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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

MMO's and Society

  
 
Yay Paul
16:20 / 14.06.05
Ok I’m a bit of a gamer and I’ve played a couple of these, most are the hack and slash type Role Playing games, mainly occupied by 12-21 year olds, all involve some type of guys flirting with guys scenario and all have a majority of arseholes.

But, one thing you can always find if you look hard enough is a group of people making a community, the arseholes may out number them 12-1 but the community is there. The thing that interests me the most about these communities is that they are run on a gift culture and players will respond to the call for help at all times...

Now, many of these community members will form, with some not all, outside relationships (msn, phone etc) and follow each other to new games where they will again begin to form the community. Its amazing to see how many of these people aren't geek type gamers, but are real people with jobs, problems, passions and real life friends, all actively participating in a culture significantly different to everyday life.

My question to you is; MMO's are games, new ones appear all the time, current games add more and more content to please their demographic and age group, society is defining them. With the gamers collective community and their use of gift culture in the games they play, how long will it be (is it happening already?) before MMO's start to feedback into the world? It has happened in other areas, governments now blog, scientists use Wiki’s to publish data, technology definitely is changing things...

Or is this indeed one person’s naive hope that something good will come out of the entertainment part of the trip?

--

And the non score draws:
What MMO's (Massive Multiplayer Online [games]) have you played and what was your experience of them, how do they compare?

*For non MMO players, what are your perceptions of this type of game?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:09 / 14.06.05
how long will it be (is it happening already?) before MMO's start to feedback into the world?

They are already - you can buy gold for Everquest or a pre-levelled World of Warcraft character, for example. People have been making real cash from auctioning virtual goods for at least a couple of years. I'm not sure if it extends to services - need a specific character class for your party? Pop over to eBay and hire one for a couple of hours - but I don't see why it couldn't.

I'd be interested seeing how this affects the games themselves. Does it damage their longevity by alienating 'honest' players, or does it extend it by providing easier access for those who can't be bothered with all that wandering around? If you can buy a powerful character straight off the bat, does it lead to resentment amongst those players who've done all the hard work for themselves? I know that the community spirit in Phantasy Star Online started to fall apart the moment that people started duplicating rare weapons and equipment and selling them to the highest bidder, but that coincided with the hackers destroying everything that they touched.

I don't know why it should be surprising that relationships built up in online games can spread out into the Real World(TM). In a lot of respects, MMORPGs aren't currently hugely different from message boards. The 'game' part still isn't very well developed, so most of the enjoyment comes from the interaction with other people. The same's also true of those online games that do have more of a game to them - for a couple of months recently I was firing up Halo 2 and meeting up with a bunch of regulars from another board. Instead of playing the thing properly, we'd get seven or eight of us onto one map and treat it like a virtual playground - some messing around in the vehicles, seeing if they could break the limits of the levels, others standing around simply having a chat with each other. Like an online version of a Barbemeet, to an extent, only with the added spectacle of tanks being catapulted into a river. It's less about the geek, and more about the ease - getting those people together in a meat space is much more difficult.

I like your idea of gift culture, but I don't see it as being significantly different to how things already operate outside of virtual worlds. For every player who's willing to help out another in trouble, or donate a hard-won item to a stranger, there are probably two more who'll fiddle their way up to a higher position than they could get to honestly, or who'll steal your Boots of Veryfastwalking +3 as soon as look at you. Same as it ever was.
 
 
Lurid Archive
17:40 / 14.06.05
Its come up before but lets not forget the Castronova study of the Everquest economy, placing it somewhere between Russia and Bulgaria. In some sense, this is a joke, but you can well imagine that if it stays sufficiently stable over a couple of decades, then it won't remain a joke at all. To be sure, economies that rely on "tourism" as their main asset are likely to be unstable...but who knows?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
18:46 / 14.06.05
It's interesting: first we have "young, male players being assholes" -i.e. over competitive- later in the thread, the concept that people go out of their way to cheat their way to better personal goods, and that this spoils the game world by making it overly violent and unpleasant, removing the fun- joie de vivre- from the game.

Is this or is this not a very accurate microcosm of capitalism's effect on society?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:34 / 14.06.05
Just been thinking more on this and the issue of virtual economies - could it be possible that a game like Star Wars Galaxies, which apparently has an economy driven entirely by the people playing it, could provide a successful model for use in the real world?

(We need a better term than 'the real world', don't we.)
 
