Other People
This past weekend, I saw the film Coraline, which I found terrific in many respects. Among other things, I think it has a lot to say that applies very strongly to virtual worlds, about why though we may all complain about bad pick-up groups, griefers, loot farmers, Barrens chat, virtual worlds are not a demonstration that hell is other people. Quite the opposite: virtual worlds live (and sometimes die) on whether they infuse authentic sociality into everything we do within those worlds.
In Coraline (modest spoilers ahead), the title character is frustrated with her parents' quirks and lack of attentiveness to her. Drawn into a magical world that exists inside her new home, she is at first enchanted by her Other Parents, who have marvelous talents, live surrounded by wonder, and are utterly devoted to Coraline herself. I don't suppose I'm giving away much when I say that there's a big catch to all this, and the last portion of the film is about how wonder gives way to horror.
The only seeming clue that Coraline's Other Mother is anything but perfection is that her eyes (and the eyes of almost everything else in the magical world) are made from buttons. And yet there is another clue right from the outset, in some ways a much more unsettling sign of just how wrong this world is. Everyone and everything in it exists only for Coraline. They have no apparent interests of their own, no desires apart from hers, nothing to do but please and delight Coraline.
Virtual worlds occasionally toy with treating each player like Coraline. In World of Warcraft, my character is greeted with delight by guards and non-player characters who allude to his past adventures. This lasts only until I begin a new round of quests in a new zone, whereupon my famous achievements are forgotten and I am merely one more anonymous grunt. When my character seems to make momentous choices that should hang about him forever, those too disappear into the haze. I am torturer one moment, and the next a saint who seeks all across the world for a cure which will save the life of hero faced with enslavement to the Lich King. In my most important adventures, I exist inside wholly private instanced worlds with a small number of friends or allies. That world, too, exists only for me.
What keeps World of Warcraft or any other virtual world from being as ultimately empty and terrifying as Coraline's magical hideaway is that these worlds are full of people who do not exist for my own pleasure. They may be people I know and like, people I tolerate, people I find pathetic, people who infuriate or disgust me. But they mean that the world is not merely my mirror.
Now I think that virtual worlds themselves could function more that way: they could react to my actions (or the actions of many players together) in much more dynamic and autonomous ways. Reading Jim Rossignol describing the latest astonishing developments in the long-running war between BoB and Goonfleet in EVE Online makes that very clear. The underlying world in EVE does not exist in a one-to-one relationship to individual players, and its basic economic and politcial infrastructure transforms in relationship to collective action in some striking ways. A world which is itself a dynamic presence in play need not be as harsh or treacherous as EVE's world is, but the basic principle is an important one.
Until we have a fuller range of dynamic worlds, though, other people, acting in the most unmanaged and unfiltered ways possible, are the only thing that keep virtual worlds from total sterility. Sometimes we all feel like Coraline: we'd like a world which exists only to delight us, full of cheering throngs and valiant allies. But like Coraline, we'd be better off knowing from the first moment of that desire that we're really chasing something horrible rather than something pleasant.
Comments on Other People:
Very insightful post.
Posted Feb 12, 2009 3:31:41 PM | link
Some excellent points, but I think it is important to recognize that there are trade-offs.
When praise is heaped on Eve Online, it is almost always for its underlying mechanics. You don't hear a lot about how awesome the story is or how epic it feels. These are things you do hear from a lot of people when they describe Blizzard games. "Eve has good mechanics. WoW tells a good story." That seems to be the prevailing wisdom in a nut shell.
Story and dynamism seem to exist on a continuum given the current economic realities of gaming. I would love to see someone turn this correlation on its head, and find a way to make a world that is both dynamic and well written, but so far the best anyone seems able to do is to make a conscious choice regarding where they want to fall on the continuum.
Posted Feb 12, 2009 5:17:15 PM | link
Nexus: I am not a WoW player, so correct me if I am wrong, but the sense I've gotten is that while WoW tells a good story, it is not through the actions of the player, really—the story exists in the world independent of the players, and they are effectively an in-world audience. Conversely, the story in EVE is entirely player-action-driven, and thus really more like real-life ebb and flow than author-created dramatic build-up.
If this is the case (and I reiterate that I don't actually know enough about WoW to know), perhaps the key to good story and dynamism would lie in players, and a system that rewards dramatically appropriate actions? It's a sort of spur-of-the-moment thought, influenced by my experience with tabletop RPGs, but I think it might be a viable route.
Posted Feb 12, 2009 5:50:58 PM | link
Kit: I think your analysis of WoW is actually pretty accurate, but I think it is worth noting that a lot of people game to escape the ebb and flow of reality. :)
A lot of this is going to come down to personal preference. I come from a tabletop background as well, but the benefit you have with that setting that you lose once you take things into the MMOG scale is selection. People who want a pure hack and slash game will tend to game together, as will people who are interested in storytelling. In heavily player-driven MMOGs people who enjoy hack-and-slash tend to actively prevent any other play style from occurring. Admittedly, this is the biased opinion of someone who scored 0% killer on Mr. Bartle's personality test.
The weird thing is I'm a big proponent of player control when it comes to social virtual worlds, but not when it comes to gaming, at least not of the implementations that I have seen to date.
Posted Feb 12, 2009 7:32:19 PM | link
"The weird thing is I'm a big proponent of player control when it comes to social virtual worlds, but not when it comes to gaming"
if by "player control" you mean "choices" as opposed to "requests upon" or "demands" then why would that be "weird?"
thats the real difference between "win" goal oriented "games" and "exist/experience" virtual worlds be it for social or not reasons.
Whats "weird"..lol is that culturally you now see that desire as something out of the norm.
c3
Posted Feb 15, 2009 5:56:40 PM | link
"The weird thing is I'm a big proponent of player control when it comes to social virtual worlds, but not when it comes to gaming"
if by "player control" you mean "choices" as opposed to "requests upon" or "demands" then why would that be "weird?"
thats the real difference between "win" goal oriented "games" and "exist/experience" virtual worlds be it for social or not reasons.
Whats "weird"..lol is that culturally you now see that desire as something out of the norm.
c3
Posted Feb 15, 2009 5:56:40 PM | link
Somewhat off topic but Coraline is just your latest variation of Alice in Wonderland. Just compare it to Mirror Mask from 2005.
I'm not sure about your point that people make virtual worlds less empty and terrifying. If we consider console-based RPGs, we can see the kind of loyal following that these solo-plays have. I think that's indicative of the role of storytelling a la "Avatar, Avatar, you've finally returned" (I think that's what you're greeted with). The MMO version of a virtual world shouldn't be considered as the only definition.
Posted Mar 23, 2009 3:55:22 AM | link
