Repeat after me: Gary Gygax. Again: Gary Gygax. If you know who Gygax is, you’re probably smiling; if not, here’s a clue: Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the fantasy role-playing game that rocked the gaming scene in the 1970s and ’80s. You know, best board game e-v-e-r: nerds impersonating elves and dwarves stranded in a dungeon in the quest for loot and experience points. Gygax created it in 1974 and became
one of the most prominent figures of a fandom (“fan kingdom”) made of acne and escapism, devoted to comic books, video games, choose your own adventure books, polyhedral dice, wargames and Marauder miniatures.
Having said that, please accept my condo- lences if you were not a child at the time. If you are still lost, let’s drop some more terms (raise your hand if you get one). How about Interactive Fiction (IF), Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), Massive Multiplayer Online Role- Playing Game (MMORPG)? Nothing yet? How about Facebook? Oh yes, now we are talking, aren’t we?
Then let’s start from the end: Facebook is the most massive computer role-playing game ever created. In it, you don’t impersonate a ba- dass dark elf warrior named Drizzt Do’Urden anymore; instead, you just impersonate your- self. But, you still do it according to a set of invisible rules created a long time ago to drive interactive drama.
Mark Zuckerberg’s online social network is the ultimate dungeon. Now, there is an epic journey that needs to be told to connect Gygax and Zuckerberg, one of paranoia and advertising in the era of the Internet. It goes something like this: Once upon a time there was the character sheet, a piece of paper filled with the stats of your mighty warrior: name, race, class, level, abilities, skills. This was a way of describing identity: I’m a level 5 warrior dwarf with a +5 bonus when at- tacking with an axe, for instance. Every at- tribute was quantified, even the personality. Gygax named the latter the “alignment” of the character, a categorization of the ethical and moral values that constituted the axis of your impersonation—that is, who you were and what decisions were you able to make in order to be coherent. Needless to say, you needed a huge amount of time, not only to play but just to read the core rulebook and fill out the character sheet. You also needed friends to join you, especially someone to play Dungeon Master, the person who cre- ated the adventures you and your friends would play out. Pencils, paper, time, friends and dice—that’s all you needed. Oh, and a calculator: there were a lot of bonuses and charts to apply whenever you wanted to do anything in the game.
Computer RPG’s saved a lot of time for players. You didn’t need to throw dice and calculate all the variables of an action anymore. An Apple II would do that tiresome calcula- tion for you. Popular video-game series such as Ultima, created by Richard Garriott (a.k.a. Lord British), managed to introduce the alignment of a character as a key gameplay feature of the game, too. This is the case with Ultima
IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985), in which the player struggled with ethical conundrums that branched the plot in different tracks.
Wait, did I say Avatar? Mind you, this is one of the first times the word was used to refer to a virtual character. Now, in the Internet era, we use avatars constantly; it is a common term, although most people don’t know that it originally referred to the terrestrial incarnation of a god. Lord British put theology into play by calling Avatar the character of his game: the incarnation of the player in a virtual scenario. Avatar’s quest for virtue and the balance of the world would be the intersection where gaming, impersonation and media ran into each other. It was the mid-’80s, way before the Internet arrived in every subur- ban home. All the pieces of the puzzle were just waiting for something big to happen. And boy, did it: Advertising happened.
In the ’90s, the Internet was like Craigslist, the Yellow Pages, and the British Encyclopedia had an affair together; it was the Tower of Babel sponsored by the porn industry—that is, virtually incoherent. Until Larry Page and Sergei Brin came out with the Google search engine in 1998, looking for stuff was just painful. The turning point was a new approach on how to browse the web. Google doesn’t care about what’s in a webpage; rather, it cares how many times a website is referred to by others according to what you are searching. Basically, Google gives you a snapshot of the web every- one is talking about on a given topic. Of course, that makes advertising placement way more accurate, so, wouldn’t it be great if people just gave up loads information about themselves? That way internet browsing could be even more personalized, along with advertisement. Now, the problem would be to convince people to do that for free. Well, welcome to Facebook.
Facebook is, essentially, a sophisticated RPG character sheet. A set of game rules come into play in how you manage your profile. There is a friend pool that you need to increase at a conve- nient pace, a lot of pictures that you have to tag, a lot of content to like and share; each of these tiny decisions you make represents who you are (or what your alignment is). That is the game; that has always been the game: to create an accurate Avatar, your perfect incarnation in a virtual world. Gamification is the pedantic term that applies when gameplay mechanics are adopted to make tedious tasks more palatable. Facebook fosters a playful notion of the world where networking is always a joyful opportunity to find yourself, to achieve happiness and prove it in every single picture of you. Everything, as in any RPG, has been conveniently converted into stats and friends to earn, and Facebook itself provides the space to act out adventures according to these variables. A world of gamified advertising that becomes more palatable as it responds to your ever-expanding character sheet and is delivered directly to your wall? Welcome to the new Dungeon.
Pablo R. Balbontin studied Philosophy and Literary Theory in Spain, then moved to the U.S. to write a dissertation on Spanish litera- ture and media.
I’ve been fighting this viewpoint for some time…and now I’ve read it from someone else’s lips and all I can say is that I hate you. I feel dirty now…I’m gonna leave and go see if I can wash this horrible feeling off with paint thinner or something equally volatile.