The Proteus Paradox by Nick Yee Page A

or to improve our everyday lives? 8
    I have no doubt that games can be powerfully motivating, but the intentions of corporations are not always aligned with the well-being of their employees or the general public. If corporations provide a game that enhances worker loyalty and engagement, I wonder if these corporations will come to see their employees as being over-compensated. And more often than not, company policies do not benefit owners and employees equally. Health benefits are often sites of struggle. Health plans that employees prefer can cost the companymore to provide, and I can imagine that companies would be interested in using games to help employees choose the “correct” health plans. Yes, games are fun, but games are also created by certain people to achieve specific goals. And in corporate settings, it is not the employees who are creating the games. For the time being, we don’t have to be worried. Just as the technology research firm Gartner has predicted that the majority of corporations will use a gamified application by 2014, it has also predicted that 80 percent of gamified applications will fail because of poor design. But eventually, some companies will get it right. 9
    A fascinating aspect of many contemporary online communities is that they are able to incentivize people to perform work for free. Wikipedia—the collaborative online encyclopedia—is an obvious example. But also consider how Facebook generates revenue primarily by aggregating the information you freely share and allowing advertisers to target you more accurately for their products. Sociologist Tiziana Terranova has called this phenomenon “free labor.” Games are uniquely powerful in converting paid work into free labor. Taken to its extreme, the premise of gamification is that any task, no matter how tedious, can be made engaging and motivating. And there is evidence that this premise is true. When unpaid laypeople solved the complex folding pattern of an HIV enzyme using an online game in 2011, it was heralded as a breakthrough in gamification. But this also means that game mechanisms can be used for less noble goals. Consider the possibility of a casual multiplayer word association game released by a marketing company in which the underlying goal is to generate high-impact keywords for marketing new products. Engagement and exploitation may be two sides of the same coin. When we receive these invitations to play, we must remember that fun can end up being a lot of work. 10

CHAPTER 5 YI-SHAN-GUAN
    The video begins with haunting electronica chords played against a black backdrop. As the lead vocals begin, the gameplay footage starts. The camera arcs around a gathered group of characters in a forest clearing, centered on a character named final Elf—the character recording this footage. The lead singer chants the word
karma
repeatedly as the video cuts to the gathered group rushing down the stairs of a stone fortress. They reach a large, open area of the fortress. finalElf approaches a female Elf from behind, pauses a second to adjust the camera angle for a better view, and then plunges a sword through her body. The female Elf slumps down on the stone floor. The lead singer shouts: “I said hallelujah.” The camera zooms in on the scene as others from the group crowd around the corpse. The group heads into another area of the fortress, slaughtering characters along the way. The lead singer continues: “Come on and tell me what you need now. Tell me what is making you bleed.” finalElf chases an elven archer through the halls. The archer suddenly stops and stands still, appearing to give up. finalElf shoots three arrows into the archer’s back before he drops to the floor.
    This massacre continues for another four minutes. The video,titled “Farm the Farmers Day,” is the first in a series of five videos in which finalElf documents his group’s systematic slaughter of