tom Corbett, I accomplished two things. First, I made the cultural connection already noted in these pages to the science fiction television tradition to which Star Trek belonged, starting with the children’s programs like Space Cadet. Second, I raised the feminist issue of why space cadets were traditionally considered to be boys or men, when girls and women had equal intelligence and ability to function in bureaucratic organizations, while the greater body size of males is of no value in outer space. Given the violent temperament of Klingons, Korbette had to be a tactical officer. The third avatar, created while STO was moving to a free-to-play economic system, was a female poor person named Paupera to symbolize functional issues in the games and the real world. Given that workers in our society can gain status through technical skills, I made her an engineer. The transubstantial fourth avatar, a male tactical officer in the Federation, Page 167 →was John Seaman Bainbridge, named and patterned after my deceased uncle, who I felt would really have made an excellent Starfleet officer. He had commanded warships of the US Navy, the inspiration for Starfleet, and for a decade had headed an organization that supported the development of law schools in sub-Saharan Africa, a transcultural project that the United Federation of Planets would have respected.8 He essentially succeeded Rho Xi as my main character in the United Federation of Planets, with a special responsibility to complete at least 100 missions that had been created by other players, as featured in the following chapter.

Secondary Avatars Recent massively multiplayer online games are prototyping methods through which users can interact with multiple semiautonomous agent assistants, what I call secondary avatars.9 While the artificial intelligence of these agents is very simple, their behavior in groups and in complex situations can provide insights into how future mixed-initiative intelligent systems may function in many realms of activity. In addition to Star Trek Online, I have studied two other MMOs in which the player may operate multiple secondary avatars separately from each other, Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO), and Guild Wars (GW), both of which are in the fantasy genre rather than science fiction. Both City of Heroes and Age of Conan also allowed some classes to operate multiple secondary characters, but they were operated through simpler controls and tended to function as a unit.

Semiautonomous Agents The droids created by Algorithma Teq in SWG functioned very much as machines, doing what they were told and lacking much individuality. In contrast, the companions in SWTOR were fully developed characters, even the ones depicted as droids. This was shown by the fact they had proper names the player could not change, and it was shown through their own distinctive story lines and their personal values from which they judged the behavior of the player. The most important secondary avatars in STO were different from both, at least as complex in behavior as those in SWTOR but possessing a different form of individuality, for example having whatever names the player chose to give them. These were the bridge officers, who would accompany the primary avatar on landbased away missions, perform distinct functions when the player’s ship was in action, and even Page 168 →be visible on the bridge when the player sent the primary avatar inside the player’s ship. The games’ AI systems possess primitive machine learning, as the secondaries concentrate on the enemies that have done the most damage to them. The systems appear also to be hierarchical, because especially in STO secondaries seem often to choose at random among the actions available to them, but respond with the correct action when approached or attacked by an enemy or when they notice that a team member needs healing. These agents are semiautonomous, and the user may set the degree of autonomy of any secondary as events require. DDO, GW, and STO place a great premium on a good user interface because decisions must be made quickly, whereas much future use of semiautonomous agents may take place over much longer periods of time and thus provide more scope for advanced machine learning. On the level of the team, if not that of the individual agent, these games already represent highly intelligent systems. Many top-quality MMOs allow some kinds of characters to have a single assistant. The main character represents the player directly and thus is the primary avatar. The secondary is a pet or minion conceptualized as helping the primary but also controlled to some extent by the player. The droids Algorithma built in Star Wars Galaxies were the first example we have already seen, an especially good example of the social aspect of secondaries because she gave two droids to Socio. All SWG avatars can operate droids, typically using icons that can be placed on a hotbar, either all arranged on one command bar or interspersed with other commands. For example, positioned on the same command bar as his own special attacks, Socio had the two icons to summon his super battle droid and to make it attack the enemy he had selected with his mouse. This bar also had the icon for his speederbike, so he could switch back and forth between these two mutually exclusive assistants with a single click. Conceptually, droids are a good example of the mechanistic symbolism for secondary avatars, because they are machines, just as the speederbike is. In SWG, a player can operate only one machine at a time, whether it is a droid, a vehicle, or something else. The goal of single secondary avatars clearly is to extend the range of activities a player can experience, but they are never essential to succeeding on a mission. The fantasy MMO Dungeons and Dragons Online places a great emphasis on team play, and many missions cannot be completed solo. Many players, however, prefer solo play, and any player might often find that no other players were prepared at the moment to do a particular team mission. Therefore, DDO offers artificial intelligence mercenaries, called hirelings, Page 169 →who must be rented, either with virtual coins earned by completing missions inside DDO, or with points that must be bought in an online store for real dollars. For each DDO hireling there is a hotbar holding 10 icons, and clicking one either gives a specific command or sets the general behavior of the agent. Four of these are actions that only the particular hireling can perform. For example, a cleric may have 1 icon to give significant healing to a selected wounded ally and another one to give minor healing to all members of the party. Six icons are the same for all hirelings: (1) toggles between standing still or following the primary avatar, (2) summons the hireling to the avatar, even over a long distance, (3) sets the hireling to behave autonomously, (4) responds only if it or the primary avatar is attacked (defensive mode), (5) does nothing (passive mode), and (6) interacts with a target such as the lever that opens a door. While DDO hirelings can be controlled in complex ways and the player can decide which ones to hire for a given mission, they cannot be customized by the player. Each has its own name, a class comparable to that of another

