There is an all too familiar stereotype of the overweight, hairy, sweaty nerd sitting in front of his computer sinking hours into an online game, or living out an alternate life in an online world. In some extreme cases this may be true, but for most, MMOGs and virtual worlds provide an escape from everyday life, if not for a few hours every night. Despite what many believe are the same thing, MMOGs and virtual worlds are very different. While both focus on social interaction in an online space to entertain, the main difference in these two genres would be that in MMOGs you are given a specific task to accomplish with many online while a virtual world allows you to choose what you want to do.
Take the MUD lambaMOO for example. Some may choose to sit around and have a cup of tea, set out on an epic journey to explore the text based world, or, if you are like Mr. Bungle of Julian Dibbell’s A Rape in Cyberspace, you may choose to force those around you in a living room to shove steak knives in unfavorable places. Whatever your fantasy may be, these worlds provide a space for you to carry them out with little to no real life repercussions. As Curtis explains in his introduction to Mudding,
“A MUD is not goal-oriented; it has no beginning or end, no ‘score’,
and no notion of ‘winning’ or ‘success’. In short, even though users of MUDs
are commonly called players, a MUD isn’t really a game at all”(Curtis, A Brief
Introduction to Mudding)
As his definition suggests, you are given no real goal, no real responsibilities, the freedom to do what you want, create what you want, including objects in the virtual world. Because of this freedom, virtual worlds tend to create their own cultures, their own socially acceptable actions and their own set of unspoken laws and etiquettes. Events in these worlds are completely unpredictable for this reason. It is impossible for the moderators of these worlds to create a concrete experience that will last very long or even entertain all of the citizens of that world. Lucasfilm’s Habitat provides a good example. Developers tried to create a treasure hunt for its users. It took them weeks to create, yet the first user to solve the puzzle did it in eight hours after he managed to find the most crucial clue within 15 minutes of it being released. What they were able to draw from this experience is that while they were able to moderate and influence the players, the real control of the world was in the hands of the users. As Morningstar and Farmer concluded in Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat,
“…we didn't really hold the steering wheel -- more influence, in fact,
than we had had when we were operating under the delusion that we controlled
everything.” (Morningstar and Farmer, Running the World)
With the freedom that players are given in these virtual worlds, Pearce explains in Productive Play, these worlds feel less commercialized, less corporatized and are much more open and appealing to non gamers and gamers of different interests simply because of the freedom they provide. (Pearce, The Play Revolution) Out of this draws another major difference between MMOGs and virtual worlds: As MMOGs focus on killing, destruction and certain missions and goals, they attract much more male players than female. Likewise, the freedom and chance for exploration provided by virtual worlds attracts much more female players than one would see in most MMOGs (guys using female avatars don’t count, sorry WoW players).
Jenkins
in his conclusion of Complete Freedom of
Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces explains this phenomenon. He
tells us that virtual worlds are much more appealing for women because they
provide a slower pace in which the players are able to explore and interact
with the things around them, instead of rushing towards a level cap or bashing
everything that has a pulse with a large club. Virtual worlds provide an
anarchistic pleasure for women without the death penalties, body hunting or any
other taboos that come with MMOGs. (Jenkins, Conclusion: Towards a Gender-Neutral Play space)
While developers have already
created the lore for their worlds and a reason for which the players need to
fight in an MMOG, virtual worlds simply provide the space to tell the story. It
is for this reason as Fullerton et all explain in A Game of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space
that these worlds are popular with both genders. Adventure games like Myst,
Shadow of the Colossus, and Zelda provide a loose story, but they allow for the
users to fill in the gaps and create their mind’s own version of the game. (Fullerton
et all, 3.5 Narrative Spaces)
That is not to say that people
playing MMOG’s cannot create their own stories. If that were the case then
every single person who would have a conversation about the game while at work
or school would be telling the exact same story. While MMOGs have a structured
story and way to interact with the core gameplay, there is still the community
aspect of the game. MMOGs, though not as popular with women as virtual worlds,
still are one of the most popular genres today with women. As Taylor explains
in Multiple Pleasures: Women and Online
Gaming,
“Chatting, connecting with
other people,
Speaking from personal experience, in the many MMOGs I’ve often found my male friends rushing to reach the level cap or looking to kill other players, while my female friends are often just sitting in towns shooting the shit with other players. For the longest time I couldn’t understand why they just wanted to sit around and talk to people, not playing the actual game, when they could be doing that over AIM or some other chatting device. In fact my one friend’s only motivation for leveling was so that she could advance her class to get a prettier looking avatar that could wear fancier headgear, and sure enough as soon as she did that she went right back to just sitting in the city and talking to friends. Drawing from this and through playing so many MMOGs I have managed to learn what is so attractive about these games to so many demographics: there is no right way to play them. If you want to grind endlessly you can do that, if you want to sit in a town and socialize you are free to do so, if you want to grief and mess around with the limitations of the game, you may be treading a fine line, but the engine itself cannot prevent you from making that choice.
