So I was sitting in the train listening to “Belfast Child” by the Simple Minds, and it again occurred to me that the only thing that really gets to me (apart from cruelty to animals) is the death of innocents caused by violent conflict or war – regardless of who causes the death.

I stand by Robert Fisk when he says that war is the total failure of the human spirit. Films about these things always get to me. Hotel Rwanda, Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Hotaru no Haka all struck a chord. In contrast, stories of personal tragedies or hardship, love episodes and all that stuff don’t really get to me – sometimes I will semi-empathize but mostly I’m indifferent. It is really in times of collective misery, of senseless mass death caused by the faceless beast that is state-monopolized violence or (otherwise large powerful bodies of people) that my heart gets rent to pieces.

With that in mind I sincerely wondered why I wasn’t at all troubled by the violent games I play – the kind of games where you play as part of an army (whether general or foot soldier). I would think about Real Time Strategy games like the Command & Conquer series, or shooters such as the Call of Duty or the Battlefield series. I’m not much of a determinist and I do not believe these games influence or cause anything specifically, but I was fundamentally troubled when I realized why there was no inner moral conflict for me while playing these games (and having a lot of fun while doing it)

It is because these games are sanitized of innocent death.

Most first person games I know of take place in virtually deserted locales. The only thing you find in the city streets you traverse are enemy combatants. If it moves and if it’s not one of your teammates, it’s a legitimate target.

Ditto in strategy games. When you play through Company of Heroes or, you fight zee Germans in villages and cities alike – which are all ghost towns. The gameworld has become a military playground, an idealtype world where there are no innocent deaths because, plainly, there are no innocents available who would be able to die.

There are exceptions, of course. In certain C&C games civilians sometimes function as propagandistic plot devices; if you are the Good Guys (the yanks) you Protect Civilians. If you play the Bad Guys (Chinese, Arabs, terrorists etc) you Indiscriminately Slaughter Civilians.

This is also what upsets me. Besides presenting a skewed picture of war (where it comes down to pure tactics in areas with nothing but legitimate targets) it also denies the reality of war: that there are no good sides, and that everyone involved militarily acts beastly. Similarly, you will never find US ideological opponents – The North Koreans in Crysis, the Chinese and Arabs in C&C: Generals, the terrorists and the Russians (I shit you not) in Call of Duty IV, the Venezuelans in Mercenary 2 – do anything remotely honorable or morally sound.

Maybe one could blame the market – who would buy war sim games if civilians would die all the time? Because this is the reality of modern war: whereas in the days of yore the majority of casualties were soldiers, in modern times it’s mostly civilians, a large part of them children. Looking at a child torn to shreds by your grenade launcher, even in pixel-form, is bound to upset people (not to mention causing public moral outrage)

Still, I cannot help but feel disturbed by this selective amputation of reality from games who have have historical or current/near future themes.

Truth doesn’t sell?

Or?

Why did I do that? To answer that, I needed to define part of who I am as well. This post is the result of that introspection. Enjoy.

I’m somewhat of a loner. I spend most of my spare time in solitude, and most of my decisions are made through consciously prioritizing myself. How did I turn out like that? I think there are two main reasons: my family history and all my moving around.

Let’s start with my family. Two main things define my family: it is small and it is fractured. Up until recently it consisted of my mother, my aunt, her two sons, my grandmother (she died early 2004) and myself – six in total. Of these, my mum hates my aunt, my cousins dislike my mum, my aunt doesn’t care (anymore) for my mum, my eldest cousin doesn’t really care about anyone except maybe his brother and my grandmother seasonally liked or disliked both her daughters. I get along with everyone, or so I’d like to think. As far as I know, the internal relations of my family look like this:

Do note that this is my interpretation, not fact. It’s not like I interviewed everyone, this is just the impression I got during my life so far.

Even with my grandmother gone, the situation is unchanged. When I was younger, I continuously tried to improve the situation, to create more green lines if you will. I would be involved in family politics: defending people whenever I felt it was due. I tried to persuade, reason and appeal. When I aligned myself with any family member I did this in all sincerity and I gave credence to everyone’s reasons and arguments and judgments.

Needless to say, this strategy failed massively. I got to a point where I received hostilities from multiple sides, and it was then that I simply stopped bothering. I forced myself into apathy on such family matters and refused to listen or discuss things whenever the subject turned to any family talk where I would be forced to pick a side.

