Chapter 1: Introduction (Mastery and the Mobile Future of Massively Multiplayer Games)

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs) are one of the fastest growing segments of the gaming industry. The current leading MMO, World of Warcraft, has 8.5 million subscribers (Cohen). The game is a $600m industry unto itself. Unlike traditional video games that support only one or several players, MMOs involve hundreds or thousands of players logging into a central server so they can all play in the same virtual world. These worlds have their own economies, transportation systems, social networks, and many other features that make them interesting to play, create, and study.

Games on cell phones (I'll refer to cell phones simply as mobile) are growing quickly, too. There are many more cell phones in the world than PCs or gaming consoles. In Japan, there are even more cell phones connecting to the Internet than PCs (Wireless Watch Japan ). Almost everyone who subscribes to an MMO also has a cell phone. Most people in major developing countries like India and China can't afford PCs or consoles, yet many of them are getting cell phones. These people will have their first experience of a video game on their cell phone.

My question for this thesis is what game design opportunities do we create when we extend MMOs to cell phones? Briefly, MMOs let players construct selves based on mastery, and cell phones allow players to access and inhabit those selves more fully.

What does extending MMOs to cell phones mean? Many of the first games brought to cell phones were ports (copies) of existing console games. Ports are generally inferior to the games from which they are copied. I'm not suggesting porting MMOs to cell phones. I'm suggesting figuring out what it is about cell phones that makes them the best platform for a certain kind of gaming, and then bringing those strengths to a cross-platform MMO that can be played on at least PC and mobile (and maybe console). Many people happily play existing MMOs on PCs. How can we design mobile windows into those virtual worlds that will entice these players to play differently and on multiple platforms? Many mobile game players won't have access to PCs. They will have mobile-only MMOs (e.g. Pocket Kingdom for the N-Gage ). I'm not focusing on mobile-only MMOs because cross-platform MMOs have more potential, and I think when these developing countries reach a certain point, many people will start acquiring PCs or whatever replaces PCs in the future. At that point, mobile-only MMO players will want their mobile MMOs extended to PCs, or, more likely, will leave their existing MMO for one that's already built for cross-platform play. In other words, in 10 years the cross-platform MMO market will be massive, and at the moment it's merely very large.

MMOs allow us to create representations of our own increasing mastery, and mobile gives us better access to this mastery and allows us to integrate it more fully into the ways we see ourselves. The rest of the thesis will examine what this means and identify the implications. First, consider mastery outside of games and how it serves to motivate.

Stories of Mastery

When I was young, I didn't like school. My dislike stemmed from a feeling that my education wasn't under my control. I couldn't choose my subjects or my teachers or my classmates or when or where I studied. If I got inspired about a subject I was learning in school, I couldn't spend the whole week in that class. These may seem like small sacrifices, but in aggregate I thought of myself as someone who goes to school because he does what he's told. After years of sitting in history classes, math classes, and science classes, I did not think of myself as a historian or a mathematician or a scientist. I thought of myself as someone who sits in history and math and science classes, and this role of one-who-sits-in-on did not feel good. Needless to say, at the end of the school day, I disrobed that self as fast as I could.

When I entered high school, I got my first computer. I played with the computer, learning how it worked experimentally. I enjoyed learning to do new things with it, because I was curious and because increasing my skill represented visible growth. I couldn't do something before and now I could. If the thing I could now do was useful, friends and family might ask me how to do it. This allowed me to show off my growth in a socially relevant context. I soon became, and enjoyed being, the expert.

Meanwhile, back in school, I was writing five and seven paragraph essays about subjects that lacked personal and social relevancy. The essays only existed so my teacher could grade me. I didn't enjoy writing. However, I did enjoy learning about computer technology, and after I designed my first website I needed some content to put on it. So, I started writing reviews of all of the computer games I played. These reviews had relevancy and an audience. As I realized people were reading the reviews, I wanted to make a good impression. I wanted to become a better writer. Over the next few years I wrote about 100 reviews, and my writing improved markedly. But, something more important happened, too. I began to think of myself as a writer, and I liked that feeling.

