November 02, 2006

The social utility of jerks

The biggest draw for MMOGs is obviously the MM part. Players enjoy participating in a persistent, multi-user world; if they didn't, they wouldn't pay subscriptions to do so when there are plenty of single-player video games available. Ironically, however, the same fellow users who make MMOGs so appealing can also be one of their biggest headaches. Unwelcome behaviors range from trash talk and verbal harassment to hardcore griefing like camping in order to kill newbies over and over again. Most companies will institute sanctions such as account suspensions against egregious offenders, but a lot of behavior, such as inequitable loot sharing and excessive aggro that gets everybody killed, falls into a grey area of "jerky, but probably not actionable."

Richard Bartle, in his description of player types in virtual worlds, claimed that "killers," analogous to griefers, provide a challenge for achievement-motivated players but depress the population of socializers in a virtual world. He also argued that although his...

...research has been used on a number of occasions to 'prove' that game-oriented virtual worlds 'need' killers, this is not the case. The model is descriptive, not normative: it shows what will happen if the proportions of player types changes, but doesn't advocate one over another. If you want achievers but don't want killers, you can have them; you need to be aware that without intervention the achievers won't stay long, though. Similarly, if you design a game targeted at killers, it will require a major effort to stop the poor ones from quitting in frustration and the better ones quitting when there's no one left to bully. (Bartle 2004, p. 141)

There is obviously a difference, however, between "killers" who are free by the rules of the game to actually kill newbies and seriously impede their progress in the game, and people who behave in a variety of anti-social/uncooperative ways that may make gameplay frustrating, but are not as intense as character murder. The former group can become such a problem, as Bartle notes, that no one will want to play. The latter group, however, unless completely dominant, serves a valuable purpose in the social world of MMOGs: its members actually bring other players together. Nothing unites two people, after all, like the opportunity to gripe about a third.

Player communities such as forums are full of complaints about immature, obnoxious players encountered in-game, perhaps most frequently in "pick-up groups" (PUGs) wherein previously unacquainted players team up to complete missions or quests:

He was afk most of the time, and when he did run into a fight, he would hack one guy and then stand around. Also, I was sk'd to him and I have Arctic Air, so I was standing in the fray with it on. Several times, he'd just run out of the fight leaving me tiny and frail, and go look around the rest of the floor; usually he'd find a group of guys, say "Here." and then go tuck himself into a corner and wait.

Finally, his "on the phone, sec" was the last straw and I kicked his dumb ass and ran the rest of the mish unsk'd.

Do yourself a favor and avoid him like the PLAGUE!

--naeko, Horrible player, City of Heroes LiveJournal community

Similarly, one EverQuest II player, T, posted an account of a PUG bad apple on her guild forum. A stranger, S, who joined a group with T and several friends, refused to give up a dropped spell that was only useful for the wizard class, to which T belonged and S did not. He ignored repeated requests for the spell and when called on it publicly he asserted (falsely) that T had not assisted in the battle and thus should not receive the spell. Finally T quit the group:

01 P: [to T] did he give u the spell?
02 T: [to P] nope
03 T: [to P] and won't return tells
04 T: [to P] ???
05 P: [to T] ur kidding?
06 T: [to P] nope, he just ignored my requests and called me dopey
07 P: [to T] i left thegroup
08 T: [to P] good for you
09 T: [to P] IG will leave too

Although S was originally the group leader, after T's departure, P and IG both left out of solidarity and regrouped with T, leaving S alone and once again looking for a group. This immediate loss of his group, however, was not the only consequence S suffered.

Unlike the CoH LiveJournal community post, which seems to simply solicit commiseration over a bad PUG experience, T's account to her EQ2 guild served as an unofficial incident report. The incident was not one with which the game company would be likely to concern itself, but T's guildmates had a more personal interest and the resources to pursue it, especially because it turned out that S was a member of another guild.

The first response to the post was "Did this fool have a guild tag? if so do you remember what it was[?]" In just under three hours, another guild member had posted the offender's guild affiliation. Other members weighed in, sympathizing and suggesting ways to pursue recompense, and two days after the original post was made, T had received a better version of the spell the offender had ganked and a formal apology from an officer of the offender's guild.

Here, a run-in with a jerk on a PUG allowed a pre-existing group (T's guild) to reinforce their relational ties to each other through commiseration, information gathering, and the pursuit of recompense, which was successful because the offender's guild did not want the stigma of allowing such behavior to pass. Of course, a player who routinely causes such problems for his guild may find himself unguilded, and one might assume that free agent jerks are a problem with no solution, since they have no social group of their own to shame or be pressured by.