But by forcing myself to be a neutral party I also lost a general feeling of allegiance. It created some emotional distance, and I’m sure some would call it a touch merciless. At any rate, I have a strong feeling of being on my own. I still have a great deal of care for my family and I am dead certain that if I get into deep shit both my mum and my aunt will help me out, no questions asked. But when push comes to shove and I am forced to pick a side, I will always pick myself.

I have also moved a lot in my life, having switched schools a total of eight times. Consequently I never had a chance to join a lasting group of friends in a certain area. Friendship upkeep was pretty high and I’m already pretty terrible at keeping in touch with people – the general rule is that if people do not approach me every now and then, contact will die out.

One of the consequences of this is that my sense of loyalty is, if not shattered, then at least rather different from most people’s interpretation. I feel that how loyalty is commonly understood – with a heavy connotation of ‘blindness’ – is foolish, counterproductive and irrational. Whether people will get my support generally depends on their merit as I perceive it. No-one enjoys my unconditional support.

Consequently I also don’t feel I have allegiance towards anyone in particular. I don’t feel obligated towards Dutch society to be a model citizen with some corporate career. I don’t feel I need to impress my family or do things they approve or disapprove of. I do things for myself.

I’ll wrap this up by saying that I chose to study sociology out of self interest. I like studying so I will prolong that state of being as long as I am able. I have no desire to go out and find jobs and sell myself in job interviews, so I continue doing what I feel like.

There are some specific reasons for picking sociology. For starters, my thesis is about cooperation in a virtual community, a topic which has sociology written all over it, both in subject matter and methodology. Secondly, my best friend Cello has chosen it and I figure that doing the same study will help both of us in terms of performance and fun. Lastly, there is some overlap between sociology and media studies as well as with politics and religions, two subject fields I like to spend my spare time on.

Thanks for reading,

- pep

In my studies I’ve been reading a lot of literature concerning Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and they’re generally about EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Ultima Online and so forth. Other texts are about textbased MUDs; things like LambdaMOO. These games typically have the player control a character. You always start out alone, and then find your way in the world, and eventually you may CHOOSE to join a guild/clan/whatever. Utopia is unique in the way that it injects you into a “guild” from the outset; it’s not a player’s choice. You’re forced to cooperate, and yet I think the concept of ‘free cooperation‘ is still applicable, since one can always choose to defect (or indeed, not to play at all).

A major peculiarity is Swirve’s rule that you don’t get to choose whom you play with. In other online games, players choose their guilds (family guilds, elite guilds) and/or choose to play with real life friends, family or workmates. One of the points I will try to make in my thesis is that this social function (of playing games with people close to you in order to maintain ties) is so strong that people who’d ordinarily not break rules in a game will resort to trading in Utopia.

There’s also this weird relationship between player-province-kingdom-alliance. I’ve read nothing in other MMOGs about true self-sacrifice, players ‘taking one for the team’. In Utopia, the province you’ve created over the space of several months can get decimated in less than two days in certain fierce wars, regardless of your skill. However (especially in the more skilled Kingdoms) players rarely mind seeing their creation destroyed like that as long as the Kingdom comes out on top. In public, people boast about their Kingdoms more than they boast about their province (or so it seems to me, maybe I don’t spend enough time with different types of players). I have this idea floating in my head about the Kingdom becoming the ‘character’ of some 20-25 players, the entity that they identify with. Then this Kingdom often sets out to join actual ‘guilds’, i.e. alliances.
(chaah)

The rules:

• We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
• Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Thanks :/

Well, here goes:

1 ) I like to photograph my evening dinner. I’ve been keeping a record since november ’06. I will only photograph it when preparing it has taken a decent amount of effort.

2 ) I have a myspace, hyves, facebook, friendster and OkCupid account. The only one I ever use is OkCupid, however.

3 ) I play Utopia a lot, and it is part of my reason that I refuse to get a (part time) job. I like my current life a lot, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

4 ) My summer will be (or should be) mainly spent on writing a thesis about the same game.

5 ) I love cats to death. Their life-value is on par with that of a given human’s.

6 ) I spend too much time downloading & watching documentaries which are political or religious in nature. This habit has made me into somewhat of a fan of Chomsky, Zinn and Hugo Chavez.

7 ) I prefer IRC over MSN, ICQ, or any other messaging service

8 ) I have sang songs.

My victims: yoppe, olde manne devan, leio, yune, woe, chrome, cello, magex.

It’s regrettable that only three of those folks have real blogs. Like Anne, I don’t really bother with personal blogs in general :/

Credits to Julian – the text and the pic have been copied from an email he sent around. Just had to share!

