Practicing trust

I know this is blindingly obvious, but it’s only really just struck me that one of the things that virtual worlds and game worlds / MMOs do is provide a forum for us to externalize and rehearse largely positive trust relations. Which I think is one plank in an argument that MMOs can be a positive force.

I realized this as I was filling my car with diesel at a petrol station in Kent UK (‘gas’ is $9.91 gallon here btw).  I was reminded of filling up at a gas station in the US, in LA I think. Here one had to pay for the gas before filling up.

This makes me very uneasy – it suggest to me that it’s presumed that someone might steal said gas, a crime, which reminds me that crime might happen at any moment, right there, which makes me wonder if I should trust the people around me as they, like me, are assumed to be potential criminals.

Of course this happens all the times, we lock our houses so people don’t walk off with out stuff. But what’s interesting for me in this case is that the cultural dislocation and alien practice externalize, to me, the assumed trust relations.

All this came to me after I’d been doing quite a few all guild instance runs in WoW and the odd mixed PuG. In most runs people would know what the drops were. Not only would there be general ‘greeding’ of loot, there would be a huge amount of passing on things that were not good for a given class and n00b’s i.e. me being told what I needed.

Here it strikes me that MMOs sit in a sweet spot between being different enough as a practice to externalize, among other thing, acts of trust and kindness. Yet familiar enough in terms of the generic nature of what’s going on for those acts to have emotional impact – at least some of the time.

I was going to say that this is a very welcome contrast to much of what I see around me. But I worry. I worry that we will see a growing gap between the semi-anonymous world of virtual spaces and the physical world. However I just don’t know how this will play out. My hope is that the practice in one will bleed into the other, especially as anonymity is only semi i.e. for many of us we know those that we play with.

I wonder if those that actually know about this area rather than stand on the sidelines of theory can expand on any aspect of how practices and trust interrelate and how virtual spaces modify this – there must be studies.

+++

Yes we have covered similar aspects of this issue here on TN before, here is a sample:

Do you trust me?

Trust, Contingency, and WoW Guilds

Trust Me, Baby

Comments

[SusanC]

1.

Yes, I agree completely.

What happens in VW's usually doesn't matter very much (in the sense that it's not a real disaster if things go wrong). You can try out trusting people more than you normally would, knowing that it doesn't really matter if things go wrong.

It's great practise in exploring the bounds of who you can trust and who you can't.

One problem with VW's, from this perspective: you can't see facial expression, hear tone of voice, or many of the other signs we use to tell if someone is lying.

Or maybe this is an asset of VW's: they teach you how to detect deception when you only have a very limited range of clues.

[SusanC]

2.

My hope is that the practice in one will bleed into the other

In many of the games I play, strangers are trusted less than you'ld trust a stranger in the real world. I don't play EVE, but think of: "Not Blue Shoot it".

[Adam Ruch]

3.

"What happens in VW's usually doesn't matter very much (in the sense that it's not a real disaster if things go wrong)."

I have to loudly protest this kind of generalisation. Very, very loudly. Because value (or 'mattering') is not a fixed property, it is defined by those who use it. It IS a big deal when someone steals the materials that have taken you 12-15 hours to accumulated, when you trusted them to craft an item for you, in Warcraft. That does matter to both of these players, or it wouldn't ever happen. Why steal something if it has no value? The catch is that we are able to decide for ourselves on an individual basis what has value much more in a VW than in the real world.

Secondly: I think the processes of trust you're describing here are very important because in the normal world they do rely heavily on eye contact, body language, etc. While these things are absent in a mediated digital world, this does not erase the process of establishing trust. It modifies the process. The realspace and virtual space processes will run in parallel, reflecting one another, but contrasting vividly due to the differences in modes of expression found in each medium. eBay for example, uses the feedback/reputation system to create trust. Instead of 'sizing up' the seller with your eye, you size up his history. You can't do this in the real world, can't look at a retailer's eyes to see what his last 700 customers thought of him. Different means to the same end.

[Nicholas Chambers]

4.

>>" My hope is that the practice in one will bleed into the other

>>>In many of the games I play, strangers are trusted less than you'ld trust a stranger in the real world. I don't play EVE, but think of: "Not Blue Shoot it"."

