Essay ++

Online Gaming: The Avatar of Anonymity

Jack Bullard-Smith

This piece is designed to look at online games as a piece of communication technology. There have been a number of items and reports based around social interaction within the online gaming community, specifically the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) community. Within this piece I plan to take away from my own experiences and the information within these pieces. The exploration of how online games change people’s social patterns and behaviors both within the gaming world and the outside world will be looked at in depth within a number of situations. These situations will unfortunately have to be limited to the direct social actions and implications due to the expansiveness of such a topic. Within this topic there is of course both a negative and positive of which this essay will be addressing both.

When looking at an item to do with the MMORPG community, it is important to discuss what an MMORPG is. An MMORPG "is a multiplayer computer role-playing game that enables thousands of players to play in an evolving virtual world at the same time over the Internet" (Wikipedia, 2007). Specifically this piece will be looking at modern, western mainstream MMORPG's, specifically EverQuest and World of Warcraft. All of these games have some major features in common. Generally there are a large number of players (numbering in the thousands, and in some cases millions) with a large number of these online at one time. All of these players interact in an online persistant world, which is in effect a virtual world that usually has an fantasy or sci-fi (Wikipedia, 2007) theme that usually involves a large amount of action. Within these persistant worlds the players are able to construct an avatar. This avatar is the players representation of them self within the gaming world. This avatar is the main source of social interaction between players, but this will be discussed later in the piece. Many of the game characteristics of MMORPG's come from original RPG's (role playing games), and usually consist of the player completing quests, killing monsters and attaining "loot" or equipment in order to better their character. Most of these games have a leveling system which is limited at a certain point to stop any particular player becoming too over powered; this is often referred to by players as the level cap. A large part of this type of games appeal is the social interaction within the game. Many people get a thrill out of playing with real people rather than simply computer controlled players (NPC's, or non player characters) (World of Warcraft.com, 2007).

As was previously mentioned, the avatar of a player is quite often the way through which expression and interaction occurs within MMORPG's. This is most commonly done through the game itself, though it also occurs within the games online forums. This can often lead to wonderful interaction, cooperation and groups of people working towards common goals (Michael Hahsler and Steven Koch, 2004). This interaction is quite often associated with the idea of guilds within these online communities. These guilds are groups of players that band together and often form strong social bonds with players helping each other, competing with other guilds and even engaging in such complex social rituals as holding online funerals. These kinds of actions however also allow for the negative side of this social interaction to be displayed, with players within the World of Warcraft Online Game who were holding a funeral for one of their guild members who had died in real life, being attacked and killed by players of an opposing faction (Digg.com, 2007). This kind of interaction displays a large number of things. First it shows the compassion that players can feel towards friends and other players online. It also displays the disregard for emotion, and the ability to commit horrible acts when the player knows their true identity is masked. Whilst the people who attacked the funeral knew full well that it was happening, as it was displayed on the game forums, they still showed no mercy or remorse.

My personal experience within the online game World of Warcraft has often led me into similar situations to that stated above. A common term within the MMO community is "gank" (ganked, ganking). This term whilst originally meaning to take something which doesn’t belong to you, it is now within the MMO community used to describe killing, or being killed by another player in an unfair situation, though it stemmed from the term gang killed (Urban Dictionary.com, 2007). This term is often the most aggressively used word within the game World of Warcraft. When players gank for their own personal pleasure, it can often lead to even greater bonds between those players who are doing the ganking. Players can often work themselves in organised teams or groups and increase their interest in playing by attacking other players in a situation where they are almost guaranteed to win. This action usually results in the opposite reaction for the player on the receiving end. Personal experience and the reaction expressed by other players (World of Warcraft.com, 2007) shows the level of anger that this behavior can create. Players generally swear, become agitated, and in some cases stop playing the game either for a period of time or permanently. These reactions can also often lead to retaliation, this usually involved a player’s friends or guild mates that are of a higher level coming to the aid of the accosted player. This in turn can lead to strengthened bonds and increased friendship between these players.

This in game social interaction can often have an effect on the outside community. During the release of the World of Warcraft expansion pack The Burning Crusade I experienced a number of strange things. At the launch there were approximately one hundred and fifty people waiting for the games release, this didn't seem too unusual, the thing that was unusual was how the people acted towards each other. There was a particular group of players standing together talking about their characters. They played the team Horde, and when another player mentioned that he played the opposing team, an Alliance character, the group began to verbally abuse him. This type of interaction is not an isolated event either. In the United States a man overheard a girl talking about how she had "ganked" another player, when the man overheard the girl mention her character name he realised he was the person whom she had been ganking. This sent the man into such a rage that he proceeded to push the teenage girl to the ground and kick her (World of Warcraft.com, 2007). This type of reaction is of course an extremely severe one, but it displays the level of connection some people make between their online and real lives.

Though only skimming the surface of the online gaming community, some very clear ideas can be drawn. The social patterns displayed within these types of environments can be wonderful and diverse, allowing people to engage in an equal and anonymous environment. This same environment however can be open to abuse by those who wish to exploit people, or have fun at their expense. Because of this perceived anonymity of both online games, and the internet in general, this form of positive and negative social behavior must be expected to some degree. It is in fact a large part of why the internet is such a popular medium for social interaction. This has led to MMORPG's being an integral social networking tool for millions of people, and at times leading to friendships that can be more valued than their real life counterparts (Nick Yee, 2004).

Reference List

Anothony Papargyris and Dr. Angeliki Poulymenakou, 2007, Learning Opportunities in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games player communities.

Mikael Jacobson and T.L. Taylor, 2003, The Sopranos Meets EverQuest Social Networking in Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

Michael Hahsler and Steven Koch, 2004, Cooperation and Disruptive Behavior - Learning from a Multiplayer Internet Gaming Community.

World of Warcraft.com, 2007, www.worldofwarcraft.com/forums

Wikipedia.org, 2007, www.wikipedia.org

Digg.com, 2007, http://digg.com/gaming_news/Online_World_of_Warcraft_Funeral_Gets_Crashed

Urban Dictionary.com, 2001-2007, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gank

Nick Yee, 2004, http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_relationships.html

Week 8 - Instant Messengers and Virtual Worlds.

Well, today our tutorial task was a fairly simple one really, we were to use and state the various differences and aspects of 3D and non-3D instant messenger (IM) programs. Seems simple enough right? Wrong. First of all I tried out ActiveWorlds which is basically a group of 3D worlds where people can chat, and build houses, and generally do all the things that you can do in real life etc. Well, to start with, trying to run this on the uni computers under Firefox caused the PC's to crash. This was the first wonderful experience. So two restarts later and I had it up and running in Internet Explorer (IE). I was pretty impressed by how quickly all the items loaded and the draw distances etc. The second program I attempted to use was Habbo Hotel. Well, after booting the client, making a character, creating a user name and password and finally entering my email address, what could you suppose happens? Thats right, their server gives me a dead response and it tells me to basically start again. This I did not like.

So, now that I've gone over that I can tell you that I decided to compare ActiveWorlds to the non-3D IM service that I chose. It seemed the lesser of two evils. Now the main IM program I use is MSN messenger service (MSN). This has one very very vast difference other than the simple 3D/non-3D user interface. MSN in NOT a chat room, it has or at least had access to chat rooms, but was not one itself. So in effect, to talk to people you had to know their email address (through prior contact) to add them. This is probably the main difference between the two, and also the main reason for the other varying differences. To start with, people in ActiveWorlds were immediately crass. I think that the main reason for this is the simple anonymity of the world. People log on with a new persona and new image, and they can say and do whatever they like with no social backlash. This is avoided in the IM world of MSN however mainly because you generally know who the person in that you are talking to and plan to have a more permanent connection, and thus are more polite.

This idea is pretty similar in most messenger systems. Most 3D services are more like chat rooms than actual IM services and this is where the real difference comes in, rather than the actual 3D environment. Finally though, when we compare a 3D chat room, to a purely text base chat room (rather than IM system) the trend seems to move in the other direction. Where people feel slightly more responsible to their 3D persona and image, than they do to simply a text based name. Therefore you tend to get more vulgarity, and less social care when entering into a purely text based environment.

So, I suppose to sum things up, what I've really discovered about the differences between 3D and non-3D messenger services comes down to the level of social responsibility and the level of social backlash that people believe they are accountable for.

Week 3 (Finally)

I've had some issues with blogger recently, however they are now resolved and I can post from home again :D enjoy my rather late blog.

So, first off we had to do some research on our major topic essay. Now I decided from the start to do something internet related, after all it is the largest form of world wide communication in the present day. However, I wanted to look at something a little more abstract when it comes to internet communications and for this reason I have settled on a rather strange topic of the MMORPG, or MMOG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game, or Massively Multi-player Online Game). This may seem like a strange form of communication but with the largest of these games boasting upwards of six million subscribers it has certainly become a new communication technology.

When looking at this topic I have come across a number of online journals which I will briefly list and give summaries of.

First
Learning to fly in persistent digital worlds: the case of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
Secondly
Defining grief play in MMORPGs: player and developer perceptions
Last
The social side of gaming: a study of interaction patterns in a massively multiplayer online game

Each of these papers looks at different aspects of MMORPG social interaction, this ranges from the negative interaction of "ganking" or "griefing" and the large amount of anger that can be generated from these activities to the positive social interaction between "allied" players, or those communicating within in game groups or teams known as "guilds". The overall structure of sociality within an interactive world is also discussed within these papers.

So heres the second part of our blog for this week, a scavenger hunt.

1) 1140 pounds
http://www.steeleoriginals.com/ls/lee/pumpkin.htm

2) Through the use of fan mail
http://www.geocities/collesseum/court/5449/from_Creator.htm


3) 18-21 feet
http://www.angelfire.com/ks3/merickson/Animalia.html
http://members.rediff.com/guneetsingh/animals.htm

4) An idea on the philisophical nature of beings, objects and the idea of existence.
Actual Meaning: specification of a conceptualisation of a knowledge domain. An ontology is a controlled vocabulary that describes objects and the relations between them in a formal way, and has a grammar for using the vocabulary terms to express something meaningful within a specified domain of interest. The vocabulary is used to make queries and assertions.
members.optusnet.com.au/~webindexing/Webbook2Ed/glossary.h4tm

5) Stereo
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000343/

6) January 8, 1986
http://www.technozen.com/manifesto.htm

7) Because the 555 exchange in the US is not a real exchange, and is reserved specifically or movie, tv and radio purposes. This partially came about due to people calling the number 867-5309 consistantly after it was featured in the song "867-5309 Jenny".

8) The ferry for 30 Euros
http://www.athensguide.com/ferries.html

9) The Seekers - I'll never find another you
http://www.onmc.iinet.net.au/topspot/1965.htm

10) The Black Assassins
http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/staff/stockwell.htm (It should be noted that I lol'd my heart out)

Well thats it, finally posted and done, and only 3 hours till dawn :)

Week 4

All of the images that I'm using were found on google and resized in photoshop.

Friends: The image is representative of friendship as you can see a group of people clearly interacting in a friendly, close manner.











High-Tech: I think this image is a perfect example of something high-tech. It is an image of a fiber optic cable, this type of cabling is considered as the next-gen data transfer system.








News: This image is of a group of news cuttings from various papers, this is an ideal image depicting news considering that the newspaper was the primary source of news projection over a number of years before television and radio.









Summer: A perfect image for summer, palm tree's and the beach, this is an image than any Queenslander comes up with when asked what summer is about.










