One of the most depressing realizations that a cynical person can come to is that no matter what they do, the world will neither change over nor miss their personal existence. Due to some horrendously conservative choices made by developers behind massive environment games, these realizations are not only limited to cynical people but also get to damage the optimism and personal joy of everyone involved.
For my two experiences, I will refer to Club Penguin and my personal transcendence to World of Warcraft Level 50 Night Elf and subsequent account deletion (it was for my own good).
First, let’s argue the blog topic and explain how these two kinds of games intend to be different from one another. World of Warcraft is a consistent reality (you even have to watch yourself fly places!) that has “real” hazards that can render you harmed through “real” consequences. You as the player are constantly in respect of these consequences that can be levied upon you and you must be ready to deal with them by acquiring new gear, teaming up with more and more players, and slaying new fiends.
Club Penguin is a fun loving comfortable environment where there is no real danger other than getting out-shown by your peers by not having enough gold to buy large amounts of gear. You earn gold by playing mini flash games.
In theory, there is a wonderful difference between this casual playground and this grueling fantasy land. Unfortunately, in reality, the difference is almost negligible. Of the attributes I laid out for both types of games, note that neither one had the honor of allowing the player to carve his own impact on the environment. This is because, due to the fact that the designers want to make the assumption that you’ll never be available for something else that the players would deem a fun experience, they must create game scenarios that can be easily instanced for millions of players at the same time regardless of active population. This makes everything boring because everyone has to get the same experience so no one has to go through the awful unbalanced personal experience of having a quest giver absent from their town hall.
For this reason, the game content of an MMOG can never fulfill Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer’s idea of a virtual community as it will never physically “scale with its population” or sustain a remotely dynamic environment. Instead, the designers simply become gate keepers that are in constant fear that their game will be exploited and their in-game economy will become completely broken and fun will be removed. This means that prices are automatically set, but it also means you cannot creatively approach any challenge, because if for some horrible reason everyone found a way to exploit your creative approach then the game’s economy would crash along the millions of subscribers that need to be constantly glued to the banality. T.L. Taylor’s claim that communities are built around the process of “conveying, stabilizing, and... challenging ... identity and community” vanish in sea of pointless tasks that often just get finished by doing the least amount of work necessary, for extremely long periods of time. (Taylor 29) Finally, this means that all conflicts in the game must be simple and repetitive because any large amounts of allotment could be a potential exploit. So, the difference between virtual worlds and MMOG’s is, in practice, watered down to semantics. The game has become so closed that Julian Dibbell’s treasured rape scenario will never even be possible, now we assume this is a good thing. The truth is, though, in a world where can’t get (cyber) raped, we also cannot come into (cyber) contact. Instead we trudge around like a legion of bitterly cynical people, ineffectual against the environment that controls us. The legal mechanisms are static, the environment is fixed, and social structures are produced out of boring necessity; were she dead, Jennifer Mnookin would be rolling over in her grave.
The horrific complaint is not just relegated to MMOG’s either. The desperate need for balance and containment applies to Virtual Worlds and in most cases, much worse ways. Personally, I think the differences between Virtual Worlds and MMOG’s is the difference between micro-transactions and subscription fees. Micro-transactions dominate Virtual Worlds in a very unhealthy way. Second Life is the biggest offender. The fact that someone can make a career out of selling virtual land highlights a problem with our expectations as gamers and a gaping hole with the balance of merchandise in the future(imagine an entire gross domestic product based on virtual land – I don’t want to). While Second Life does get a pass for using a MUD convention treasured by Pavel Curtis and allows users to sell and own custom content (anyone is allowed to make content and sell it), it does still go to great lengths to make certain plots of land valuable and un-editable. In club penguin I can spend hours upon hours making all the gold I want, but it just amounts to selecting from a list of predesigned clothing, essentially I’m putting hours or money into watered down merchandise. The real problem with this valued merchandise is that once again, economy and balance must be held to such a regard that creative decisions or actions need to be categorized and contained to prevent exploitation.
Why is it that designers must make such conservative choices? Celia Pearce has the fortune of being able to traverse through what one would consider to be the idyllic MMOG/Virtual World, Uru. A Virtual World that had many attributes taken from MMOG architecture, Uru was live for a very short amount of time. Oddly enough, though, creativity soared. Pearce discusses instances where players began to terraform their own environments and create almost a virtual state that carried what she was compelled to call “refugees”. Out of sight from a production herder, the group involved with Uru was able to go to any length they deemed necessary to maintain a community, and in many cases this included penning a whole world in the style of the fictional characters that populate the Uru universe. For most massively available online games, this freedom does not exist, however, the capabilities to have such freedom clearly do.
Brenda Laurel says it best when she says that “being able to see the effects of our actions is what gives us the sense of agency or personal power”. (68) In the MMOG/Virtual World paradigm, the player is, by design, stripped of that agency. After that, what is it that we have? Some big shoulder armor for my night elf and sunglasses for my turquoise penguin, that’s what.
Curtis, P. "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities."
Dibbell, Julian. (1993/1998). "A Rape in Cyberspace."http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html
Pearce, C. (2006). "Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up." Games & Culture. Volume 1, Issue 1, Winter 2006.http://lcc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/PearceGC-Jan06.pdf
Taylor, T.L. (2003). "Intentional Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them." ion 19, no. 1.
Mnookin, J. (1996) Virtual(ly) "Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO." Volume 2, Number 1: Part 1 of a Special Issue, June, 1996. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol2/issue1/lambda.html
Laurel, Brenda. (2001). Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
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