Such incidents and group commiseration over them, however, also more generally allow players to reaffirm their identities as "good players, not idiots/jerks/babies like that player"; in this mode, even free agent jerks may actually serve to bring people together who previously lacked any social ties. The following case involves a PUG with five members, two of whom are a married couple playing together, but otherwise initially unknown to each other, hunting low-level mobs in the CoH sewers. One player holds forth at great length about his prowess at PvP, while HH and HO discuss an online streaming radio station to which HH has just introduced HO:

01 FR: put me up agianst a brute i could win
02 (16.1)
03 HO: requests huh? too bad you can't make them in game
04 (3.1)
05 HH: corner here
06 (1.5)
07 HH: you can
08 (2.6)
09 HH: DJ Shecky
10 (1.9)
11 FR: put me up agianst a dom i would win
12 (2.1)
13 HH: You can probably send him a tell
14 (1.3)
15 HO: ...you rock
16 (0.2)
17 L: ouch walk before running
18 (4.2)
19 FR: ((attacks mob))
20 (6.9)
21 HH: *grin*
22 (19.1)
23 FR: corr i dont knopw good attacks
24 (6.0)
25 FR: and can heal
26 (26.3)
27 FR: wut i'm trying to say is that i can own alot of peeps in pvp
28 (7.3)
29 HH: oh, I didn't get that.
30 (1.2)
31 HH: :p

There is no uptake from other team members to any of FR's assertions about his ability to beat members of various City of Villains classes at PvP at lines 02, 11, and 23-25. At 27 he gives an explicit formulation of his earlier talk; HH responds sarcastically at 29, softening the response with a humorous emoticon at 29, but also not elaborating on her response any further. Throughout FR's talk, HO and HH discuss the radio station that HH had earlier explained how to access, also in group chat; FR does not attempt to participate in this line of talk. Following this excerpt, FR produces some further talk on his PvP prowess before running ahead of the group, dying, and teleporting out of the zone.

FR's teleportation to the hospital is notable because it occurs immediately after his character can be seen to have died on the team roster. The team has been sharing resurrections since setting out on a hunting expedition; thus, the expected action in this situation is to wait and see if anyone has a resurrection to share before teleporting to the distant hospital. HH and AM both inquire about FR's plans to return; it is only after they question him that FR reports that he is going to a different zone. HH, as team leader, then kicks FR from the team roster there is both public and private chat concerning his abrupt departure:

01 HH: ((kicks FR from team roster))
02 (4.3)
03 HH: well, that was random.
04 ...
05 HO: agreed.
06 (9.1)
07 L: indubidly
08 (3.0)
09 HH: [to HO] maybe we weren't enthusiastic enough about PvP talk? :p
10 ...
11 HO: [to HH] lol. We didn't massage his ego enough i think about he can
12 "take peeps out" in PvP. Shoulda been like "Oh FR, What IS PvP you huge
13 mass of manhood!?"

HH, as team leader, formally kicks FR from the team at 01, although as the boldface indicates, this is a private action visible only to HH, the kicker, and FR, the kickee; other team members can only see that FR has left the team. Following this action, at line 15, HH remarks to the team at large on the inappropriateness of FR's behavor; HO agrees with her assessment at 17 and L upgrades its intensity at 19.

HH and HO have been conversing in team chat for some time already, as seen previously. At 09, HH expands her talk about FR in a private tell to HO, openly mocking FR's extended monologue about his PvP prowess--this is particularly relevant since FR had begun this line of talk with assertions about how his controller (similar to a mage) could beat HO's defender (a healer class character) in PvP combat--a topic on which he expanded at great length despite lack of uptake from HO and others on the team. interest. HO responds enthusiastically to HH at 11-13, expanding the mocking account for FR's abrupt departure.