What Barry Says – Click to launch the video

—

Google’s Masterplan – Click to launch the video

Will miss him horribly :/

He was between some 17-19 years old, so at least he had a good long life

Why does it matter, anyway?

Why study MMOGs? It is a good question. Games have become quite the economic force over the past few decades; with World of Warcraft reaching the eight million player mark in January 2007¹. Considering that a WoW copy costs €30,- and playing online requires a monthly subscription of €13,-, it follows that the company has made at least 240 million euros from WoW sales only, with at least 104 million euros incoming monthly – and that’s just one game. But I would agree with David Nieborg² that the amount of gamers and the total amount of (free) time spent on gaming is the more meaningful way of validating game research and MMOG research specifically.

A survey from Swirve.com from 2002 shows how much time people spent on Swirve websites:

How much time do you spend per day (on average) on the Swirve Website?
Less than 10 Minutes — 3552 — 3%
10-20 Minutes — 16208 — 14%
20-40 Minutes — 27259 — 24%
40 Minutes to 1 Hour — 24979 — 22%
1 to 2 Hours — 20230 — 18%
2 to 3 Hours — 8469 — 7%
More than 3 Hours — 9034 — 8%
Total — 109,731 people — 100%

76,810 of these people played Utopia at the time the survey was taken.¹ This however pales in comparison to the amount of time people spent playing MMORPGs like WoW. In an article written by Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell and Moore² it was calculated that it takes on average 15,5 days (372 hours) before character level 60 is attained; at the time this research was done (February 2006), 15% of all WoW characters were level 60. Supposing that this percentage holds true today, it would mean that well over 1.2 million people have spent at minimally 372 hours playing the game. Average time spent playing per player per week hovers around 21 hours, often at the cost of watching television.³

In its peak period, Utopia reached 88,045 players. Today, the number is down to around 27,000. Well over 13 million players worldwide play MMOGs.⁴ Clearly MMOGs are massively consumed world-wide, with more players joining each day, but more fascinating would be to investigate why people play in the first place.

Between February 2^nd and February 20^th 2007 I was heavily involved in an alliance war.⁵ Alliance wars are often major events; it usually concerns one alliance (a group of kingdoms) pitted against another, though frequently other alliances join in on either side. This particular alliance war concerned only two alliances – Lotus and 9 Fates (9F). I assumed command on the side of Lotus, and for the next eighteen days my daily life was turned upside down; my sleeping pattern revolved around my army’s return times, my eating habits changed for the worse, I was stuck in my room all day and kept my forages in the outside world – attending class and doing groceries – to the barest minimum. I put most of my single player habits on hold (except for one or two sessions of Civilization IV⁶ during some particular frustrating periods) and fully focused on coordinating 230-270 players in a long war against a foe with similar numbers. Day and sometimes night I would be on stand by to respond to new events, to provide people with information and updates and to conduct or coordinate diplomacy efforts with the opposing side. I developed mouth ulcers due to bad eating habits and irregular sleeping times; sometimes I would go to bed at 9 PM to wake up at 3 or 4 AM, and then catching some more sleep at 7 AM after having issued some orders and addressing some newly developed concerns. I certainly did not have any fun. Throughout the ordeal I have tried to strike a balance between successfully defending the alliance and ending the war as soon as possible without surrendering. A new semester was starting and I did not fancy the thought of Utopia interfering with my university work. Finally, in the afternoon of February 20^th the leadership of the opposing alliance agreed to an end of the war. Neither side proclaimed victory, and my life switched back to its normal routine.

Any outsider would declare me insane in a heartbeat; who spends so much time and effort on a GAME?! Why play a game if you are not having fun? I will admit that I invested so much partially because I would have a nice anecdote for this thesis. But there was more to it than that; I felt I had a responsibility towards my friends in the alliance. I had been hanging out with some of them for three and a half years. The other alliance attacked us using justifications that my alliance and I felt were vacuous or false. I was defending my home turf. I was defending my convictions on what constitutes honourable game play.

1Swirve E-mail

2Alone Together

3Yee, Nicholas. http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000891.php

4http://www.mmogchart.com/

5http://alliancerankings.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2131

62k games etc

1http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=12371

2http://www.gamespace.nl/content/MAThesis_DBNieborg.pdf

MUDs and Utopia

So in the great scheme of all things, where does Utopia stand? Is it a MMORPG, or a MUD? I would say it’s neither and both. First of all, Utopia does not feature characters as we know them in role playing games – the player manages a province, and although s/he is deemed the ruler of this province, there is no equipment or exploration or leveling or monsterslaying involved in the game play. Nor can Utopia be called a MUD – there is no space to navigate or manipulate, nor does it have the demographics of a MUD – whereas 200¹ MUD participants are considered to be a solid playerbase, Utopia currently numbers at least 27,000 provinces, and likely a comparable number of actual players.

