REBUTTAL TO: Fist Person Plural: The Conflicting Identities of Reality and a Virtual World
This is going to be a bit of a short editorial as there isn't very much to say outside of 'don't lose yourself in the fancy wordings'. The editorial prior to this one was a very long winded and verbose lecture upon MMORPG and specifically the nature of identity in them. I hope not to bore anyone with such a ridiculously oversized bit but in the interest of having some of the rebuttals to this kind of stuff be public, I'm offering a response for it. This will be three simple parts questioning the base assumptions of the editorial and a brief conclusion on the importance of perspective.
Assumption A: MMORPGs are different from RPGs. They are not RPGs.
BZZT! Not only is this not really ever backed in the article, obscured as the lead up is with renaming various roles over and over again, but it's easily seen as not being true. RPGs consist of a lot of forms but you'd have a very hard time making a case that five friends congregating in a chatroom to roll up a game of D&D are much different than five friends congregating around a table to do the very same thing. The act of them suddenly being unable to see each other or identify themselves as more than friends with semi-anonymous taglines does not change the nature of the game extremely. Similarly, if you quadruple both numbers, the nature of the game does not suddenly change though adjustments are made to handle the size of the playing crowd. Continuing along this, the nature of the role playing does not suddenly transform itself into something significantly different and unrecognizable (and thus undeserved of the title of Role playing game) by suddenly having thousands and thousands playing in the same worldspace. The logic of it doing so is flawed. You can't make special sweeping generalizations for MMORPGs based some intrinsic difference in them. It's not there. The same shield of anonymity exists for countless other versions of the RPG. It's existence doesn't make it a new genre of game deserving of some unique separation from the act of role playing.
Assumption B: We can simplify the entire playing society into a single person image.
Nope, this can't be done. Any picture or analysis taken doing this is inherently going to miss getting to anything interesting or relevant. You can't simplify the MMORPG gaming society to just a 'representing some inner self not seen otherwise'. For all forms of RPGs there are those who do just that. There are also those who like the act of RPing. Those who don't care who they are playing so much as they can scale up a leveling curve. You can't render an intelligent analysis on the people who play by locking them into a single group. Yes, MMORPGs are used for 'entertainment' and yes some information can be ascertained from those that play, but when you step from 'they this type of game' to 'they obviously must like this derivation that a small group playing that game does' you step out of reality and into bad logic. It's no more true that all people who like role playing games are re-establishing a hidden portion of their identity then it is that all people who like football love getting covered in paint and roaring for the home team while shaking a fat naked belly around.
Assumption C: Virtual Environments lack any restrictions or moral ethics in them. There are no 'retaliations' for acts done.
I think the strongest voice that would disagree with you here is Raph Koster, he of seldom updated webpage and famous MMORPG Ultima Online. Designers and developers do indeed code ethical standards into the game. Do indeed start with giving an intrinsic value system to the world of right and wrong and how things are done. Outside of that to say Online RPGs lack 'social judgement' is blatantly lying in the extreme. In anonymous role playing environment, peer pressure is a relevent issue. Attributing it to basic good moral natures is poor usage as it's ignoring that good actions are often relevent to having 'fun' in the game. It's often designed in. It's pretty silly examining 'good' and 'evil' in a playground, anonymous or not.
Final Thoughts:
It's extremely important when analyzing a large social group to accept and admit that they are a large social group, composed of many smaller social groups and many varieties of opinions, thoughts, and ideas. It's not a good analysis to simply grab one tiny group and extrapolate that to what's going on with everyone. To be effective in understanding the gaming environments of such massive games as MMORPGs, one has to be clear where one's focus is and aware of what else is out there. Without it, it's impossible to really understand the medium. To write good editorials on this subject, you must understand the medium you are writing about. I apologize for rambling longer than expected.
|
RSS feed
iTunes