Shortly after this interaction, HO sends HH an invitation to be global friends, meaning that they will be able to see each other logged into the system with all characters:

01 @HO has invited you to be global friends. Do you accept?
02 (0.3)
03 HH: ((accepts global friend invitation))
04 (20.2)
05 HH: [to HO] thanks. :-) I'll definitely be on again later tonight, too.
06 (30.8: some irrelevant talk ommitted)
07 HO: [to HH] awesome! I like to keep in contact with the cool people on
08 here since..you know,they're hard to find, lol

Since then, these two players have grouped together with a few different characters on the server, and also formed a supergroup/guild with the other members of the original PUG. As the exchange above displays, jerks in MMOGs not only bring people together by providing a convenient object of mutual disdain to talk about--they also provide a point of contrast that makes everyone else look better. Despite the near-ubiquitous player laments about the jerks one encounters on even high-level PUGs, it is encounters with just such jerks that make good, basically competent players seem even more attractive and appealing by comparison. The jerks are actually a kind of social glue encouraging us to stick together--an effect that is perhaps nowhere so dramatically demonstrated as in the sheer existence of a WoW guild titled "Hikaru is a Dork."*

---

*Name has been slightly altered while preserving original connotations.

Posted by cabell at 05:13 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 13, 2006

On the internet everyone knows you're not actually an elf.

Lisa Nakamura has written extensively about race and identity tourism in virtual environments. She argues that in most cyber social spaces, the surface absence of race is an implicit assumption of default whiteness. The textual environment LambdaMOO, for instance, requires users to set a character gender (although "neuter" is available); although players may choose to include it in their character description, race "is not even on the menu" as far as the interface is concerned (Nakamura 1999). Today's MMOGs, however, make race explicit insofar as one cannot create a "colorless" virtual avatar--although most games offer some non-human options ranging from elves to cow, rat, and lizard people. As something that is visually available to all players and generally considered integral to personal identity in the mainstream culture, race, whether human or fantasy, seems to offer a particularly valuable resource for role-playing (RP) in game spaces.

Despite the possibility of non-white human avatars, however, their actuality seems rare. A Black character with an afro in City of Heroes draws comment from other players when a white character with spiky pink hair does not. A preliminary analysis of video data from several games yields several examples of players using non-human race as an RP resource, but only one instance in which a character roleplays non-white human race. In this latter instance, uptake from other characters is problematic, an issue that may be related to the character's heavy reliance on racial stereotypes. Non-white avatar options such as hairstyles are also in limited supply in most games, limiting available "looks" for such characters.

It is probably true that the available character options reflect the demographics and desires of the majority of the current players, but it is still possible that the addition of more identifiably non-white faces would lead to the creation of more non-white characters. Far more female characters exist than female players; while one can argue the realism of many female avatar options, there are still quite a variety of recognizably female options available. Whether the presence of more non-white characters would lead to more nuanced, less stereotypical RP, of course, is an open question. Certainly many male players' female characters are built upon stereotypical conceptions of gender, such as "healers are girly."
It seems possible, however, that the presence of non-white character options might attract more non-white players, if we assume that people have some interest in creating avatars with which they identify on racial lines--it does seem to be the case that women prefer to play female avatars, although a significant minority of men prefer female avatars as well. If a similar pattern in player/character racial identity exists, it would seem that adding more non-white options for character creation is likely to provide an added attraction for a cross-section of players in any game that does so, but perhaps particularly in game worlds like CoX where almost all characters are basically human.

For one thing, character race, although especially non-human race, yields one solution to the general problem of making RP distinct from OOC talk. While players use many strategies to do so, most commonly bracketing, even interactions that seem to fall fairly clearly into one category or the other may be explicitly identified by participants, suggesting that the possibility of confusion is always there.

In cases where non-human character race is used for RP, however, there is no question about its status as RP rather than RL talk, as in the gaming session excerpted below. Following the "arrest" of third character by Imperials, A and another character, LG, RP with each other using their character race (Twi'lek) without any OOC negotiation or discussion:

Excerpt (1) [RP styles and tell frame shifting SWG 02-22-04 RM-3 RAVE 001: 148-165, irrelevant talk omitted for clarity]

01 LG: [angrily] They already HATE us...
02 (0.7)
03 A: [angrily] oh my god
04 (3.4)
05 LG: [angrily] Twi'leks...
06 (7.8)
07 LG: [angrily] If your not HUMAN you aren't anything in their eyes!
08 (2.1)
09 A: [angrily] I know

The arrested character is also a Twi'lek, which LG references at 1 with her assertion that the Empire "already hate[s] us"; she then clarifies the category at 5 with the explicit identification of the hated people as those who belong to the race Twi'lek and further expands on this at 7 with an assertion that to the Empire, only humans are "anything," to which A agrees at 9. Some time later, the "sisters" A and Ci also use their shared Twi'lek race for RP about their childhood separation from each other following an Imperial raid, and LG asserts that Twi'leks are in particular danger of enslavement because of their oppressed status.

