Smack talking to your base

Those of us  in the US have a midterm election coming up this week.  In the short period of time before the polls open is when it seems that political advertising is at its most negative.  Do the dynamics of negative advertising have parallels with the role of "smack talking" in online games?

Anecdotally, it seems that people frequently complain about negative advertising.  So too it seems that many players complain about 'smack talking'.  I wonder though whether the offended are missing the point: they are not the target audience.  Is smack talking really about rallying the base in your game?

Subjectively I might describe smack talk as the player clap-trap that clutters communication channels involving baiting and outrageous claims about how one side is better/worse than the other (humor, see Fn1).  The BBC h2g2 narrowly suggests that smack talking is a subcategory of leet talk:

As with any type of competition, 'smack' talk became prevalent in online gaming. Phrases such as 'I am elite' became common place, and somewhere down the line l33t speak crept in, reforming the phrase into '1 4m 3l1t3' in order to demonstrate that the speaker was a hacker and someone to be feared. It was further exaggerated by purposeful bad spelling and eventually wound up as something like this, '1 4m 3l33t!' and simplified to, '1 4m 133t'. Hence the name 'l33t speak'.

This is misleading in that it is quite possible to find articulate non-leetish smacking (smack talking on boards tend to be more coherent than in text chat).   Yet this does emphasize two important points (IMHO) about online smack talking.  First, it likely started out as an import from  real world examples (sports).  Second, once taken root in online spheres, it has evolved into its own rituals.  Yes, in some cases those rituals may be linguistic.  But too those rituals can be pragmatic in terms of the game world.  In "Verone's Survival Guide : How To Survive A Ransom Attempt (in Eve-Online)", rule number one is:  Don't smack talk... "Like you, pirates can be sensitive to certain abuse... and will probably just kill you if you start being an obnoxious turd."

World of Warcraft (WoW) discourages direct smacking between players of the two sides (Horde and Alliance can't communicate).  Other games (e.g. Eve-Online cited above) do permit it.  I think this speaks more to the nature of these game worlds than anything else.   WoW, in spite of its name, seeks less of its content to be driven by interplayer conflict, whereas Eve-Online (again in spite of its idyllic name), does so. 

This brings us to what I believe is a basic trade-off.   Succinctly, it is this one:  "(e)ven though I despise rude smack talk from people, those people who spout it definitely provide me with hours of entertainment."  Look but don't touch.

Yes, but too much looking may suppress one or both sides turn out for a while (from here):

...just repeats the stuff that both sides are responsible for spewing on to the forums. "They're taking bigger losses in (numbers/ISK)", "Our killboards are right, theirs are wrong", "They're on the defensive/we're on the offensive" etc etc. If either side think that forum smack is going to win or lose the war then they're ignorant as well as arrogant.  Smack talk may discourage a few people for a while, but when push comes to shove both sides will go "all-in" and no amount of crotch-grabbing on the forums is going to make a difference.

But perhaps those who do turn up are more fired up for it, and hence the effective but perverse logic of it.  Get your based fired up.  Everyone else may be a no-show anyway.

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Fn1.  Ian in comment #34 in the Terra Nova StrangeLove discussion  brings us a tongue-in-cheek  "(d)etermination of a discrete unit for the measurement of smack talk" (Eve-Online, P.S. can someone attribute this to its original source?): 

Determination of a discrete unit for the measurement of smack talk

By: Culmen

Smack continues to be a staple of the eve community. However studies into the causes and effects of smack has thus far been limited by an inability to quantify smack in a discrete and scientific manner. While there have been studys on a subjective determination of smack (Allen et al 2003). These determinations are not scaleable, and are unable tocope with levels of smack occasionally seen in game. A recent study conducted by Jerkov at al in 2005 has attempted a similar scale, but fails to differenciate smack by side, instead measuring the overall content of smack in the entire local channel. Thus I have compiled a  scientific study in the hopes of better understanding the phenomenon of smack talk in a quantifiable manner...

Comments

[Andy Havens]

1.

