Slashdot Mirror
The Mafia Everquest Connection
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the 2003 Melbourne Digital Arts And Culture Conference site, where a large selection of new academic papers about videogaming have been disseminated online. This includes The Sopranos Meets Everquest - Social Networking In Massively Multiplayer Online Games (PDF file), which discusses why "instead of having Gandalf as a role model, [Everquest players] would be better off trying to think as Tony Soprano, a present day mafia boss in New Jersey from the American TV show The Sopranos."
And the mafia? One's legal, and one is illegal.
They both operate using force and attempt to gain as much power for themselves as possible (in response to the ability of the populace to fight back against them). Well, Everquest lacks a real government, so as a result, mafia becomes the rule.
People who play video games can make friends? How can this be?
I've learned from experience playing MUDs that in this type of game, just like life, it's not what you know, it's who you know that gets you ahead. From items to money, there's nothing that a high experienced friend can't get you.
Good to see the academics are catching up.
both to practice, and to program. It takes maturity to come up with a better solution. This isn't to say that violence has no place, I am only saying it's much easier to be violent than it is to be compassionate. Also easier to reward experience points based on killing than on non-killing.
But I wasn't convinced by the analogy. Based on the sopranos, anyway, the mafia seems to have an ethos of servitude to---producing for---the higher ups, and I didn't see enough proof that the same is true of EQ guilds.
This post is dedicated to all of those
My two cents (more like five dollars):
The behavior you see in many online RPGs, in which "familial associations" form between groups of players, is basically similar to the formation of cliques in high and middle (US) schools. The only difference is that the cliques have weapons, magic, booty and lots of XP; the sum of these is what determines the worth of a person in the online world, just as "fashion" and "who you know" are the determinants of self-worth in cliques IRL.
In fact, if you take some steps back and look at the most infamous mobs, could it not be argued that they are simply cliques with guns that join together to commit crime and bribe those in power?
And then there's the issue of newbie hazing, which is analogous to cliques blackballing those who are not members of the "in" crowd, again quite similar to what happens when the mob gains control over a city and "elects" its officials. Online RPGs, especially and notoriously Everquest, are extremely culpable in this regard. Newbies who do not join a guild or other crowd of "in", upper-level characters will find themselves ostracized and devoured by trolls (not necessarily the Slashdot variety).
The issue of newbie hazing wasn't really touched on by the paper, but I argue that it is a huge problem and that it is not just limited to online RPGs, but also many websites with "experience" systems. Everything2 specifically comes to mind but I'm sure there are many other examples of sites where an attempt by a newbie to contribute to the community at large will be rejected because the newbie doesn't have the right connections nor the XP to stand on their own. What about Slashdot? The karma system works because trolls are controlled and a newbie can stand on their own, and the only real privelege granted by "experience" is a +1 karma bonus to initial posts. Newbies can do everything those with "Excellent" karma can do and the moderation system cares a lot more about the age of an account than its karma. Again, contrast with Everything2, and with Everquest.
So, I argue that the points the paper makes are quite valid outside the world of Everquest and are applicable to many, many online and offline environments. (Apologies to Everythingers who might be rubbed the wrong way by the above comments, but I have seen with my own eyes that Everything and Everquest have an awful lot in common from the newbie's perspective.)
"I am root. Bow before me." To this I say, "You are root, and you bear the sins of the world upon your shoulders."
I'm not so sure that gaming is becoming totally mainstream -- I just think that geeks (who will admit to gaming) from all walks of life are starting to come out of the closet, as it were.
/.ers -- we don't hold a monopoly on geekiness! (But somehow we seem to gravitate towards this site...) Just because some guy DOESN'T spend his days immersed in writing arcane code and his nights hacking his TiVo does not DISqualify him as a geek.
....Bethanie....
Face it,
Geeks go to law school, they write papers like this one, and sometimes, they're just stay-at-home moms with a penchant for mental stimulation that can't be gained from hours spent passively absorbing the pablum that is network television (Sopranos not included under that label, of course).
One final note: I think we should question Jared's status as a true "geek" if was actually at a party -- especially one where there were people who watch television and tried to carry on actual "conversations"! Personally, I think he's just trying to come off as a cool guy or something. Or maybe he's just the perfect example to prove my point!?! *grin*
I'm not sure how well the mafia connection holds up, frankly; I'd like to see a lot more information and analysis about the parallels between the two than the hand-waving "just as the Mafia developed because of its environment." Still an interesting read, especially since I've never played EQ.
But I have played Shadowbane (though I don't anymore), and I think they might really have something if they looked at a game, like SB, where player-killing is virtually unrestricted and where all expectations point to a social-interaction model versus a lone-wolf model.
Their example of a player ripping off the group by logging out pales next to some of the experiences I had on SB: an assassin backstabbing from stealth to kill and rob players ten levels lower, for example. Then griefed players grouping together to track and kill that sucker across the entire game world (as we did once). Add in the ever-present guild scene in that game, in which certain leading individuals are known to literally every player on the server, and you get a lot closer to northern New jersey.
Even though Everquest breeds gangsters, it treats its playerbase like shit. This is a bad idea because the inevitable result is someone's going to take it out of fantasy to real life. There are many players who play Everquest as if it is their life, so its not that big of a stretch.
God spoke to me
Any zone in which people interact is fodder for sociological analysis, and online gaming is particularly interesting because there is a level of abstraction built into the interaction (although, as the paper points out, it isn't completely isolated from "RL" relationships).
I'd look for more of these as time goes by; the creation of a virtual world comes close to addressing one of the major deficits of the 'social sciences', the inability to (ethically) set up an experiment to test a theory. It's limited, of course, since the players
Nevertheless, this is an arena in which sociological concepts can in a limited fashion actually be tried out. I think we'll learn a surprising amount from it, and hopefully it will even have practical use if we go on to create new societies in space.