In this case, the source material of the game lends itself to racial RP; the original Star Wars trilogy depicted female Twi'lek characters as slaves kept by Jabba the Hut for his entertainment. Character race, in addition to being an obviously in-game quality, is also a resource about which most players may be presumed to have a shared knowledge base. Even in games that lack such an established and developed world, however, character race is still a resource for RP, as in this scene from the assembling of a pick-up group in EverQuest II:

Excerpt (2) [levels of RP EQ2 01-19-05 RM-1 A 001: 5-33, irrelevant talk omitted for clarity]

01 D: greetingsss
02 (24.8)
03 R: I smell an iksar!
04 (14.7)
05 D: rodentssss...
06 (39.1)
07 R: I prefere Ratonga, or even rat over rodent.
08 (8.5)
09 D snarls R.
10 (14.8)
11 R dies x.x

In excerpt #3, R is a male rat person (Ratonga) and D is a male lizard person (Iksar). D makes the lizard race of his character an explicit part of his speech with expanded s's and remarks on R's race at 5 with the word "rodents," to which R objects at 7. The antagonism between them is further elaborated through emotes at 9 and 11. The two characters, presumably previously unacquainted, collaboratively produce a racial conflict almost immediately upon encountering each other in the virtual physical space of the game. Even without the kind of world-established race relations available in SWG, players may use character race to color their in-character interaction, although in the EQ2 excerpt the conflict is done "playfully" in that it does not noticeably inhibit group cooperation in any way; a more "serious" RP of such conflict might preclude the characters grouping together. Such RP does, however, break up the otherwise somewhat monotonous routine of a pick-up group's hunting activities.

The open conflict between races role-played in these examples from SWG and EQ2 is particularly interesting when compared to an instance of more "realistic" human race role-playing taken from a social event in City of Heroes/City of Villains (CoX) involving an African-American female character named Afro-ditee (name has been changed while attempting to preserve original connotations). This character appeared in Pocket D, a designed social zone accessible to both City of Heroes and City of Villains characters, during a going-away party for the developer CuppaJoe. She joined a service line that formed when another developer, Manticore, offered to grant custom titles to characters:

Excerpt (3) [Afro-ditee welfare CoX 09-01-06 CG-6 title line 001: 1-54, irrelevant talk omitted for clarity]

01 PTM: Whats the line?
02 (20.0)
03 Ad: welfare
04 (18.8)
05 Ad: manticore is giving us food stamps and inf vouchers
06 (5.9)
07 DSM: LOL
08 (9.1)
09 DSM: Charity is so very heroic
10 (12.6)
11 AC: what is this line for?
12 (5.0)
13 K: I think I might change to a hero, he's inspired me so much. :D
14 (1.7)
15 DSM: A yellow title
16 (9.8)
17 Ad: it's good to know my little d'shawn will finally get a real costume
18 this year
19 (14.8)

PTM asks about the purpose of the line (which is very long and noticeable) in broadcast chat at 1; there is some non-serious discussion of the line's length that has been omitted, but at 3 Ad provides a second non-serious answer: "welfare". There is no response to thisr, and she elaborates at 5: "manticore is giving us food stamps and inf vouchers" ("inf" is short for "influence," the currency of CoH). DSM responds with laughter at 7 and then goes on to build on this candidate answer at 9, saying that "charity is so very heroic." Following this line of talk, at 13 K claims that he is so inspired he might become a hero himself (presumably K is a City of Villains character). Neither of these replies directly identifies the speaker as a recipient of the "charity."

At 17-18, Ad continues her talk about the welfare line with an utterance about being able to adequately--in terms of the game world--clothe her "little d'shawn," further tying welfare receipt to cultural stereotypes of African Americans. There is no further uptake on Ad's impromptu RP from the other characters present, but neither is any challenge issued concerning her joking talk about welfare or its connection to her portrayal of an African-American woman, either in an OOC frame or an RP one (one could imagine an anti-welfare reaction to such statements as well as a negative reaction to the character Ad portrays). Certainly there is no RP of open racial conflict, either serious or playful, such as occurred in the SWG and EQ2 examples above; players unsure of the connection between player and character race may be less willing to engage in such interaction.

