Spectacle

Dan Hunter

I'm at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium organized in inimitable fashion by Liz Lawley, and attended by about half of the brainstrust of Terra Nova. One of the focuses here has been the connection between virtual worlds, online communities and the rise of social computing generally. Tim is liveblogging from the event, and so I won't. But it's made me think about a couple of things, one of which I want to mention here.

Chatting in one of the breakout groups, we discussed the nature of specators within MMOGs. With a small number of exceptions--notably the arenas in City of Heroes and Villians, watching a duel in WoW, sitting up on a hill as the crowd runs by--there is very little opportunity for engaging in the world as a spectator. That is, one could sit back and watch people going about their business in world, but the modality of engagement in virtual worlds is participation not spectation (is that even a word?) Indeed, like Stephen Johnson, this has always been one of my major defenses of video games against those who stigmatize them: video games get the user to do something, unlike television or radio or newspapers.

But I think that perhaps we've underestimated the joy of spectaction (and spectacle), of being present but not directly engaged in what is happening in our world. I think that perhaps spectation has been unfairly stigmatized ("You're not watching the boobtube again, are you?") and that perhaps it serves an important role for us. There is, no doubt, an established literature on this, but I'm not aware of. Perhaps others can help me out here.

This observation leads to some game design implications. Why is it that we don't have "televised" spectacles within the worlds, why aren't there more arenas where one can watch others fight, why do we assume that participation is the most important touchstone of immersion within MMOGs? And so on, and so on.

I don't have a thesis here. But it intriques me as to why MMOGs are so different from the physical world.