You wanna see some real-life smack... try reading the comments on some of the more partisan liberal and/or conservative American political blogs. Jebus wept... nobody is every really going to convince anyone of any position with that kind of vituperative, bilious spew... but they go on and on, page after page, same old stuff, hash-hash and re-hash... The few times I've slogged through it, I get tired and depressed just reading it. I can't imagine writing it and thinking that anyone would care enough to read it and be moved beyond just yammering out another smack-back.

Here in Buckeye Country, if you say "OH" I say "IO." Lots of smack talk seems, to me, about as clever and intelligent as that... but with the added flava of negativity and ire.

[?]

2.

@Andy,

what you observed is not an attempted dialogue it's just "covering ground", "blocking out", silencing the opposing camp by screaming louder than "they".

[Thomas]

3.

In a game, people will call you an idiot when you are in fact winning the war.

[N. Ng]

4.

I personally despise smack talk, but the connection between games and smack-talking is actually well established.

See Homo Ludens ch. III. In my edition it's on pg. 69. Huizinga describes rituals in several cultures, including ancient Greece, which are pretty much the archaic equivalent of smack-talking. He then goes on to identify it as a form of agonistic (competitive, or "PvP") play.

[Andy Havens]

5.

@?:

Yeah. Well. Isn't that a decent definition of "smack talk?" I was just comparing venues.

Here's a sidebar on the subject, btw. I blogged a couple months back about what we here would call "Anti-Smack Talk." I titled it "Anti Yo-Mama," after the MTV show, "Yo Mama" that's out now. My brother and some of his friends started doing, instead of, "You suck!" one-up-manship, "You're amazing!" one-up-manship. The benefits, they discovered, were real and (in the case of getting, er... "temporary female companionship,") measurable.

[Gabriel]

6.

A lot of smack comes from uninformed opinions about conflicts - for instance, if two alliances are engaged in war, someone who just beat 2:1 odds and came out on top may run to the forums and say "hooray! I am better than these other people and beat them soundly." Another person who talked to his friend on the losing side may get biased facts - i.e. "yeah we lost some but not a lot" in order to save face or downplay the damage. These two conflicting viewpoints clash in the forum, with both sides calling the other liars in order to promote their own version of the facts.

A potential solution lies with accurate killboards in EVE. Only a handful of groups portray 100% accurate killboards, and most of them are mercenaries since their future employment hinges on their current performance. CCP provides killmails to determine who killed who. Human nature being what it is, these can be forged, altered, or ignored so it really takes a strong leadership to enforce accuracy. However, the continued innacuracy of major killboards (see the ASCN / BoB killboard disparities at http://www.killboard.net/ and http://ascn.eve-killboard.net/) keeps the forum smacktalk alive and kicking so one side can win the PR war and the support of the EVE population.

It would be interesting to see if smacktalk would decrease if a MMORPG developer provided 100% accurate kill/loss boards for groups and individuals in a MMORPG. My guess is no, that you would instead see more "cheating" accusations and personal attacks. It seems like people like lashing out at those who made them feel small or inferior.

[chas]

7.

@Gabriel

I'd say that, in the face of "100% accurate killboards" the community would instead question the killboards, challenge their reporting accuracy, what it means to get a "kill" and whether "kill" really has any meaning (winning the battle... losing the war).

Once they've so discredited the boards' effectiveness, they'll go right back at flinging poo at one another.

[Daniel Speed]

8.

If CCP (for example) did provide a 100% accurate killboard, then it would automatically become the de facto e-peen comparison method. It wouldn't matter if one alliance had a huge enough manufacturing base to easily replace losses, only that they were losing more ships.

Combat would become even more of a stand-off as people became risk adverse, and since the actual efficacy of combat would be reduced by there being less of it, people would probably smacktalk more to compensate.

I hold the behavior of people in some FPS games up as an example of this: the global ranking system in BF2142 leads to wildly aberrant behavior ingame less concerned with "winning" and more concerned with racking up points.

[Todd Ogrin]

9.

Dark Age of Camelot's website provides pretty comprehensive statistics on player kills, "keep takes", realm points (like PVP XP points), and other stats. Though there are lots of cheating accusations ("radar"), two other manifestations of smacktalk are players accusing one another of playing an "easy mode" class, and players complaining that the developer is incompetent to have devised a system where other people can win.

[Gabriel]

10.