Stereotypical performances like this one are also more noticeable in an environment where non-white avatars are relatively rare; part of the reason for that rarity may be the lack of non-white options in character creation. While players do exercise control over the skin color of their avatars, as noted above, almost all preset hairstyles and facial features seem geared towards the creation of white avatars. CoX does provide a few Asian faces among its presets, perhaps reflecting the large overlap between players interested in comics and players interested in Asian culture, including manga and anime; as a result, there does seem to be a visible minority of Asian characters in the game, although they are heavily tilted towards ninjas and cat-eared schoolgirls. Only one preset face, however, seems to have African American features, and the afro sported by Afro-ditee is the only identifiably African American style available except for perhaps the dreadlocks. Noticeably absent are the braids favored by many African American women.

Posted by cabell at 02:02 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 01, 2005

Dances With Farmers

With my 57 mage nearing the end game in WoW, I recently had my first two encounters with farmers in the wild. Of course, I've had the typical encounters in Ironforge where someone is spamming the trade channel or yell channel, or the situation where you contact someone about an item they've advertised and the subsequent discourse is limited to "Farmer: [Lag Eliminator of the Auctioneer] 29g. okay?".

Now, by "farmer" I'm meaning the more restricted definition of someone who habitually uses RMT to monetize the things they do in-game. Which means I'm making assumptions about the two farmers I met, since IGE is not letting me look into their internal records. As players, it's very easy to make assumptions too quickly. My own trading alt, a 21 rogue, is listed by another player on the server forum as a "known farmer".

I stumbled across Nepili while questing in the Blasted Lands, needing to free some tormented soul at the back of a cave filled with crazed followers of Allistarj. Nepili was going from mob to mob outside the cave, and I started to -- very slowly -- make forward progress into the cave. Did I mention Nepili is a 60 rogue? (Did I need to? Ah, assumptions.) At one point she simply stealthed past me as I made my slow progress, and I would come on short stretches of cave filled with dead bodies. I died a few times, and after running back from the cemetary would find Nepili back outside again, or back inside. At one point inside the cave, Nepili pulled a mob, ran toward me, and then vanished, at which point the mob turned on me, while I was already at low health. Intentional? I don't know.

And then, about five minutes later, Nepili sent me a group invite, and through broken English and animated emotes I conveyed that I was trying to accomplish something at the back of the cave, beyond all Allistarj's crazed follewers, which we quickly dispatched working together. Paranoid that I am, I wonder if she tried getting rid of me by training, and then decided the fastest way to get me out of her hair was to help me.

Copfe is a different story. My trading alt met Copfe in Ironforge, trying to buy Arcanite Crystal, and when she couldn't speak very good English, I labeled her as a farmer. The chat started to run a little on the long side. She (and I use "she" because the avatar was female) said she was from Xi an, and asked how something was said in English, which I explained, and by this time I was curious enough about how farming looked from the inside that I tried to keep the relationship going. We added each other to our friends list, and exchanged simple greetings each day, and each day I'd try to say at least one thing that would stretch her English. Over the next couple weeks, each time one of my alts logged on, I noticed she was either in the Eastern Plaguelands or Azshara.

Eventually, the quest my mage was working on took her from the Blasted Lands to Azshara, and Copfe happened to be in that zone when I showed up. My mage could solo the first couple quests, but then died to a hydra I needed. And then I got a tell from Copfe,

[Copfe] whispers: omg
To [Copfe]: what's up?
[Copfe] whispers: you die
To [Copfe]: lol. yes. how did you know?
[Copfe] whispers: i see you

Well, it turns out she was swimming around in the ocean near where I was questing, and sure enough, happened to witness my demise. Curious, I ask what she's doing, and she says she's mining. Taking my opportunity, I ask if I can watch, and she says that's just fine. So I spend the next hour as Copfe runs an incredibly efficient loop around Azshara, mining veins and picking up chests, eluding large numbers of mobs, but going for the jugular for certain mobs (who are apparently too near chests and veins for stealth to work). During the hour that I followed her, I didn't see any good loot or even arcane crystals drop. The largest value would have been in the thorium and mithril mined. But the efficiency with which she worked was mind-boggling.

So what impact might Nepili and Copfe be having on players in the field, apart from any economic impact? For Nepili, very little. She's killing mobs with a very high respawn rate, which is probably part of the reason the site works for her. If she intentionally trained a mob on me, well, that's some degree of impact. The largest impact she's likely to have is that questers may have to slash through somewhat fewer zerglings on their way into the cave. Copfe's a different matter. I don't know the respawn times of the various chests and veins she looted. If they're a significant part of an hour, she could single-handedly be having a sizable impact on the loot available in Azshara to the "more casual" player.

Posted by at 10:05 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack