Originally posted January 10, 2011
((I hold MMORRPG's as a great example of social learning and have tried to share the ideas I see in the medium with people in other professions. I posed this question to a few groups and found this response from Severe most interesting.))
I'm in the process of writing a blog entry for my consulting company about what MMORPG's can teach us about transparency and teamwork. With that in mind, I wanted to ask "what have you learned from MMORPG's?" My examples include things like grouping leads to more experience and you should always know your role. Do you have any other thoughts?
-- by Severe
I could answer that and have you guys hate me some more. I'll do it anyway.
MMO communities tend to underline the paradoxes in "civilized" occidental societies. The main example being that we tend to gather together in order "to do great things" - which are mostly what the game devs have thought about having us do - and although we like to adhere to the morals of teamplay, it is frequently jeopardized by self-centered behaviors.
MMOs have taught me that whether it'd be TV, cinema, sports, celebrities, or any entertainment industry, it is quite easy to amuse the people and focus it's attention on puppet shows, where they will feel in charge, while others run their lives. They are indeed a great place to gather people minds around moral values about team work, open mind, tolerance, manners, achievement, friendship, and so on. They stimulate the need that each of us has for recognition and well being amongst ourselves, yet they are almost always polluted by selfish behaviors that we, occidentals, have build a way of life upon.
As Heather said, community behaviors in MMOs tend to recreate work infrastructures. MMOs can be seen as a way to put a general lack of imaginative thinking into light, or rather, a lack of need for imaginative thinking. We want others to imagine for us, so that we can simply suck their imagination and make it ours. Whatever the goals of the guilds, coalitions, corporations, super groups, brotherhoods (you name it), are, its players will constantly try to mimic real life situations and organization. They will constantly follow the course of actions the game dictates : level up, gear up, get a guild, keep gearing up, defeat other players or defeat monsters. Too rarely shall we try to shape these artificial worlds around new structures. Eve Online is a great example of that. Players in Eve have been given free space, literally free space, upon which they could build just about anything. What they did is they made Alliances, territorial empires, and they have been fighting over those for about 8 years now. And even if this can be great fun, it is still a story about getting recognition from your allies by crushing your opponents, for immediate profitable goals. Efforts put in Eve communities are sometimes breathtaking, and the butterfly effect they are so proud of can go a long way. That makes for a very unique gaming experience. But sadly, imaginative thinking is wasted on finding better ways to have the upper hand on your foes, never to shape a new way of playing together.
We can then argue that when we want to play a MMO we do not necessarily want to bore ourselves with overly complicated thinking about our way of life, we just want to have fun.
And that is, to me, another thing MMOs put into light (among other situations and medias) about community behaviors : the stigmatization of intellectual behaviors. Intellectuals have become those boring dusty old guys who don't know how to have fun and keep rambling about stuff that interest no one and won't ever change anything. That is a very sad phenomenon. Intellectuals used to be what made this world push forward. They are supposed to inspire us, make us want to discover new horizons, and, in a more general way, evolve for the betterment of our species. That is a part of why I regularly turn back to RP sessions, for they are a very good insight on player's psyche and require creative thinking. Get high, paint the future. Creative thinking goes a long way if you care to stretch it to it's maximum.
All in all, MMOs have taught me that whatever the media, and whatever the people, we just need puppet shows to hold on to morals we no longer feel concerned about, and that we keep asking for more puppet shows, around which we will keep gathering and recreate life as we know it. And although we are still capable of going great length to explore games we play, we keep bringing up the same limits to our behaviors. We do what we are told, more or less, and we prefer to do it together than on our own. Furthermore, we won't do it with anyone : the "pick-up guy" has become an entire new social class on MMOs, WoW is the best example of that. So in the end, we don't really want to play with others, we want others to play with us. It is breathing assistance for community ideals.
Yes, it is a very gloom view of it. But it doesn't make me sad, in all this brews a need for social values that will someday resurface. I'm confident in that. Getting together is a natural need. It gets lost in our occidental way of life. It is being kept alive by unnatural means like social networks and internet communities. It can never be as fulfilling as the real deal, but it keeps those values alive for now. It kept most of the ingredients. All we have to do is feel concerned. This extends to many things.
|