Indeed. There's a noticeable distinction in regards of trust between the free and the paid worlds. The paid world's seem to develop a culture of cooperation and enterprising; the players produce, sell, auction and so on. The free worlds on the other hand seem to exist in lines of a post-apocalyptic "everybody on their own", i.e. steal, backstab and plunder, if you can.

I think this builds a direct link between the VWs and the RL. You can do whatever you like in a free virtual world and the worst thing that might happen to you is your 10 minutes old character getting banned for a while. In a paid world, your account gets blocked, result in a loss of money, playtime or both.

[SusanC]

5.

There's a noticeable distinction in regards of trust between the free and the paid worlds.

When I played MUD1 back in the 80's, it was often said that the University of Essex version was more combat oriented than the CompuServe version. There, we had two almost identical virtual worlds, differing only in the demographic of the players and the out-of-game economics (cost of access).

[evaroberts]

6.

Well to quote about the site i would like to say that i completely agree with the article. Either of the two good or bad could encounter by practicing trust..
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eva
Addiction Recovery Illinois

[Cunzy1 1]

7.

The same thing happens in Animal Crossing Wild World.

True story.

[Tamara Paradis]

8.

I'm with Adam. I also want to loudly protest any blanket statements that once again perpetuate the hoary old idea that online is not real, or at least not as real as offline, or that the consequences of online actions and relationships are not as deep, valid and full of potential. That potential is for the entire spectrum of human interpretation and valuation.

But to get back to what Ren is bringing up... the ideas of both risk and trust, along with acceptance and management of those aspects of human life. His gas example is an excellent one that highlights the ways various cultures perceive risk and handle it. In North America, risk is so often tied up in financial and/or bodily risk. We see this in risk discourses around digital life, where we worry mainly about our credit cards and financial data and the safety of ours and our children's bodies and property. What ends up happening is the assumption of a set of boundary understandings between one's safety and abilities and those of another. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas points out, our understandings of safety, trust and danger are bound up in understandings of what are acceptable practices in and through those boundaries.

Online, this kind of dual risk management happens in various ways in different games, or across different servers on the same game. I think of the ways in which one manages and plays one's toons on a PvP server in WoW versus a PvE server. On a PvP server, the automatic assumption is that anyone of the opposing faction will always need to be seen as 'red so dead'. Thus, there is a heightened awareness of risk and danger, and a decreased ability to trust the opposing faction. The same is not necessarily true on a PvE server and so the experiences of encounters with opposing faction players carry less inherent sense of risk. But this lessened risk sense can backfire on you in odd ways at inopportune moments.

I was playing WoW last night with my boyfriend on a PvE server, me as a mage, he as a priest. We were doing an escort quest in an area that is open to both factions. Two players of the opposing (Horde) faction came riding through our quest area. When they saw us, they flagged themselves available for PvP. Since neither my boyfriend nor I are big PvPers, we ignored them and kept working with our NPC escort. In what we read as an attempt to incite us to attack them, they subsequently killed the NPC we were escorting, which, in turn, caused us to fail at the escort quest.

We had a boundary choice to work with at that point. Do we attack the Horde players? If so, what is our motivation for doing so? Revenge for killing our NpC? For the loss of XP and rep with Stormwind? Annoyance? Fun of the game? what about challenge?

Both of the Horde players were 4-7 levels above us, and would most definitely have been able to kill us both quite handily. But since I was much closer in level to the Horde players, it was possible that I could at least take down one of them before being killed, so long as my boyfriend could keep me healed long enough to accomplish it. In a few seconds, I had to weigh out all of this against my purpose for being there and negotiate it with my play partner. We chose to ignore the Horde members and move on to another area, but for the next few minutes, we engaged in a lot of "trash talk" about those players and about the Horde in general and we put a word out in General that those players were out and about, "griefing lowbies". We also talked about why we dislike escort quests and about how we would be more careful in "contested zones" when doing them, taking them on only if the escort route was within an instance or difficult for Horde players to get to.

This small encounter highlighted for me several of the risk/reward, safety/danger, trust/mistrust aspects of both play and purpose, and of social interaction in general. The factors included these in, through and against not just the strangers in this encounter (the Horde players), but also the well-known player (my boyfriend). The understandings and negotiations of boundaries and boundary management are fluid. This fluidity is what leads to both pleasure and danger in any environment, digital or not.

[Rel]

9.

>>>"Indeed. There's a noticeable distinction in regards of trust between the free and the paid worlds. The paid world's seem to develop a culture of cooperation and enterprising; the players produce, sell, auction and so on. The free worlds on the other hand seem to exist in lines of a post-apocalyptic "everybody on their own", i.e. steal, backstab and plunder, if you can."<<<

If you mean paid as in there is a subscription fee, EvE does have one. Trust is in short supply in EvE for many reasons. Most people own more than one account and use alts to spy on other alliances or corporations for deplyment info or whatnot. It isnt completely uncommon for someone to build up trust for months or even a year, then suddenly steal millions or billions of ingame cash when finally given access to the corporation(guild) wallet. NBSI policy(not blue shoot it) is there for multiple reasons, first it gives the pvpers in your alliance a ruleset on who they can and cant shoot, but mostly its there for defense...you dont want a neutral guy flying around in your space doing who knows what for who knows who. Eve is a pvp game, where alot of people would like nothing mroe than to melt your face with a laser cannon. With players constantly changing corporations/alliances who can say where thier loyalties really lie. Eve is a harsh game with pvp in every corner, even on the market.

That being said, there is still plenty of trust that goes unpunished. Programs like vent and TS or eve's ingame voice chat, in my opinion, make it easier to trust people. Theres something about hearing a persons voice that makes it harder to steal from them. However, I have played one MMO or another since original EQ, and the amount of people that I can say I truly trust I can count on my fingers.

[Bart Simon]

10.

This continues to be a great topic IMO and very few folks have done any significant research here that I can see. One important distinction to make though is between trust and acts of kindness or altruism. There has been lots in the virtual community literature on altruism.

Trust on the other hand is a basic building block of all social relations (some say it is intrinsic to the definition of social order)and it need not be altruistic in character. Trust is in effect when we fly on a plane, enter intimate relationships and exchange money. Most of the time trust operates in the background of everyday life but I think what makes MMOs a perfect petri dish (ala Ted's perspective) is that trust relations can be made into a going concern.

PvP is a perfect example of this. Despite the similarities, life is not like PvP (like some sort of odd Hobbesian fantasy game designers have). But in PvP the more or less explicit rules basically say -- do not trust anyone you meet but you must establish some kind of trust relations to accomplish (end game) goals. What's actually cool in PvP is looking at how hard it is to not trust folks as the game progresses.

One thing we find following stuff Mikeal Jakobsson and TL Taylor have done (remember the Sopranos metaphor) even in PvE situations is that many players import trust relations from networks outside the game proper - they play with family and good friends.

If I were studying this I'd look specifically at situations of social coordination (people doing things together in a more than ad hoc fashion) and see how regular patterns of action are maintained or how they break down. Thar be trust in dem der hills.

[Thomas Malaby]

11.

Hear, hear, Bart. I think it comes down even to very small, nuanced acts of coordination, many of them done almost without thinking, whether in urgent conditions or not. For example, I know how hard it is to see around a male tauren in WoW -- heck, I'm looking at that perspective for much of my playing time. So, in a group preparing for a pull, I've noticed that I make slight movements to ensure that I'm not blocking anyone's view.

In combat, similar acts of coordination, often improvised and unlooked-for (but not unwelcome) can become the difference between a messy wipe and an heroic one. :) Bad groups, it seems to me, break down frequently because these small acts of reciprocity are either not provided by one or more members, or their moral practices are too variant, in either case leading to a sense of discomfort, which eventually finds it way into tells and perhaps the party chat. This often happens in PUGs, in my experience.

Such small acts come to stand as acts of reciprocity, and they contribute to the formation of trust. You're right, Bart, that it's not the same as altruism. It reminds me more of Adam Smith's lesser known work The Theory of Moral Sentiments. His reliance on sympathy as a basis for our moral awareness of others' position and struggle in the world fits. We sympathize with others in a very immediate way, because we also inhabit a world where we are subject to accident and other sources of suffering.

[Rel]

12.

So I feel like I don't belong here now, and maybe I don't, ha, but I guess I don't get the point of all this.