Utopia can however be understood in terms of a MUD, in that it is totally textual. Aside from little images decorating each page, there are no graphics whatsoever. The only way in which the graphics play any kind of meaningful role towards game play is in the paper section, where little icons aid the player in making sense of recent events. The game can be understood in terms of a MMORPG regarding its large player base. What MUDs, MMORPGs and Utopia all have in common are that they are multiplayer games based online, fulfilling the social needs of its players.

Spatiality

Utopia’s lack of spatiality is important. Space does exist on some level, in the way values in a database are separated from each other in their respective cells. While the game uses geographical concepts such as islands, kingdoms and acres these appear as fluctuating values in a variety of tables, eroding the illusion of space. One could of course argue the same in the case of MUDs which consist entirely of scrolling text; however the illusion of space is more easily maintained during game play. MUD players continually move between spaces by typing commands (i..e. Move East) and each time they arrive at a spot, there is a description of the surroundings. A MUD space can be mentally mapped out, whereas imagining Utopia as a continuous space poses a challenge to the imagination.

Picturing space during Utopian play is strange indeed. Consider for example the act of capturing new lands in combat: players send out their armies on an assault on another province, and if the battle goes successful they will generally take roughly between ten and twenty percent of their target’s land mass. These lands will become available after seven to fifteen (roughly) hours, after which buildings can be built on them and population space will become available. However, during an age players will sometimes make hundreds of such attacks as well as receiving similar amounts. If we assume that these conquered lands do not move an inch from their supposed in-world location, one would have to imagine his or her province scattered through the entire world, tiny bits of it located on each island. This quickly poses a problem for the imagination, since the same would hold true for every other province in the game world, resulting in a strange world where every twenty-five acres or so would be owned by another player. At the same time provinces are centrally ‘located’ on the Kingdom page with the total number of acres written next to their names, suggesting geographical coherence and proximity. Players cope with this conceptual problem mainly by ignoring it, although occasionally as seen near the ending this kingdom banner by making fun of it:

Spatiality is a taken for granted in MUDs and MMORPGs. Online games involving fantasy characters always feature a space which is either displayed or imagined, but always clearly described. The size of these realms limit the movement and exploration of its inhabitants. The geographical game world is a fundamental part of the game, and traversing it a fundamental part of the game play. Social interaction and co-operation are always firmly founded in space; for instance waiting with others at the ferry terminal to travel to a distant isle, travelling with team mates through dangerous areas, searching for group mates in densely populated locations; all of these are not unknown to the MMORPG player. In Star Wars Galaxies, spaces like the Cantina and the Starport¹ form social hubs where players congregate in order to sell wares or services or to look for people to group with for a hunt. In EverQuest, certain locations formed hubs for players where they could find refuge, buffs and transportation to different parts of the world.² Basic strategies, such as ‘tanks’ (heavily armoured melee warriors), healers (such as clerics) and damage dealers (such as wizards and archers) require space to thrive; whilst a monster attacks the tank, the cleric heals him and the tank and damage dealers focus on besting the creature. This only works in a spatial arrangement, with the warrior positioned between the monster and the other characters. Utopia provides no such shelter, nor does it provide spaces for players to congregate for trade and the likes. Every province in Utopia is at all times (except when a province is in freeze mode) able to attack, thieve or cast spells on any other province in the game and vice versa. As such, every province is vulnerable at all times, and the options fellow players have for protecting or helping their team mates are very limited; direct co-operation in Utopia limits itself to gathering intelligence for team mates or sending resources via the aid page. The Elven race used to be able to cast beneficial spells on other provinces in the kingdom, but Swirve removed that ability at one point arguing that it made each race ‘less unique’. Utopia players cannot use space in a strategic way; one cannot, for instance, park one’s army in front of a team mate’s province to help fight any invading hordes. Each province is ultimately on its own; yet co-operation manifests itself in different and inventive ways.

1Mortensen, Torill Elvira. WoW is the new MUD

1Ducheneaut, Nicolas and Robert J. Moore. The Social side of Gaming: a study of interaction patterns in a massively multiplayer online game.

2Taylor, T.L. Play Between Worlds. P 60-61