player, and particular built-in strengths and weaknesses. Thus it is conceptualized as a separate person from the player, rather like the already-defined characters in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, not to mention the companions in SWTOR. Guild Wars has a similar system, offering well-defined and already-named assistants, but it does not require payment for them, except that each of them takes a fraction of the virtual loot obtained from enemy NPCs. In one of its expansions, however, GW added hero assistants that could be customized and operated very much like a second primary avatar. Its successor game, the highly acclaimed Guild Wars 2, abandoned this complex system of secondary avatars, perhaps because its virtual territories were far more open and players could encounter each other easily and become partners, and because it included many sudden events that occurred apparently at random and attracted players who happened to be nearby to cooperate in responding to these challenges. Starfleet Teammates As a heavily instanced game like DDO, despite interface tools to help players cooperate, Star Trek Online had to deal with the fact that players would often do missions in partnership with secondaries rather than with other players. As explained in the game’s instruction manual, it provided much greater freedom in assembling crews than did SWTOR: Page 170 →Your Bridge Officers are completely customizable members of your crew that grant your ship unique and powerful abilities. They also form the backbone of your away team when you’re on the ground. As you level your character your Bridge Officers earn points to level with you. When you have leveled up an officer enough, you have the chance to promote your Bridge Officer. The higher the officer’s rank, the more of their abilities you unlock, and the more of their abilities you will have access to in space and on the ground.10 Since Bridge Officers can have unique skills, they may be more complementary to one Captain’s play style than another’s. As such, you may transfer Bridge Officers to other players in exchange for their Officers or other goods and services.11 Star Trek Online chiefly takes place in outer space, as fleets of spaceships battle each other, but some away missions take crews of five characters to the surface of a planet or inside a ship. A mission begins when the player’s ship enters a solar system, and STO automatically assembles players into teams if they have not already teamed up with friends and if other players are starting the mission at roughly the same time. When this does not happen, the team is completed by secondary avatars conceptualized as officers from the bridge of the player’s ship. By the time he became an admiral, Rho Xi had fully ten of these bridge officers, but only used subsets from just five he had trained and outfitted with good equipment: Thuvia (Andorian female tactical officer), Marx (Ferengi male tactical officer), Tonga (Trill female engineering officer), Flash (Human male engineering officer), and Azura (Vulcan female science officer). Each secondary avatar has four special abilities, in addition to using whatever weapon it carries, and here are the descriptions of Thuvia’s abilities, adapted from STO’s wiki before the changes at the beginning of 2012 removed this information:12 Suppressing Fire: Slows down and reduces the damage caused by an enemy. Leg Sweep: A short-distance attack with a high chance of knocking back any nearby foes. Photon Grenade: Throws an explosive grenade at the target.