Back in French class, all of that relevancy and sense of accomplishment disappeared. Why did I need French? I didn't know anyone who spoke French, and had no ability to go to France. I learned as little as necessary to get through the course and never once thought of myself as a French speaker or even a future French speaker. I wasn't enrolled in that identity.

In college, I studied abroad in Costa Rica for a semester. I went with no Spanish training and lived with a host family that spoke no English. I quickly discovered that when I was hungry, Spanish could get me food. When I was lost, Spanish could get me directions. Now I had relevancy. I studied Spanish every day for hours. I could see myself getting better week by week, and that visibly increasing mastery felt good. Furthermore, I studied with a program of American students who evaluated each other based on Spanish fluency. Now, the way to be cool was to learn. It's been five years since my time in Costa Rica, but I still consider myself a Spanish speaker and a Spanish learner. Because that mastery feels good, I enjoy studying Spanish now for fun.

All learning is an opportunity for mastery, for increased respect within some social structure. The kind of learning that frequently takes place in a mandatory setting lacks relevance to the learners, who quickly disengage. Fortunately, we can create relevancy with games, especially social ones like MMOs. These games hook players with an intriguing story, compelling characters, and an immersive world. Players of these games spend a lot of money and time on something completely optional. Why? Because these worlds offer an opportunity to increase relevant mastery visibly. This visible growth comes in many forms: leveling up, gaining new abilities, increasing social networks, obtaining rare items, and exploring new territories, to name a few. Furthermore, this growth is visible not only to the player, but to the entire game community. In other words, the game decides to a large degree how players judge each other and it makes these criteria transparent.

Mastery and education are closely connected, but I do not mean to give the impression that mastery is only relevant within educational systems. Visible mastery within a social context makes players and learners feel good. Once they feel good, they will devote free time and money to continuing to feel that way. In education, that gives us invested learners. In the entertainment business, that gives us loyal customers. It's clear how the motivating principles of good game design can help learners enjoy learning, but how can we leverage mastery to improve even commercial entertainment games? We can make that mastery more visible. We can give players more opportunities to invest in virtual identities that are quickly becoming as relevant and real as off-line identities. We can reduce the barriers of time and place that sometimes keep players from inhabiting these constructed selves of mastery. We can bring these identities to where the players are, instead of making players isolate themselves physically in their respective homes where their PCs and consoles are before interacting with friends virtually. We can do all of this by extending MMOs from PCs to mobile.

Throughout this thesis, I will use mastery in the context of MMOs to envision new ways of designing games. These new ways will in turn have implications for how mastery can be leveraged in MMOs, education, and many other areas.

Mastery Motivators

These stories of mastery share common themes. The skills I wanted to improve were meaningful to me -- they had personal relevancy. I wanted to become a better Spanish speaker. Jenkins identifies the importance of personal relevancy as well, “These kids are passionate about writing because they are passionate about what they are writing about” (2006). But, Spanish didn't mean something to just me. It had meaning to a group of people with which I wanted to increase my standing -- it had social relevancy. Becoming a better Spanish speaker increases my acceptance into the group of Spanish speakers and Spanish learners. Personal and social relevancy of a skill is frequently enough to motivate me to increase my mastery of that skill, however making my progress towards mastery highly visible motivates me even more.

When I can see my progress, that is, my mastery has personal visibility, it is easier for me to feel like I'm making progress. In middle school, my soccer coach challenged the team to see who could juggle the soccer ball the most. It provided an opportunity to gain respect within the team. The way to gain that respect was to become more masterful. The way to know I was becoming more masterful was to count how many times I could juggle the ball. Counting made my mastery visible.

When a group to which I want to belong can see my progress, that is, my mastery has social visibility, mastering that skill becomes even more relevant to me and my motivation increases. Increasing my Spanish fluency brings visibility of my progress to Spanish speakers who I converse with, who can quickly tell when I'm struggling to express myself or don't understand. In summary, when my mastery has personal and social relevancy and visibility, I am most motivated to improve it. Table 1 (Mastery Motivators) illustrates this relationship.

Table 1: Mastery Motivators

Mastery motivators feed into each other. Personal relevancy strengthens social relevancy, since a group cares more about mastery when each member of the group cares more. Social relevancy strengthens personal relevancy by giving each group member a social context in which mastery garners appreciation. Personal visibility strengthens personal relevancy, since I can see my progress. Since personal relevancy strengthens social relevancy, personal visibility strengthens social relevancy as well. Social visibility strengthens social relevancy, since the group can see my progress and I can see others' progress. Social visibility strengthens personal relevancy, too, since social relevancy feeds into personal. In sum, these mastery motivators all connect to each other, with visibility feeding relevancy and relevancy feeding itself.

Mastery motivators vary by degrees. What matters isn't just whether a skill has personal relevancy but how much. Increasing any of these motivators raises the overall motivation to increase that mastery.

Mastery motivators will serve as the overarching framework through which I reference and apply theories of presence and self in upcoming chapters. As players feel presence of various kinds, they experienced increased personal relevancy. Self presence, in particular, allows players to feel that the avatars representing them in the game reflect on their personalities and achievements. Without self presence, a player would take little pride in a masterful avatar. Further theories of self-construction describe what players can do, once they experience self presence, to successfully experiment with mixing real and virtual selves. This experimentation with self-construction feeds back into these mastery motivators, strengthening each of them and personal relevancy most of all.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivators

Personal relevancy can come from either intrinsic or extrinsic motivators (Bates 1979, Ryan & Deci 2000). Hobbies are the classic example of intrinsically motivated activity, since people do them for the sheer joy of the activity, and money is the classic example of an extrinsic motivator, since people work to make money in order to get other things that they want. The line between the two is fuzzy, since, for example, hobbies can earn money or be done for other partly extrinsic reasons, and money can become its own reward when people connect it with security, power, and self-esteem. Still, the general distinction remains useful.

Malone and Lepper discuss the elements of games and learning that inspire intrinsic motivation (1987), and they map to mastery motivators easily. Those elements are challenge, curiosity, control, and fantasy. Challenge encompasses personal relevancy and visibility, since they describe it as relevant goals that inspire feelings of mastery with obvious performance feedback. Curiosity refers to the personal relevancy that comes from sensory and cognitive stimulation the game provides. High production values and certain kinds of presence stimulate the senses, strengthening personal relevancy through curiosity. Challenges of solvable complexity or mystery create cognitive stimulation, and thus personal relevancy. Control means players feel agency in the game, helping them feel more vital in their roles in the virtual world. I discuss this further as self presence in later chapters. Finally, fantasy creates personal relevancy through making the game world more interesting and emotionally powerful. These are just some of the ways intrinsic motivators impact mastery motivators.

Situated cognition, coming after the introduction of intrinsic/extrinsic motivators, teaches us that all cognition and therefore motivation must be considered in context (Brown 1989). Therefore, I will not label anything an intrinsic or extrinsic motivator, but rather an intrinsic or extrinsic motivator for some person in some context. In this thesis, I will discuss these motivators for players of Labyrinth and World of Warcraft in the contexts of those games.

In games, the line between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators becomes blurrier still. All activities could be said to be intrinsically motivated, since people play for the joy of it. However, it's useful to think of in-game rewards like points or money as extrinsic motivators in the context of the game, whereas the activity players engage in might be intrinsically motivating. In some games, the play activity itself becomes tedious over time and players continue due to extrinsic motivators like acquiring further wealth. MMOs in particular suffer from this problem, and we call the resulting play pattern grinding or a treadmill -- tedious activity that gives some reward when completed. Sometimes the most enjoyable activity in a game is not connected to extrinsic rewards at all. Usually that means the game's designers have either forgone extrinsic rewards entirely or have failed to reward players for engaging in the activities they find most enjoyable.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators combined can maximize personal relevancy. Throughout this thesis, I will discuss various factors that affect personal relevancy without first labeling those factors as intrinsic or extrinsic. I find the distinction mostly muddies the waters, distracting from more accurate intuition.