Abstract: How to describe something as abstract? I guess the fact that this image is quite strange and certainly doesn't fit into any normal category has to make it abstract. Plus, a table and pillars on water is mighty strange.









University Life: It was going to be either a library or a bar, but I thought the library was more symbolic of how we should be living our university life.

Week 2

Well here we are in week 2, well actually closer to the start of week 3. I'm sitting at home now, reading over the very meager notes that I took in this weeks lecture. One item has caught my eye however and here it is.

Ferdinand de Saussure

1900 - Semiotics
* Semantics - the relationship of signs to what they stand for.
* Syntactics (syntax) - the formal or structural relations between signs.
* Pragmatics - the relations of signs to interpreters.

Oh and quickly for anyone reading this, I've decided that from here on in any blocks of text that I pull directly from my notes will be displayed as above (in blue and centered).

So anyway, basically I've spent the last 30 odd minutes reading about this guy 'Ferdinand' and his ideas. In doing this I have come across quite a large body of notes taken in 1910 by one of Ferdinand's students (found here http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/saussure.htm). Strangely enough, in all of these notes I didn't find a single reference of semiotics or any of its subsections.

For this reason, I now sit here periodically typing away at this blog as I read through various bits and pieces of information on semiotics. Most of the information is incessantly difficult to understand and seems more like I should be reading it for my effective writing course, rather than new com tech.

Ah, it seems that I have discovered some reference to semiotics but under the French wording of semiology. I won't bother copying the information that I have just read into here, as I've provided the link to it above. I also lack Microsoft Word at the moment and don't really know how many words I've written here, as I don't want to give Chris to much to read I'll start to wrap this week up.

With this I'll just leave a quick note about the movie we watched during our lecture. The film was called "La Jetee" and to be totally honest, was incredibly difficult to watch in the lecture theater. It didn't help of course that I was dead tired, but I was on the verge of sleep for the second half of the film. I do plan however to find the film and watch it again at home, with a large amount of caffeine.

Well that about wraps it up, sorry Chris but I'm pretty sure thats more than 300 words haha.

Until next week.

Week 1: Tutorial 10-12 JBS

Well, back on the internet. The beginning of my first computer class for my journalism course and already a wonderfully "subtle" hint towards 4chan.

For those that don't know me, my name is Jack. I'm studying journalism, as i stated above, this year and plan to move into that profession when I finish. I'm starting a blog as one of the 'oh so many' course requirements that seem to be thrust upon a poor, first year student. This reason aside however, after listening to the first lecture of this course; new communication technologies, I have begun to see more uses for this blog than simply completing an assessment.

I plan, hopefully, to use this blog to attempt to display other pieces of my writing and receive some feedback. As I'm writing this in fact, my tutor is informing the class of how the internet and computers in general have changed the way society works. This fact is what has led me to my attempt to use this blog as a staging ground for other forms of writing.

I have honestly found it amazing that in a single week of this course many of my ideas about the internet and its uses in writing and communication have changed. No longer simply a portal to /b/ and its many internet superheroes, but a medium by which to promote and discover talent in areas i had not before associated with the web.

These thoughts aside however, there is an assessment criteria to this course. The first of these items is in fact, this very blog. We have been set the task of updating the blog weekly with around 300 words or so, and to have approximately 3000 words by the end of the course. This part of our assessment incorporates 30% of the overall mark for the course, but should be quite fun and not really much of a burden. Not alone in its web based assessment, the blog will also contain a separately assessed essay at some point during its life. Although this has only been set out as 1000 words, and 20% of our marked criteria, the large number of references required seems quite daunting compared to what I have become accustomed to through school.

It seems that I have rambled, as I usually do when put in front of a keyboard, about close to nothing. To conclude this first post of mine I suppose I should mention that I really have enjoyed the course so far, and from what I have seen of the course so far, presume I will continue to enjoy it.

Until the next time I post on this, my own little piece of the internet I shall say good bye.

P.S. For those that don't know what it is, google /b/ and see what you can discover.