Todd: could you expand on players saying that the developer is incompetent for developing a way to tell who "wins"? That's an interesting idea, since I see a lot of competition in MMO games, sometimes carried out to an excessive degree, about who is better. Do players complain that since there's an objective ranking, there's no way to appeal to uncertainty by saying "my buddy is better than you"? The easy mode accusations come in all shapes and sizes, in every MMO: Paladins in WoW, flying a certain type of ship in EVE, etc.

[Sara Jensen]

11.

It's actually very difficult to build a totally objective, non-exploitable PvP ranking system (here's a good article on some solutions). In my experience, PvPers derive a great deal of enjoyment from smack talking on the message boards; if you had a real, working ranking system, those guys would be out of things to post about. :) Uncertainty drives a lot of quality out-of-game discussion.

[dmyers]

12.

Interesting topic, but I see a potential group-emphasis bias in the notion that smack-talk might somehow contribute to group identity/motivation. I’m currently looking at different sorts of theoretical explanations that result from an emphasis on cooperative group behaviors during MMO play (in short, within most pve) vs. an emphasis on more competitive (and, I would argue, more individualistic) behaviors during MMO play (ie., during pvp). Along these lines, I would say that smack-talk is mostly about an individual positioning himself in relation to other individuals. This most often occurs in group contexts, to be sure, but the motivation, I think, is clearly rooted in self-esteem rather than in, strictly speaking, group identity.

Two (or three) related points.

1. Most smack-talk (in CoX, for instance) occurs after defeat and by the defeated. “Nice FOTM kill, noob; lotsa lag tonight; lol spine/regin; etc.” There are, of course, various sorts of saber-rattlings before any battle, but that appears to be more about nervousness than identity. Smack-talk after being defeated is very consistent, very patterned, and seems a blatant attempt to assert the unfairness of the outcome and, thus, diminish its implications (ie., “I suck”).
2. Smack-talk appears to diminish over time among experienced pvp’ers. Sudden changes in expected fortunes may result in whining in broadcast, but, by and large, those players who are new and/or yet unsure about their individual performances (and related “values”) in pvp are those players most likely to smack-talk.
3. There are definitely persistent smack-talkers, who, for instance, enjoy engaging in “forum pvp.” But I’ve observed these are more often ostracized than promoted by their guilds/groups.

I don’t think these observations are explained very well by the OP thesis.

[nate combs]

13.

Dave> I see a potential group-emphasis bias in the notion that smack-talk might somehow contribute to group identity/motivation.
--------------------

Yes. To the extent that one can appeal to a group at all, there has to be a group. I am inclined to believe, however, that it probably gets pretty complicated. Even mobs of individuals are mobs.

Perhaps a few thought experiments.

A.) a pick-up-group in an arena game: transient group experience, individual ladders

B.) clan matches in an arena game: cohesive online group, group ladders.

C.) RL buddies and their "Death from above!" band on Friday nights: cohesive online group, RL bonds.

D.) World of Warcraft: the state of the Horde or Alliance is independent of the performance of their respective groups. Battle grounds are about individual honor points/ladders.

E.) Role-players in WoW

F.) Eve-Online wars (ignoring 1-1 pvp aspects - e.g. piracy etc): performance or prowess of the individual is often in the context of group circumstances and metrics (from post: "They're taking bigger losses in (numbers/ISK)", "Our killboards are right, theirs are wrong", "They're on the defensive/we're on the offensive" etc)

...

C., E., F. seem like cases with stronger group ids.

Yes I suppose in terms of numbers, most smack examples are *mostly* about self-esteem displays (How much is that also true of the RW?). Cases like Eve, might introduce into the mix more cohesive large group motivations (alliances/warfare).

Even with WoW - we still see clustering around different ideological views of PvP (e.g. The Price of Serenity). So is it all about the individual?

Going back to Andy's example of partisan blogs. Individual displays or group motivation? I would be inclined to believe both in some mixture.

[hikaru]

14.

:rolls eyes.

Linking flesh world politics with MMOGs is such a stretch here... there is no negative ad equivalent because in most MMOGs there is no mechanical equivalent of voting/popularity contests. Players cannot become elected officials with power over game world policy.