Attribution theory does warn against ignoring the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. It says that whenever people see something happen, they automatically search for an explanation for why it happened. They search for an attribution for their own behaviors, too. If someone has a hobby, for which they earn no pay, they attribute the time they spend on that hobby to enjoyment. If, on the other hand, they do receive pay for that activity, they probably attribute the time they spend on that activity to being paid. Paying someone for an activity he already enjoys could change his attribution for that activity. And, attribution affects motivation. If he decides he's doing that activity for the pay, and the pay disappears, he may cease that activity. He ceases even though he originally performed the activity for the joy of it. The change in attribution causes him to forget why he originally behaved that way.

With attribution theory in mind, providing extrinsic motivators for activities players already find intrinsically motivating could decrease their intrinsic motivation and personal relevancy overall. However, extrinsic motivators in games don't generally carry enough weight (as a salary would) to induce a behavior which players don't find at all intrinsically motivating. Also, games generally don't remove extrinsic motivators after introducing them, so there's little danger of players ceasing play altogether.

Mastery in MMOs

MMOs are good at motivating players to increase their mastery within the game in large part due to the degree to which they address these four mastery motivators. The following examples come from the MMO World of Warcraft (WoW). To give the game personal relevancy, it must entertain. WoW uses stylized, 3D graphics to represent a vast fantasy world that players can explore. It has a detailed and intriguing story that players can uncover and feel part of. It has a professionally-performed orchestral score. It provides players with dangerous situations and gives them the tools to feel heroic. This level of sensory stimulation and dramatic opportunity creates sufficient interest and therefore relevancy for many players. However, WoW also lets players take on a specific role in the world and, over time, become more skilled and powerful in that role. Many players see this as an opportunity to grow their mastery (a process that feels good), creating significantly more personal relevancy for them.

If WoW were a single-player game but just as many people played it, there would still be social relevancy. Players could talk about the game and their progress through it at school, at work, online, etc. This kind of discussion would solidify players' membership in the WoW affinity space (Gee 2004), creating social relevancy. However, WoW is not a single-player game. MMOs allow hundreds or thousands of people to play together online. Now, friends and strangers can all see what level of mastery I've attained within the game. Castranova writes that MMOs motivate in part from social validation and the meaning it creates: “All players in a synthetic world will generally share some notions of what is important there, and will therefore deeply validate the emotions that result from the actions one takes” (112). Just as having a website of game reviews that other people read motivated me to want to become a better writer, so too does having an avatar that represents mastery and that exists in a public space motivate me and many others to empower our avatars and increase our mastery.

How does WoW create personal visibility of mastery? Every MMO that I'm aware of contains some kind of leveling system. WoW started with 60 levels, and then went to 70 with the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. Players start with characters at level 1, representing no mastery, and progress toward the level cap (in this case, 60 or 70), representing a high level of mastery. Every time I kill a monster in the game, a frequent activity, an announcement pops up on the screen saying, “+100XP,” or some such. This means I've gained another hundred experience points, moving me closer to leveling up (reaching the next level of mastery). Furthermore, there is a bar running across the bottom of the screen that fills with a solid color as I move closer to my next level. When I reach the next level, my character is consumed in a tower of golden light and the success sound plays. It's like a slot machine that rewards the player periodically with lots of flashing lights and sounds. WoW makes growing mastery obvious to me.

Because WoW puts many players in the same virtual world, everyone's mastery is visible to everyone else. When a party (a group of 2-5 players) goes on a quest together and one member of the party levels up, everyone notices. Even more meaningful, if one player's character is too low-level for the quest, he is excluded from participating with that group. Thus, to be eligible to play with my friends, I must keep up with them in levels/mastery (this turns out to be a real problem for friends who want to put different amounts of time into the game but still play together). Everyone in the game world, even outside my party, can see what level I am, or maybe just that I am a much higher level than they are. As a result, it becomes the quickest, easiest way for players to judge each other. Imagine that I'm a professor, and I have the label PhD tattooed to my forehead. Everyone else in this hypothetical world also has their education level on their forehead. Regardless of how good a predictor education level is of anything, people will likely use it heavily to judge each other, because it's easy and visible. That is the world MMOs create. MMO designers have a responsibility to make sure that visible representations of mastery in the game actually represent something meaningful within the social ecosystem. In WoW, level primarily signifies how much time a player has devoted to the game – a missed opportunity to measure something more meaningful.