 
A fall of geckos
19:39 / 14.06.05
I don't have details onhand (have just mailed a mate for the name of the game etc), but there's an open source MMO currently running which has an economy that overlaps with the contribution people make to the game. So if you're short of cash, you can write a plugin - for example to let characters fly. Then you set up a shop and sell it.

It's an interesting feedback mechanism that encourages the game to expand technically.

I'll post some more details as soon as I can find out a bit more about it.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:50 / 14.06.05
Second Life?
 
 
A fall of geckos
21:22 / 14.06.05
Cheers Spatula, that's the one.

Only had time for a quick look around - the only thing I've seen so far is:

"Learn the Linden Scripting Language to give life to your creations: weapons that shoot, vehicles that traverse the air, land, and sea; build in-world games of all variety and genre"

No mention of how if this skill is being used inside the game as part of the economy. Cool avatars though.



The front page had a Gir when I checked.
 
 
Yay Paul
09:07 / 15.06.05
Star Wars Galaxies, which apparently has an economy driven entirely by the people playing it"

Interesting you should mention SWG, it's one of those that i have played.
Yes the economy is driven by the people playing it, which from my experience and also from talking to people in game about the model, is why it kept falling on its ass. Players were finding if they started a character on an older server then they would have a much harder time getting equipment or even starting a business because the overall economy has been inflated way too high.

SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) by its own admission knows the system is faulty quoting 'a lot of the currency out there must have been "counterfeit"' and that the 'the highest folks are billionaires', 'showing game economy is replicating characteristics of the real world economy'.
Its interesting to see that a system that was in theory left open to grow in anyway the players saw fit did actually start to mimic a real world economy.

Quotes from : SOE Article


Also from an article i found before i played the game one player is quoted as saying about the economy: 'The problem is simple, but the solution is, in perhaps the greatest understatement of all time, difficult'.
 
 
Yay Paul
09:29 / 15.06.05
Spatula had a couple of points there from WoW which is the MMO I’m playing right now.

Pre-leveled characters and accounts have been around since the beginning and I have no doubt you will always find them for sale on eBay. Blizzard has said it keeps a beady eye on eBay sites and will ban players or lock the accounts of those that do so, but for everyone they spot ten will get through, inevitable I think.
The one interesting thing I did find while taking a look at eBay was people selling power leveling for your character. world of warcraft wow power leveling. Now I’d be concerned that this is wholly a scam and giving people access to your account information would be a bad idea, but what does interest me is; would paying someone to level your character be seen as a breach of terms, if in fact Blizzard would know at all?

'Does it damage their longevity by alienating 'honest' players'
Not sure how this goes for pre-leveled characters, but for 'scammers' or 'exploiters' I think the honest players win out. One instance just last month of a guild cheating players out rare items or cash was thrown up on the WoW forums and was all over in game. Players were named and shamed and those named put on /ignore, banned from groups etc.

'For every player who's willing to help out another in trouble, or donate a hard-won item to a stranger, there are probably two more who'll fiddle their way up to a higher position'
Your right, this is so very true, only thing I can say there is lead by example, if you help five strangers out with what they need and one of them goes on that day to do the same the community wins in my eyes.
 
 
■
09:39 / 15.06.05
I always felt there was something dishonest about "buying up" in such games, which is what put me off them. Using money as a substitute for effort and time does make sense, though, and I can accept that it can happen for good reasons. It's actually a fascinating area and, with the sweatshop model emerging in Asia, it could tell us something about the evolution of economies and their attendant exploitation.

However, the model I grew up with was that of MUD (the original, thankew, on a v23bis modem), which is still going in various incarnations. One of the fundamental unspoken rules is that you never tell anyone else anything you've learned because working out the puzzles is half the fun. Most people spend as much time talking and pottering around as they do playing and when you're dead, you're dead. End of story. Even a wizard (top level game controller type) can get killed if they're not careful, and have to start from scratch. There's something of an idealist meritocracy about it. Those who make it are respected by the others. It's also very very cheap.
 
 
Keith, like a scientist
19:14 / 03.08.05
(We need a better term than 'the real world', don't we.)

Coined by some genius I can't remember the name of on this very board, and highlighted in "Barbequotes":

real world = meat-space
 
 
semioticrobotic
21:00 / 03.08.05
I agree, Keith. 'Virtual' objects could be 'real' in that they have very real consequences. In this way, a different distinction between spaces (like the one you posit) is necessary.
 
  
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