« Cows, Immersion, and Sports Law | Main | You mean, like, you can make money at this? »

May 27, 2005

Zerg, Borg, Firm, Guild, Collablog

EQ

Nate's most excellent post on Zerging suggests the alien Zerg collective's attack strategy may be bad because it is boring.  By contrast,  the Borg, another four-letter alien bunch whose name ends with "rg", are not particularly boring, but are thought to be bad because their all-assimilating Hivemind wipes out Mill's concept of individual liberty (and plus all that flesh-machine grafting is kind of icky).  The Firm, according to Grisham and certain others, is dangerous when it gets too big, too powerful, too sharp.  Collectivity threatens the individual, and in some cases, it threatens society as well.  Which, of course, leads me to Robert Marks' interesting book: Everquest Companion.

I'm halfway through the book and this tension between the individual and the collective is jumping off the pages.   Why?  Because Marks wants to tell a story about a few individuals who "made" Everquest, a broader story about individuals shuffling between corporate structures (EQ's move from Sony to Verant to Sony) and a still broader story about community that he seems to claim is at the heart of Everquest.

For instance, Marks repeatedly reminds the reader that while you can start out solo, the game will force you to group.  On page 82 we have:

Indeed, in the here and now, the guild system has become almost essential to higher-level players, and raids are more famous than almost any other type of game play.

On page 94, Shawn Lord says:

"The game isn't about the developers; it's about the community playing the game."

On page 104, in the course of exploring the various types of guilds and their structure, we are informed that:

Although most role-playing for these guilds is initiated by the players, it is sometimes imposed by the Game Masters... [Joel Herndon is quoted] "A GM contacted our Guild Leader... and made up a story line that Innoruuk's daughter would marry the guild leader of this Dark Elf guild and there would be a classic battle of good versus evil..."

So the guilds are grouping with the devs.  On page 99, we hear about "the Protection of the Cabbage" quest in Shadows of Luclin.

The original idea had come from a player who had submitted some lore, along with a quest progression, and the first person to complete the quest, Xanthe, had an earring named after him in the game.

So the players are grouping with the devs.  There's plenty of this stuff about the importance of the community, the contributions of the community, how the current live team is made up largely of former players who continue to play, etc.  But then compare to pages 72-75, where, discussing the Black Snow lawsuit (yes, that's DAoC and AO, not EQ, but it's context for the EQ & RMT discusion), Marks quotes Brad McQuaid as saying:

When people claim that having time invested in the game somehow gives them authority or ownership over elements of that game, you certainly have a situation that could threaten the entire genre itself.

(Interesting interplay here between "authorship" and "authority")  Also, on pages 105-108, where, discussing the Mystere incident (where an EQ player was banned for writing inappropriate Dark Elf fanfic), Marks says:

Rather than being limited to playing in Everquest, players began early on writing stories about Norrath... [W]here the player community starts to write original stories about Norrath, it is difficult, if not impossible, for Sony to have any control over the content.

Yes... but I thought we were all one happy community just a few pages ago?  Interestingly, Chapter 6 is called "Reaching Out to Your Fellow Elf: Guilds, Forums, and Conventions," so the next step is from guilds to the larger web community of EQ sites (e.g. Stratics and Allakhazam) and RL conventions of players.  There's even a little sidebar on 115 describing EQ as "A Community of Practice." We're back to the community story.

Of course, a major question with all communities is: Who's in? Who's out? Who decides? Who makes the rules?  TL's paper, "Whose Game is the Anway?" was probably the first paper describing this community/corporate conflict in EQ, and Sal Humphrey's paper "Commodifying culture -- it's not just about the virtual sword" is an attempt to take the discussion a step further, by linking it more explicitly to the legal scholarship on intellectual property and ownership vs. cultural participation.   And Marvel vs. NCSoft, of course, puts a whole new spin on these player creativity and IP ownership questions.

It's important to note, though, that the implications of all these questions of communities colliding with technologies of collaboration extend well outside the virtual worlds fishpond.  For instance, consider this post on Savage Minds (actually citing Farmer & Morningstar) about how best to handle the organization of research papers in the anthropology community.  Or take this post from Anne Galloway discussing an article on Forbes about mass amateurization (something Dan and I have written about, btw) as not exactly radical, but instead pointing largely toward mass corporate commodification of amateurization. 

The Zerg are boring because they are boringly effective.  The Borg are frightening, because their power-gaming KOS tactics (and absolutely efficient Hivemind) make them the ultimate antitrust concern.  But whenever a group unites, it will, as a matter of course, use whatever practical and legal tactics it chooses in order to further its mission.  As a recent rail against Boing Boing noted, even vaunted indy collablogs don the mantle of the commercial corporation.  As Nate noted, collective strategies are so darn effective in MMORPGs and elsewhere that they can feel, at times, like a design flaw.

On page 83, Marks notes that guilds and raids were not planned to be the endgame of Everquest:

To this day, McQuaid denies that raids were planned for specifically.

Guilds happen.  Put 300K players in a cyberspace, give them any power, and you're squarely in the realm of politics and the emergence of the collective order.  Resistance is futile.  Prepare to be assimilated.

Relatedly, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy has started a project "Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds."  (Richard is an advisor.)

on May 27, 2005 in greglas |

| | | |

Comments

1.

greg, your writing has too much content, my head is so full it hurts.

>Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.

Just a thought on this: Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones (From Ludlow's book).

Between innovation and assimilation is one brief moment of something that is truly different. We may well look back on the period 1997 - 2005 as the golden era of virtual worlds, when they had become very large in size and graphical, but had not yet been sullied by the norms of large organizations.

Posted by: Edward Castronova | May 30, 2005 at 15:58

2.

Or perhaps the early history of the printing press, before the governments woke up and realized that censorship was the appropriate strategy? What's funny is that, the more I look at the history of VWs, the more I'm thinking that the political corner for VWs turned way back in 95 -- text MUDs were (and probably still are) much less "sullied" by those particular norms of which you speak.

Posted by: greglas | Jun 02, 2005 at 17:53

4.

For the record :)

We definitely planned from the beginning for EQ to have both guilds and raids. Personally, I was part of an uber guild on Sojourn/TorilMUD yeasr before EQ called Crimson Sigil and we often raided.

What we didn't plan on was both the problem with zerging as well as the ever increasing size of groups in a raid -- I think it got a tad out of control, to say the least.

Posted by: Aradune Mithara | Jun 05, 2005 at 05:11

5.

Aradune Mithara> For the record :)

Hey, wow, thanks for setting the record straight! And thanks for the validation on the factional stuff in the earlier post.

And I just realized that Aradune, like Lord British or Hakkon, is really a pretty cool game fictional phenomenon in himself, isn't he? More avatarish than most avatars -- that probably ought to be included somewhere in the paper.

Posted by: greglas | Jun 06, 2005 at 11:36

The comments to this entry are closed.

Search

Recent Comments

Powered by Postrank