Playing the game
Posted on July 08, 2003 @ 12:40 in Research
An AP news story is making the rounds and CNN, Mercury News, and Wired are writing it up. The story is about a bunch of guys playing mob characters in The Sims Online, and shaking down and harrassing other players. It's an old problem, something that every mudder will have experienced from time to time. Instead of suspending disbelief and immersing themselves in the alternative reality of the game, some players think it's fun to 'play' the game, to see what more or less 'legal' hacks of the game mechanics will let you achieve.
The really interesting thing to me, is not whether these players are involved in "extra-game" or "meta-game" cheats or behavior, but the way "in-game" and "extra-game" motives and activities blur. The separation between a player and his/her character is tentative, at best, and the ideal of role-playing — completely separating the fictional world of the character from the world of the player and suspending disbelief to totally immerse yourself in the world of your character as your character — is a fiction, as I also describe in my book. Creating and sustaining a shared fantasy depends on the willingness and trust of the players, and the bigger your player base, the more players you will have who are not willing and the less players you will have who know eachother and hence trust eachother. No amount coding will compensate for that, as any wizard who's tried will probably admit. The worst (ab)uses of code can of course be resolved, but at heart it remains a social issue: a player deciding to look at the game as a game, instead of seeing the role-playing as the game. It's a thorny problem and it's going to be interesting to see how new generations of MMOGs are going to deal with it.
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