MMOs with external forums, like WoW, often make pieces of players' avatars visible on the forums. WoW puts pictures of players' avatars next to their forum posts, along with their level and rank in player versus player combat. Readers can click on the picture of any avatar to take them to a page describing that avatar in detail. Taylor writes about how players use these status symbols to add weight to comments and, “draw continuity between virtual spaces” (104).

Players enjoy inhabiting these identities because they feel the identities give them status and credibility in a social context. Whenever they can extend those effects beyond the limits of the core game, they do. If WoW didn't automatically include this information with players' posts on the forums, players would include much of this information themselves in a signature at the bottom of their posts. These signatures are, in fact, to what Taylor refers. WoW and other MMOs smartly identified this player desire and accommodated it in the design, increasing social visibility of mastery.

The words personal and social, as I'm using them, exist on a continuum. In particular, social could mean my three closest friends in the game, or my guild of 50 or 100 players, or the whole server, with hundreds or thousands of players, or all servers, with millions of players. Clearly, there is a meaningful difference between my three closest friends seeing my progress and that progress being potentially visible to millions of players. My closest friends likely know how far I am from the next level and exactly when I level up; my guild mates can see my name in the guild roster and see my level go up over time; people in my server can run past me and see my level, or look at a list of all players; and, any player of the game can look up any other player's profile on the web, but in practice they are not likely to do that unless they know the player or are looking through a high scores list.

Table 2: Mastery Motivators in MMOs

Mastery motivators are dependent upon each other. In fact, every motivator has the potential to affect every other motivator. For example, increased personal visibility of mastery increases personal relevancy as well. Castranova writes, “The fact that the archery skill is an observable rating makes it a more fun skill to raise -- how do I know that I personally am a better archer, after all? (178). Therefore, when we think of the contribution one mastery motivators makes to players' overall motivation, we must think also of its effect on every other mastery motivator.

For all the praises I've sung of mastery in MMOs being highly visible and relevant both personally and socially, they still have much room for improvement. MMOs do a bad job right now of allowing and encouraging meaningful forms of mastery. Leveling up requires mainly time, saying something but not enough about creativity, resourcefulness, leadership, or any other more meaningful quality.

MMOs also fall short with inadequate social visibility, too. This past year, Facebook introduced a feature to allow people to track every change, no matter how minor, anyone in their social network made to her profile. MMOs, which are basically games about tracking progress, should make it much easier to track the progress of everyone in a social network -- who leveled up, who created a new character, who joined or left a guild, who completed a raid, who ranked 3rd out of 12 in a player versus player competition, etc. Status updates should be automatic. Boyd warns that this change that Facebook made was a “privacy trainwreck” (2006). Basically, information that people knew was public but thought went unnoticed through obscurity suddenly became easily trackable. However, this argument doesn't apply fully to MMOs. Most status changes in MMOs are actually players advancing in mastery. The main way that could be seen as embarrassing is if someone is progressing too quickly or too slowly and doesn't want others to know how much time he spending in the game. Designers can prevent this, in part, by ensuring that increasing mastery is not simply a function of time. Now, his friends are free to think that if he's progressing quickly he's simply very good at the game. And, they'll be right, because if he isn't very good at the game he won't advance as quickly and the time he invested in the game will be less noticeable to others. On the positive side, players get much more social visibility for their progress, about which they probably want to brag (or have the game brag for them). Boyd herself agrees: “Gossip is addictive. There's a voyeur in most of us,” and, “I have no doubt that strong ties can be maintained through these systems, provided that other forms of synchronous engagement complement the gossip feed” (2006). Since MMOs already provided other forms of synchronous engagement, they now would benefit from the gossip RSS feed.

