The Proteus Paradox Read Online Free Page A

experience and an assortment of gold coins and equipment from the slain creature; this assortment is collectively called
loot
in gamer jargon. When a characterhas gained sufficient experience, that character levels up and either learns new abilities or improves its existing abilities. In broad strokes, these games are about killing monsters and selling loot to buy bigger swords to kill even bigger monsters that drop more valuable loot. In online games, players refer to monsters as
mobs,
short for “mobiles,” a term coined by Bartle in the original MUD. 11
    These games encourage players to cooperate in a variety of ways. Although it is often possible to fight creatures and level up alone, this generally becomes more difficult beyond the beginner areas. Also, different character classes complement one another well when taking on more challenging monsters. There is a “holy trinity” in terms of combat class synergy that is important to understand. In a group encounter with hostile monsters, heavily armored
tank
classes shield the group from enemy attacks while lightly armored
DPS
(high Damage Per Second) classes inflict large amounts of damage from a distance.
Healer
classes restore health lost during combat to prevent their team members from dying. All gameplay tactics and strategies derive from these three class archetypes. Tanks need to make sure they vigilantly taunt and distract monsters, known as maintaining
aggro
—short for aggression. DPS need to maximize damage output without drawing aggro. And healers need to selectively heal their group while preserving their
mana
—a resource used to cast spells that regenerates slowly. Typical group encounters take place in dungeons, and challenging end-game encounters with boss monsters are usually termed
raids.
    Because of the number of players needed to conduct a raid (up to twenty-five players in
World of Warcraft
), players form large, persistent social groups known as
guilds.
Guild founders create a unique name for their guild (for example, The Druid Circle), take on a leadership role, and delegate officer roles as the guild grows. In these games,players communicate via typed chat. Newer games provide voice tools that allow players to chat directly using headsets with microphones. Online games typically also provide a set of virtual “emotes” that have visual animations. For example, typing “/dance” causes your character to loop through a dance animation. And in addition to combat skills, many online games allow players to learn and level up in noncombat abilities, such as tailoring, blacksmithing, and alchemy.
    Most online games provide different game servers with slightly different rules that cater to different players. For example, there are usually servers on which players are able to kill each other. This activity is usually referred to as player-versus-player, or PvP. Servers on which this is not allowed are marked player-versus-environment, or PvE. Even on PvE servers in many games, consenting players can kill each other in certain situations. In
World of Warcraft,
for example, players can choose to enter into battlegrounds or to initiate duels.
Historical Accidents and Digital Vestiges
    Hindsight streamlines history, often inaccurately. Many gamers think that MUD descended directly from
Dungeons and Dragons,
but according to Bartle, the “Dungeon” in MUD “has nothing to do with the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.” As I noted earlier, it derived instead from Trubshaw’s interest in the adventure game DUNGEN . In fact, some later MUDs tried more explicitly to replicate the game mechanisms of
Dungeons and Dragons
. For example, developers in the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen created DikuMUD in 1990 specifically to capture more of the
Dungeons and Dragons
spirit—twelve years after the creation of the original MUD. The evolution of online games didn’t