Page 171 →Fire on my Mark: Reduces the enemy target’s resistance against damage. It is important to understand that operating STO secondary avatars involves much end-user programming, although not generally conceptualized as such because it is done by clicking or dragging icons. The user decides which of several possible abilities each bridge officer will have and what weapons, armor, and special equipment they will carry. Over time, the player spends points earned in the game to train each crew member with appropriate abilities for his or her class, but with a good deal of freedom to customize. In action, the hotbars for the four secondaries have icons representing the four abilities of each, and clicking one removes it from the list of actions the secondary can perform, putting the emphasis on the others. Unlike the situation in SWTOR, where control over a companion is limited to the actions they can perform, an STO player can tell each secondary to go to a particular location within the field of view, or send all four to the same spot, something that was also possible in City of Heroes. When encountering a group of enemies in STO, the user can leave the secondaries free to respond to the situation autonomously, control each one in detail, or—what often is best—have them all attack the same enemy officer to remove him from action quickly and then respond autonomously as the combat unfolds. Visually, the result is exceedingly complex, especially as many of the actions taken by engineers set up equipment that then functions autonomously.

Personhood The ability to name crew members not only symbolizes their independent existence as persons but adds to the freedom the player enjoys to shape a personal STO experience. During a battle, it is practically impossible to consider the personalities of secondaries, simply because the action is too intense. But while training and equipping them, when deciding which ones to take on a mission, and at quiet times during a mission, the player is free to take them seriously. I often contemplated what one or another of my secondaries might have said about a situation we faced, and I had a backstory in mind for each of them. Page 172 →The First Federation Team I chose the five names of Rho Xi’s main crew members carefully. Thuvia is the name of the heroine in Thuvia, Maid of Mars, the fourth of the Barsoom novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.13 She is sometimes described as the first female character in science fiction who was really autonomous, rather than merely being the object of a male hero’s desire. The novel about her contains an extensive glossary, giving some terms of the Martian language, listing key characters, and generally providing verisimilitude, as if Barsoom were a real place. Thus, for me, Thuvia symbolizes the desire for science fiction to become real, as it nearly does in virtual gameworlds. When I decided to recruit a Ferengi crew member, I naturally thought of the distinctive way the members of this alien race were depicted in Star Trek. They are greedy merchants, hucksters, capitalists, and connivers whose only moral code is the Rules of Acquisition. For a Ferengi to become a loyal assistant, he would need to undergo a major cultural transformation, so I named him Marx after Karl Marx, the prophet (not profit) of Communism. I tend to think that Marxism was Capitalism turned on its head rather than being a really new economic system following its own principles. Whether I am right in this judgment or not, a player may use the identity of a secondary avatar to express an idea the player happens to favor. Flash, of course, is Flash Gordon. Azura is the powerful female ruler of the red planet in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars. Until near the very end of this 1938 serial, she is an ally of Ming the Merciless, the villain of all three Flash Gordon serials, but she is independent from him and possesses great power, described as magic but possibly the result of arcane technology. Like Thuvia, she has a strong and independent personality, suggesting that the women of Mars were thoroughly liberated long before the women of Earth. Near the end of the serial, she is killed by Ming and redeems herself with her dying words, so I imagined that had she lived she could have turned her magical powers to healing. Tonga was a character from the early 1950s science fiction television program Space Patrol. She was the Lady of Diamonds, who started out as a villainess but transformed into a technically