MMOs haven't learned from social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, which know that the best way to create relevancy is to get a critical mass of people onto the site. Everyone who is not on the site must feel he needs to join just to keep up with his off-line social network. I don't know whether an MMO will ever achieve that critical mass, but one could certainly interface with those social networking sites to further integrate real and virtual identities and take advantage of all of the profile propagation features those sites offer. If both the MMO and the social networking site had open APIs (programming interfaces) for exchanging data, avatar status could easily be integrated into personal profile. Otherwise, a corporate alliance could ease the data exchange.

Extending MMOs to mobile can help reduce those second and third deficiencies (increasing social visibility of mastery and achieving critical mass of relevant people in the player's social network to whom this mastery is visible). Extending to mobile can help by bringing information about players' progress in the game through the mobile device and into the players' real-life, face-to-face social network.

Mastery in PC-Mobile Cross-Platform MMOs

All of the mastery motivators discussed in the previous two sections still apply when we extend MMOs to mobile. How does mobile enhance personal and social relevancy and visibility? Mostly, enhancements come from the opportunity to play the game more frequently and in new situations.

In seventh grade, I played the collectible card game, Magic: The Gathering. It was social, competitive, collaborative, strategic, fun, and expensive. The game motivated my friends and me to think hard about how we constructed our decks. Half of the fun of playing against a friend was seeing how my deck would perform and half the fun was seeing all of the thought and strategy my friend had put into his deck. Our growing mastery was visible and relevant, and it made us feel good about ourselves. The game gained more relevancy through portability, since we took it with us and thought about it everywhere. It elicited thinking from us that made us feel smart, and that kept us coming back.

How does extending an MMO to mobile enhance its personal relevancy? Anything on my mind frequently becomes more relevant to me. Because I carry my mobile with me everywhere, it is frequently on my mind. It gets more attention than it deserves sometimes, because there is nothing happening then or there that's more compelling. In other words, it doesn't always have competition for my attention. Even when I am currently occupied, I frequently glance at it to check the time or read a text message. If my mobile let me access a compelling MMO, that MMO would become something I frequently look to when I'm partially or totally unoccupied. The more I play the MMO in this way, the more invested I become in my progress in it -- that is, the more personal relevancy it has for me. I allow the game to take more mindshare, driving me back to it more frequently. It stays on my radar. Mobile helps set up a cycle of increasing personal relevancy for the MMO. If the game doesn't drive me away with poor design decisions, it could take a very large percentage of mindshare. Warning: it will then be up to the game designers to push players out of the game when they have put enough time in, so they don't overdo it. MMOs that require and allow less time from players will become more popular. There will doubtless still be MMOs that encourage obsessive play. But, that is always the case with design improvements, and I don't shy away from better designs simply because they could be applied in excess. (Trying to nail down exactly what “in excess” means is beyond the scope of this thesis.)

How does mobile enhance social relevancy? When the MMO goes mobile, I'll play it in many new situations. People will see me playing it, or I'll see them playing it. It will become the first topic of conversation after greeting between me and my friends who play the game. Because of this pattern, we will all suspect that the game will be discussed when we meet in the future. When a single topic becomes something a group of people invest in (invest money, time, and identity) and talk about frequently, both online and face-to-face, it gains social relevancy. Also, if meeting face-to-face and talking about the game leads us to sit down and start playing together, the encounter increases social relevancy further. Finally, these encounters provide plenty of opportunities to interest other friends in joining the game (viral marketing). The designers simply need to give us something interesting to do and talk about when we meet up. As a positive example, Magic: The Gathering gives players a wonderful social interaction. Even when the game wasn't on my mind, if I bumped into a friend I would certainly remember that I had acquired an interesting card recently and wanted to show it to him. So, I would show him the card, which would remind him that he wanted to show me his most recent cards. Then, if we had time, trading might ensue. If we had even more time, we would take out our decks and start playing. At any point during this interaction if anyone walked by who knew us or played the game, he would be enticed into the activity as well. It was brilliant. Ito calls this kind of interaction hypersocial: “When Yugioh players get together (hyper)social exchange involves both the discursive sharing of stories and information, as well as the material exchange of playing cards and virtual monsters” (7). Mobile can bring this quality to MMOs, if they're properly designed. Of course, this whole dynamic works best when people are in a situation where they are likely to bump into each other. School is a likely candidate. The workplace could be, too, with the right atmosphere, people, and game.

