Shall We Play a Game?

Peter J Roth

In the near future a child prodigy, Hideo Tanaka, invents a powerful new

technology that links human minds with the internet through a “neurolink” to create the

most believable virtual reality possible. To promote this game-changing tech, he also

designs…a game! The game, Warcross, is a VR version of capture the flag with players

chasing each other and battling in fantastical worlds of Tanaka’s design. Warcross has

taken over and has become the world’s favorite pastime with everyone playing at some

level and the calendar dominated by professional championship versions of the game.

An ex-con hacker named Emika Chen is struggling to survive in New York when

she hacks into the Warcross All Star game, becoming famous. This sudden, foolish move

sets her on the path to being drafted as a wildcard in the Warcross finals, and into a

dangerous cat and mouse game with a hacker named Zero who wants to destroy the

game.

Public obsession with Warcross is so great that it has seeped into everyday life to

the point that activities outside the actual game are rewarded with points which are

valuable within the game. For instance, when Emika arrives in Tokyo she is awarded

points for “first visit to Tokyo.” This assigning of points to common experiences is a type

of gamification, which critics such as Ian Bogost consider the least interesting part of

gaming and label “exploitationware.” (Nicholson, 2012) It’s clear that Tanaka’s reason

for gamifying things such as visiting a tourist attraction is that Warcross fans will use

their points won in the real world—or perhaps, more accurately, their augmented

reality—to engage further in the actual game. These points can be used to purchase

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“power-ups,” prizes which can be used by a player to give them an advantage over their

opponents.

Not only is the assigning of points the least interesting part of gaming, it’s also an

ineffective form of motivation. External rewards such as points, badges, even money

ultimately stop working on people because they decrease internal motivation

(Nicholson, 2012). It’s interesting, therefore, that points are assigned for participating in

daily life, visiting somewhere new, or trying a new activity. Visiting a new city in another

country should already provide internal rewards such as excitement and wonder.

Adding “pointification” to that experience seems to apply an artificial external

motivation, as if to dampen people’s real life experiences in favor of their virtual reality

game. Suddenly the real world offers points for doing what you were going to do

anyway, making those experiences seem cheap. Playing Warcross on the other hand

offers players the opportunity to fly above an ersatz Tokyo or battle other players in

giant robots. The in-game experience offers teamwork and the thrill of problem solving.

If it seems insidious that Hideo Tanaka’s invention seems designed to downplay

the pleasures of reality and intensify the pleasures of participating in Warcross, it’s

because it is. Tanaka has invented new contact lenses that allow players to maintain a

semi-permanent link to Warcross. They can augment their everyday reality with VR

skies that make the stars visible over light-polluted cities or give them real-time

information about whatever they’re looking at. The contacts also make it easier to play

Warcross whenever you want, and Tanaka is giving them away for free.

By the end of the book, Emika and her team hava managed to disrupt the plans of

the black-armored, menacing hacker named Zero. They believe they’ve prevented him

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from distributing a virus through the game into the minds of everyone watching the

Warcross finals. Instead she has helped Tanaka distribute a program into everyone

wearing his contacts. Anyone who’s ever worn Tanaka’s VR contacts, whether or not

they keep them in, is permanently connected to the neurolink. Tanaka will use this

connection to control and pacify the papulation.

The cynical aspects of Warcross’s pointification of reality, and the dangers in

playing have similarities to social media today. One could compare the way Warcross

assigns points to everyday activities to Bogost’s Cow Clicker game. In Cow Clicker

Facebook users had a single option, which was to click on a cow and earn a point. They

could click on the cow as many times as they wanted, earning a point every time (Tanz,

2011). Bogost’s purpose behind inventing Cow Clicker was to make fun of Facebook

games like Farmville, which he felt provided no real meaningful experience for users, it

just rewarded them for “clicking on cows.” Similarly, in Warcross, players are rewarded

for entering a building or meeting a person. This type of engagement, Cow

Clicker/Farmville and Warcross’s point system, are meant to keep people plugged into

the platform such as Facebook or the neurolink, not necessarily to provide meaningful

experiences for the gamer.

The threat that Tanaka and his platform pose is also similar to that of social

media platforms today. Even Bogost’s very simple, click a cow and get a point game on

facebook threatened user’s privacy by gathering their personal data which Facebook

sold to nefarious entities like Cambridge Analytica (Bogost, 2018). Not only does

Warcross resemble real life platforms like Facebook in the way it pulls users in, keeps

them there and then threatens their privacy—or in Warcross’s case, their very freedom—

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the figure of Hideo Tanaka resembles contemporary tech celebrities like Steve Jobs or

Mark Zuckerberg. He is a cult-like figure who is worshiped by his fans as a visionary and

a genius, but he’s also cold, aloof, and convinced that his methods and goals are justified

and unimpeachable.

Like all great science fiction, Warcross is not a warning about the future, but

about the present and what it could mean for our future.

Reflection

Warcross is a truly enjoyable read. It’s exciting and fast paced, filled with

interesting characters, mysteries, and high tech adventure that’s sure to capture the

imagination of young adults. Social media around the book shows that it really has

taken off with readers who share their theories about the upcoming sequel and fan art

under the hashtag, #Warcross. Emika is, of course, the subject of most of the fan art, not

only because she’s the protagonist, but because she is a cool teenager who represents the

diversity of the readership in her American nationality and her Asian heritage. She also

has rainbow colored hair and sleeve tattoos which are described in detail in the book,

symbols attached to each one. Fans love drawing and painting her.

Not only do I think this is an excellent book for young people because of its

entertainment value, but because it also encourages them to think critically about the

technology that they engage with. The book presents Warcross and the neurolink that

makes it possible as exciting and fun. People fill their worlds with augmented reality

dragons and starscapes, they play a game that allows them to swim through sunken

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ruins or fly over cities. But they also risk their privacy. Players who use the neurolink to

connect to the underground criminal “dark world” risk having all their personal

information exposed to hackers who auction that information off. Many players have

also become dependent on the game, turning to it rather than improve the world around

them. Crime is so rampant in this world that the police hire bounty hunters to bring in

low level offenders. Young readers may recognize similar dangers in how social media

threatens their privacy and, in some cases, takes away their agency in how it requires

agreeing to exploitive user agreements to use the platforms.

Hopefully they’ll also recognize how manipulative Tanaka is; how he makes

Emika feel special and seduces her despite the fact that they have no previous history.

It’s clear that he’s doing this to make her loyal to him, so that she won’t question why

Zero is trying to bring down the game. Most teenagers are not romantically involved

with the most powerful entrepreneur on the planet, but many of them may find

themselves in relationships that feel like Emika’s crush/romance with Tanaka.

Warcraft wad wonderful and I for one am looking forward to reading Lu’s next

book in the series.

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Cited:

Bogost, I. (2018). My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data. The Atlantic.

Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/my-cow-game-

extracted-your-facebook-data/556214/

Lu, M. (2017). Warcross. New York: NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers.

Nicholson, S. (2012). A User-Centered Theoretical Framework for Meaningful

Gamification. Paper presented at Games+Learning+Society 8.0, Madison, WI.

Retrieved from: http://scottnicholson.com/pubs/meaningfulframework.pdf

Tanz, J. (2011), The Curse of the Cow Clicker: How a Cheeky Satire Became a

Videogame Hit. Wired Magazine. Retrieved from:

https://www.wired.com/2011/12/ff-cowclicker/

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