In one game in particular my friends and I tried pushing the limits as much as we could to see what the communities’ reaction would be. In Lineage II players are able to participate in PVP (player vs player) anytime, anywhere (excluding towns, but they are few and far between). This means as soon as you exit out of the newbie zone anyone can just run up to you and kill you. The penalty of this was that as soon as you kill someone who doesn’t try to fight back you are marked a murderer. This means that even in towns people can try to kill you, and you have a chance to drop your equipment. My friends and I, since there were about 10-15 of us playing at any given time decided that wherever we went, any dungeon or leveling place, we would stand at the entrance for about 5-10 minutes or whenever we got bored and would just kill anyone who entered. Seeing as there were so many of us, it was very hard for anyone to fight back unless they were organized or a much higher level. Seeing how it was inherently part of the game we weren’t doing anything the game defined illegal, we had just found another way to play it. Regardless, people were completely outraged by it. We had broken the unspoken rule that you aren’t supposed to player kill leveling zones, and while most of the time the community spent its time squabbling over who had a leveling spot first or what each item was worth, for once we saw them unite for a greater cause, “defeating the evil people who derived their fun from others misery”. This wasn’t a story that the devs had drawn out when they created the MMOG, it was just something they had made possible. Despite the lore, the quests, and all other structures of the game, we had created our own story, one of which all the xXSePhIrOtHXxs and ChibiNarutu-kun1707s of the world rise up and stop the evil kill joys, or try anyway.
My experience in second-life was also one of griefing, but it turned out to be a completely different animal. While there was an obvious way to make people mad in an MMOG, given their specific task of leveling up, in second-life you sort of have to research what a certain community is interested in, what is and isn’t socially acceptable and then find out what makes those people tick. For example, when someone who owns a property tries to immerse themselves in an experience, say medieval fantasy, they don’t like when people walk in with a Darth Vader costume on and spam lyrics from the Macarena. They also don’t like when their neighbors create some ridiculous structure that is perfectly visible to them and takes them out of their immersive experience. Just as virtual worlds allow for more creativity, griefers also have to be more creative in these worlds.
There is a limit however to what the player is and isn’t allowed to do. Because of Mr. Bungle and idiots like my friends and I, developers are constantly looking for ways to moderate the worlds so that everyone may have an enjoyable experience, not just those who derive their fun from the displeasure of others. Mnookin explains in her paper, Virtual Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO, the aftermath of Mr. Bungle’s steak knife catastrophe caused actual laws to be put in place in the virtual world. The most common offenses in any online experience, both MMOGs and virtual worlds, are harassment and actually breaking the set structures of the games (cheating such as botting, passing through physical objects that shouldn’t be possible, etc). There isn’t a defined line as to what is and isn’t acceptable but most have an idea. Where things get hairy is near that middle ground, that is, when people manipulate the game space in a way that the developers had not originally intended but had made possible. Mr. Bungle and my band of idiots would be perfect of examples of this. It was totally possible for Mr. Bungle to rape the virtual people of LambdaMOO, just as it was possible for my group to mass murder. However, most people don’t know how to handle what would be real life crimes in an online space, whether it is acceptable or not, given that it is possible. When devs do draw a line on these actions there are typically resistors. In the case of LambdaMOO, following the incident judicial courts were made to handle events like the Bungle rape. However the community formed factors of those for and opposed to these strict enforcements. (Mnookin, Directions for LambdaLaw) Where we draw the line on what is and isn’t acceptable is a grey area and will vary with each online experience even if it is only a slight one. But in each case there will always exist people who test the limits of these structured communities.
Work Cited
Curtis P. Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities.
Dibbell, Julian. (1993/1998). A Rape in Cyberspace.
Farmer, R. & Morningstar, C. (1990/1991). The Lesson of LucasArts Habitat.
Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (2007). A Game of Ones Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Game Space. In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007, Perth, Australia. 1-11.
Mnookin, J. (1996) Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: Volume 2, Number 1: Part 1 of a Special Issue, June 1996.
Pearce, C. (2007). "Narrative Environments from Disneyland to World of Warcraft." In Space, Time, Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. 1-6.
Pearce, C. (2006). "Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up." Games & Culture. Volume 1, Issue 1. 1-8.
Taylor, T.L. (2003). Intentional Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them. International Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 19, No. 1. 25-34.
Taylor, T.L. (2003). Multiple Pleasures: Women and Online Gaming. Convergence, Vol. 9, No. 1, 21-46.
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