competent member of the team that supported Buzz Corey, the main hero, fully able to be a female engineer.14 Azura and Tonga represent some of the ways science fiction grappled with gender roles, initially conferring power to traditional feminine roles, then contemplating transcendence of those roles. Page 173 →The Three Other Teams The other primary research characters were also accompanied by secondaries given meaningful identities. Since Korbette was based on Tom Corbett, she was accompanied by secondaries representing the two other crew members, a man simply named Astro and a woman named Rogera to represent a feminine version of Roger Manning. It is a remarkable fact that the actors who played Tom Corbett (Frankie Thomas) and Roger Manning (Jan Merlin) both are published novelists.15 Thomas wrote novels about Sherlock Holmes, and Merlin’s own identity links to British fiction because his original last name was Wasylewski before he assumed the professional name of the mythical wizard. Thomas also wrote and took organizational leadership roles in the subculture of players of the card game, bridge, and when he died in 2006 he was buried wearing his Space Cadet uniform. It is hard to imagine more powerful statements of the intimate connections between fantasy and reality, games and life. Korbette’s crew was completed by Tarkas and Tara, two characters from the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarkas was the green Martian man represented in STO by an equally green Orion. Tara was the daughter of the Earthman, John Carter, and the Marswoman, Dejah Thoris. Like Korbette herself, Astro, Rogera, and Tara were Klingons, essentially human beings with slightly exotic features. John Bainbridge’s secondaries consisted of his brother, father, and two uncles, memorializing the real family John represented. Paupera’s crew, given the chaotic nature of the Tribble test server, were the four horsemen of the apocalypse—Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death—using pestilence rather than a more authentic alternative because I was thinking of the dismal future described by Thomas Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population.16 Given that pestilence invokes the principles of biology, epidemiology, and demography, Pestilence was naturally the science officer. War had to be a tactical officer. As a dedicated engineer, Paupera wanted her team to emphasize engineering, so both Famine and Death were engineers. Paupera’s team illustrates how a group of secondaries can have a functional theme, in its case technology. Her standard way of fighting inside caverns and fortresses was to find a group of the enemy but not engage them. She would back up a short distance into a passageway and tell her two engineers to place two barriers of land mines on the ground, plus two automatic phaser turret guns. Then she would back them up a little further, Page 174 →set up a medical generator to provide a modest healing benefit, and order them to stand their ground at that point. Then she would carefully step forward within range of the nearest enemy and fire one shot, after which she would run back to join her team. The enemies would run after her but step on the land mines and take shots from the turret guns, arriving within range of her team already in damaged condition, at which point she and her four secondaries would finish them off. John and Rho followed a simpler but well-organized approach, typically in a tight phalanx of five Starfleet officers, using no weapons other than handguns but standing close together so that if one were hurt and fell unconscious, another member of the team could revive the fallen comrade. Neither John nor Rho was especially adept at using the layout of the environment to military advantage, as Paupera certainly was, but they did sometimes position themselves so that some of the enemy were at first blocked from firing at them, for example around a corner or on the other side of storage crates. Korbette, being an easily enraged Klingon, had little use for tactics. Her team simply assaulted the enemy quickly, in no particular formation, counting on speed to win the day for them.

Pets and Minor Secondaries Among the most famous episodes of the original Star Trek series was “The Trouble with Tribbles,” which aired December 29, 1967. Tribbles are kitten-sized furry animals with no visible features except for hair and a tendency to delight humans. Vulcans find them quite uninteresting, whereas Klingons loathe them. As detailed in

