Often the results from the Future Future League (they run tournaments in house while the cards are still being developed) end up in very different places from the real metagame.

Blizzard basically does the same thing (with the public test realm as the FFL), but they release talent updates and rebalances in a far less ordered fashion than MtG releases. In fact it reminds me much of how Magic was when it was five years old. The fact that they still call them “balances” instead of packaging the shuffle as a piece of new content (as it truly is for theorycrafters) limits what they can do with it.

(I should add to all of this that I am not an active WOW or MtG player. MtG in particular, though very, very well designed is far to expensive for the amount of “game” you get out of it. Most of this is from reading Mark Rosewater’s column.)

Blizzard’s constant rebalancing of the game to incentivize certain behaviours – to save a dead spec, for instance, as they recently attempted to do with Subtlety Rogues – is a bit of a trouble spot when it comes to getting long-term data about changes in strategy. I wouldn’t quite call it artificial selection, since it’s a change in game conditions and not the player behaviour of who copies whom, but it’s not quite natural selection either – especially when you consider that the talent hierarchies themselves are occasionally redrawn.

The truth is, when there’s a long stall between content updates, the specs that are theoretically the best for the current gear levels and bleeding-edge content tend to settle on a few choices that aren’t that flexible. Again, it depends on the class; some of them have more freebie points to go around, while others are very rigidly mathematized. I’m aware that Blizzard’s design goals for their next expansion is to allow for more variation (“spend these remaining points however you want”), but it remains to be seen whether that will play out.

One thing that remains a challenge for memetic theories of culture and ideas is how we account for creativity. We’ve got a good model for how people copy others (at least with respect to games), but what do we do about the researchers who intuit good ideas that they investigate and substantiate? Strategic variations that appear statistically “random” are intentionally designed, which is certainly not how we think about genes.

• Sometimes there are rouge theorycrafters who have far different builds. Usually they are dismissed easily, but sometimes they have made changes that are more effective than the paradigm and the paradigm quickly and rather abruptly shifts. This is much like the sometimes swift changes in seen in natural selection.

• Rebalancing of classes and talents causes a brief period of chaos and then a reordering after a dominant paradigm takes hold. This is much like how species react to small or large changes in their environment.

• It should also be noted that Blizzard does rebalances for two reasons 1) to purely make sure that no one thing is too overpowered 2) to shake up the paradigm. Blizzard is actively rewarding this evolutionary behavior and recognizes it as a prime part of the “fun”. Although it popped up “naturally” it is now actively perpetuated (so it would be more akin to artificial selection in some ways).

Separately:

Another game that is a perfect example of this is Magic the Gathering. At top levels the actual game is not as important as the “metagame.” The metagame is figuring out the optimal deck for the environment based on expectations of what other people are going to be playing. For top players this metagaming IS the game to the extent that the point is almost to beat the evolutionary paradigm set in front of you. At exactly the point where the environment is becoming stabilized a new set is released to upset the balance.

Again this isn’t unknown to the game’s designers and the careful design and development of the sets to create a healthy metagame is one of the reasons Magic is still around after 18 years.

For an insidery column on the Magic metagame go here: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Archive.aspx?author=Mike%20Flores

For a really good column on Magic in general (and one of the best regular columns on designing games period) check out Mark Rosewater’s column: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Archive.aspx?tag=makingmagic&description=Making%20Magic

You can think of it as analogous to organisms and genes: when organisms interact with the environment, their reproduction and survival have an impact on which genes get propagated more successfully than others. From the genes’ point of view, the organisms are there to carry them around. If the organism doesn’t propagate the gene and dies, that’s one less manifestation of the gene in the population, while other genes in fitter organisms keep spreading. Similarly, if a player cancels his or her account, that player’s talent choices are effectively out of play; that particular talent spec doesn’t disappear, but high-performance specs are more likely to stick around than offbeat, suboptimal specs because the people who stay active in the game are more likely to adopt them. Someone can still look up an inactive player’s Armory profile and copy what they did, but they’re more likely to copy active players that keep themselves up to date.

The analogy isn’t that simple, of course, and some biologists argue quite persuasively that the gene/organism dichotomy doesn’t map neatly to the functions of replication and environmental interaction, respectively. Genes do a bit of both, and organisms do a bit of both. And there are a number of quirks about WoW that disturb the analogy to natural selection as well (among them, gear progression and Blizzard’s constant hand in rebalancing the numbers). But I’ll get into those another day.

I still need to digest what you’ve said before I give any kind of constructive feedback, but I will submit one of my ruminations that your paper is essentially positing: for players striving for achievement and excellence at the upper echelon of raiding culture in WoW, it essentially boils down to that ultimate (if overly simplistic) biological maxim – adapt, or die. I haven’t played the game in two and a half months and I already feel hopelessly outdated. Were I to renew my subscription, I would have to spend several hours reading up on the implications of patch changes to my talents, spell rotation and professions and then implement those changes in my talent tree and rotation – which would correspond to changes in my enchantments and gems. I would also have to update all my addons, read up on the new bosses in ICC, and hope to god that a kind-hearted raiding guild would take me back and help me update my already-lame gearscore (which was considered very good when I left the game, but has already become sub-par in terms of end-game content).

In short, I found that the challenge of keeping up on the WoW community’s evolutionary changes was both enthralling and exhausting. I think you’ve hit on something big here as to why players can become so completely absorbed in this game that it becomes, in effect, their whole life – it’s about survival. A primal need to adapt or be faced with oblivion.