How does mobile increase personal visibility? Because I can access the game at all times, I log into the game to make some small amount of progress frequently. Even better, the game could train me to expect some interesting update to my status or the virtual world if I simply log in to check. This would drive me to the game to check whether I have made progress inadvertently, and I would likely stay in the game long enough to make a bit of progress deliberately. Because I'm focusing so much attention on the game so frequently, every update to my status becomes even more visible. The game could even reach out to me, texting me when something especially important happens to my character or the game world. There is a danger of reaching out to players too frequently, annoying them and encouraging them to opt out of that feature or the game. “Too frequently” will be different for different players, and will also depend on how interesting (relevant) the interruption is.

Finally, how does mobile increase social visibility? Continuing the example of Magic: The Gathering, when different segments of my social network see me throughout the day interacting with the game, and especially when we all interact with the game together, everyone's progress becomes more visible. If we're all playing in the same physical space, my character levels up, and I express excitement, everyone nearby can see and hear that excitement. Human excitement may be the best way to increase social visibility beyond the existing flashing lights and sounds.

Table 3: Mastery Motivators in Mobile MMOs

There are even more effects of extending MMOs to mobile, some of which I'll address in the next chapter. In particular, mobile changes the way we experience presence in the context of the game.

Terminology

Throughout the thesis, I will reference World of Warcraft because it is currently the most popular MMO and therefore the most likely to be known by readers of this thesis and designers within the game industry. World of Warcraft is an MMORPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. MMORPGs are currently the largest subset of MMOs, but MMOs do exist in other genres, including action and strategy. All of my thinking in this thesis applies to MMORPGs, and most of it applies to MMOs in general. Neither MMO nor MMORPG is a very appealing term. Acronyms are unfortunate compromises, since a better term, if widely adopted, could be much more memorable and easy to say. Even so, I have picked these terms because they currently have the widest usage. I hope we can all move to better terms in the future, but I don't expect everyone would follow me if I introduced a new term now. Sorens likes the term Persistent Entity Game, but he seems to be the only one using it:

The reality is that the MMO as we know it is primarily about advancing a “secure” persistent entity (character, team, vehicle, country, etc.) in a multiplayer environment of any size. My term to describe these games, then, is Persistent Entity Game, or PEG. (2007)

I think his term is as good as any other, though it's still an acronym. There is a growing trend to use MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), since MMO is technically an adjective, not a noun. Yet, you'll still see MMO much more frequently.

Castronova looks at the options for labeling these worlds: “Virtual world, MMORPG, cyberspace, metaverse, proskenion, hyperstage, or synthetic world” (2005). He settles on his own terms, synthetic world. “Synthetic world” carries with it a lot of intuitive meaning. On the other hand, it has the disadvantage of not actually being used by players. Doing Google searches for both terms yields 15 million results for MMO and 34,000 results for synthetic world (as of August 26, 2006). MMOG, 6 million. Metaverse, 1 million. Virtual world, 9.5 million. MMORPG has 24 million results, but is restricted in applying to only role-playing games. Cyberspace has 51 million results, but, as Castronova mentions, is now too general for what we are discussing.

Conclusion

In summary, mastery is motivated by personal and social relevancy and visibility. MMOs are play spaces for mastery, and players enjoy the relevancy that the entertainment context gives them as well as the visibility of the way the games help them track their progress. Mobile, furthermore, enhances these mastery motivators by giving players a persistent access to their identities of mastery and bringing the game into real-life social situations.