the STO chapter of my earlier book The Virtual Future, a great variety of tribbles are available in STO, can breed to produce different baby tribbles depending upon what the parents are fed, and can confer a modest improvement to one of a character’s ground combat parameters.17 If a tribble is placed in a storage slot of either a primary or secondary character, the character can take the tribble out, stroke it, and gain this modest buff. Four tribbles were treated differently and qualified as valuable pets, so John added all four to his collection. On February 14, 2012, John decided to add a Tribble of Borg to his collection, but the cheapest of the three offered for sale through the STO auction system cost 4,900,000 energy credits, and he only had 186,544. He had already bought several other pets through the auction system, and despite having much lower prices they had exhausted his savings account. A Tribble of Borg could, however, be purchased for 240 Cryptic points through Page 175 →STO’s in-game store, where such points could be bought for ordinary dollars, and at that point I had 1,320 of them, which I had gained simply by maintaining my traditional subscription. For the same price, John also could buy a Golden Tribble, more technically called a Polygeminus grex Rivera, or a Fluidic Space Tribble. While tribbles were useful, other pets, sometimes called vanity pets because they expressed a player’s style or companions because they merely accompanied the main character while he or she walked around public space stations, were not. No-nonsense Klingon that she was, Korbette possessed only one pet, a targ pup, the size of a small dog but looking a little like a wild boar, that trotted alongside her. Klingon non-player characters often used adult targs in battle, and she liked to say her targ would be a great military asset when it grew up. But it never did get any bigger, and privately she loved it because it was cute. John developed a complete collection of all the pets available to him. One of these was an exocomp robot that lacked arms or legs and merely levitated near the main character. In the 1992 Next Generation episode “The Quality of Life,” an exocomp raised the frequently discussed issue of whether smart artificial intelligence devices should be considered lifeforms, but STO exocomps are very stupid.18 In principle, they could solve problems, but actually they never did and merely showed off the player’s techy style to passersby. When John’s collection was complete, it also included a doglike Sehlat cub, not very different from Korbette’s targ, plus four different kinds of horta. In “The Devil in the Dark,” the March 9, 1967, episode of the original series, the horta was a life form similar to a rock and thoroughly misunderstood by miners for whom it was a nuisance or a danger.19 John was never exactly sure how his hortas differed except in appearance: a gleaming eisilium crystal horta, a sulfur-fuming polytrinic acid horta, a purplish dilithium horta, and the original horta that looked like a crawling lump of molten lava. Two pets were small spacecraft that would accompany John’s main ship, but only one at a time, so he could not achieve the three-ship minimum to have a traditional “fleet.” One was a type-8 shuttlecraft and the other was a Danube Runabout, each of which could also be obtained as a free-flying craft, but which then could not be flown simultaneously with one of John’s main craft. Perhaps the most striking of John’s pets was his Gekli, a flounder-shaped space fish the size of a shuttle that would swim alongside his ship. While they could be bought in the in-game store for 240 Cryptic points, John bought his through the auction system for 200,000 energy credits. Such creatures first entered Star Trek lore in the 1991 Next Page 176 →Generation episode “Galaxy’s Child,” in which the Enterprise accidentally killed a mother of this species just as she was about to give birth, leaving them with the challenge of taking care of this alien baby.20 But John’s Gekli neither demanded attention, nor offered help, during any space adventure they might share.

Fleets of Players In MMOs, relationships with other players are important, and as we have seen both Star Wars games had guilds. In Star Trek Online they are called fleets, but several features of the game render them less important except at the very highest levels of experience, when much of the action may switch to mass space battles and player-versusplayer combat. A theory we cannot definitely test now but is worth mentioning concerns the long-term effect of moving to a free-to-play system. This may work out well economically for the game operators, but in the case of Perfect World Entertainment the strategy is to have a suite of games, with the expectation that many players will

constantly switch back and forth from one to another, over time operating a large number of characters that exist simultaneously in multiple gameworlds. The result may be less commitment to any one of them and thus less commitment to any group of fellow players. In China, players often sit together in gaming cafes, so virtual teams may often be groups of real-life friends. But the Western habit of initially playing solo then developing friends online and joining a long-lasting guild may not work well in the free-to-play context. Three Fleets For research purposes, I affiliated my three Holodeck characters with fleets. In the early phase of research, when STO fleets were especially unstable, Rho Xi belonged to a couple, but in the second phase of research he joined a well-established fleet, the 1701st Renegade Tactical Squadron. The number 1701 is quite familiar to Star Trek fans; it is the serial number of the original starship Enterprise. The group’s website explains its orientation: FLEET PRIME DIRECTIVE: 1701st RTS is a mature but casual Fleet. Our core values include team work, a positive attitude, respectfulness, and most of all, having a good time in game. We welcome those Page 177 →who want to succeed and bring prestige to the fleet. Our Fleet has 3 main requirements: 1. Always communicate with other Fleet members who speak to you directly. Teamspeak is highly recommended and is a free download at: press here> Teamspeak