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."

Comments

better still:

[Nihilanth]

i think a better role-model than a mafia boss would be the main character of Office Space. When you're trapped in a repetative and mundane experience, the players i look up to are ones that find creative solutions to the boredom wraught by blind farming of capital and experience.

Re:Good Lord, what is the world doing?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Like it or loathe it, videogaming is fast becoming an important everyday pastime for the masses, much like television. Strangely, it is still perceived as being something for the in-crowd, something that only nerds so. Television = mainstream, games = nerdy. At any party, when asked if I have watched the latest installment of Big Brother on TV last night, and I tell them that "no, I do not watch TV", I am met with blank stares of disbelief. But if someone asks if they have played some game or another, everyone (including the gamers) will most likely stare at the asker and wonder how on earth he can be so insensitive as to bring up a topic like that at a party.

If you had read a headline about academic papers being written about viewing habits or other TV-related stuff, you'd probably have shrugged and moved on.

Mafia or Fraternity?

[Bigboote66]

As appealing as it may be to glue two pop-cultural phenomenons together, the connections to fictionalized mafia and EQ seem pretty tenuous.

For one thing, there isn't the zero-sum game of the Mafia - the power brokerage involved in EQ doesn't seem to benefit from betrayal, or "keeping your enemies closer" aspect that we see in that thing of theirs. There isn't the "money flows up, shit flows down" ethic, and you don't have to worry about entanglements with a more powerful outside authority (FBI).

Most of the examples given in the article examining the social networking could just as easily be seen as an excuse to have an adventure ("Someone's dead! Let's go rescue him."). You get to play the hero in a very specific mini-myth.

The larger & more formalized groupings in the game resemble fraternities a lot more than the mafia - a bunch of people who glom together who share a common outlook on life & a desire to party together. Piss off the alpha members of said community and you'll be shunned, not whacked. Heck, with all those "virtual weddings" you hear about, can "virtual date rape" be that far off?

-BbT

Re:I only skimmed the paper so far

[Mahrin Skel]

Two illustrative points:

1) Most "Uberguilds" have a "raid points" system, the more raids you go on, the more points you get, and the more chances you have of getting some of the better items.

2) In at least one guild, the officers were smuggling the proceeds of raids off of the server (through character transfers that SOE will perform for a fee) and selling them on eBay, the cash getting split among those in on the scam. Interestingly, even after finding out they were being used, most of the members chose to stay with the guild.

--Dave

Haha, exactly.

[dsanfte]

Yes, you would do well to compare the actions of EQ guilds to the mafia and Tony Soprano. Their motives, while differing in context, are unavoidably similar. Power, wealth, and social status.

The ultimate goal of any EQ guild is to get ahead of all other EQ guilds, acquire the best loot and items, and block the progression of any other guilds by killing important MOBs before any other guild can get their members online.

The only way to exercise power on a "blue" server (non-pvp) in EQ is to grief other players within the confines of the game rules. This means that blocking the progression of other players is a very enjoyable pasttime. It's the only way you can hurt them. Watching other guilds complain because they are stuck unable to progress in the game for weeks or months is very entertaining, and addicting. Many, many guilds do this, and relish the opportunity. And Verant/SoE does nothing to dissuade or stop it, unless you pay an extra $30/mo in subscription fees, in which case they put you on the "Legends" server, and force the other guilds to give you a chance.

To be a mafia, you really should be dabbling in illegal activities. This is true in EQ to an extent. The only rule that Verant/SoE consistently enforces on end-game guilds is the no-exploit rule: "You can't take advantage of flaws in the game design to kill something more easily or more quickly than Verant/SoE wants you to."

As a matter of fact, this rule is broken very often in the name of getting ahead of the competition. Nearly every EQ guild exploits something: if not MOB pathing, then a spell that's too powerful, a quirk in the Feign Death ability, etc. It's the way the game is played. Some might argue that the game is so flawed that it's impossible NOT to use an exploit now and then in the course of playing an honest game.

Anyway, for further reading, you can check out this article on EQ I wrote way back in December. It goes into some of the problems with the game that lead to a mafia mentality taking over the social structure, and the apathy of the development company. A few of the comments were pretty good, also.

http://slashdot.org/articles/02/12/27/1748252.shtm l?tid=127

Re:Haha, exactly.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is in response to the no-exploit rule.

One of the burrs in Verant's ass for a very long time was a non-detectable program that sniffed the Everquest network traffic and pulled useful information out and displayed it to the user in Linux. The name was ShowEQ and there is created a sorta rift between those with an almost omnipotent knowledge of all monsters in the current area and those that were confined by the game client and had to use whatever the game gave them.

The presence of this program gave way to necromancers running across Southren Karanas going after a monster that very rarely spawns. I know, because I saw it happen on my version of the program.

It was something that you had to be hush hush about as well. Like I could not tell the necro grats on the kill because back then the GM's were checking chat logs trying to root out the users of this horrible program.

It reminded me of the times of Prohibition where speak easy's was a place you could do whatever you want, especially drink. But you could not go out in public, get a haircut, and tell the barber you were completly wasted off your ass since a new shipment came in.

Re:Good Lord, what is the world doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to statistics cited in Martin-Campbell Kelly's just published history of the software industry From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog (MIT 2003), $10 billion was spent on games in 2001 in the US alone (as compared to $8.3 billion that same year on films). Why shouldn't this be a topic of critical intellectual inquiry? For what it's worth, academic game studies go back to at least 1995, with several papers in Steven G. Jones's Cybersociety anthology.

Academic papers

[Doctor Cat]

I think the most interesting academic writings and research on online worlds are coming from Nick Yee, who has studied demographics and patterns of interaction in games like Everquest and from Dr. Edward Castronova, who has a PhD in economics and has done work on figuring out the exchange rates between virtual currencies and real world ones, calculating the "GNP" of online worlds, etc. The links above go to collections of some of their writings.

Of course some of the best writings on the subject (not from academia, btw) are the seminal "Habitat Papers" by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer. Their main home at communities.com is gone, with the collapse of that company - does anybody out there have copies or links to another site that has them?

Reminds me of Sanctuary Mud

[mindstrm]

The same thing, basically.. unrestricted player-kill.

If you killed in town, the town guards would go hostile on you.

If you killed in an area the Order guild chose to be policing, you would end up with them after you.

If you killed someone, you would have their friends after you....

The trick, of course, to PK, is those who run the game ensuring there is balance.. as you said, if a high level doing socially unacceptable things like killing noobs causes him to end up chased around teh entire game by a mob for a few hours, that's *AWESOME*. It's fun, there is purpose, anger, feeling, intent.. everyone gets into it.. that's how it SHOULD be, and one of the best gaming experiences there is.. for BOTH paties.

Knowing that if you walk through town and steal shit from some high level guy, nobody will mind if he kicks your ass gives you more incentive to be good at it, and chose your marks carefully.

Sanctuary had a good balance.. you could generally go out in a group and chase wahtever items you wanted, or level up, without fear of being attacked... except of course there was a guild who's job it was to stir shit up.... plus you had some nasty solo players out there with god-given superpowers who, although forbidden to group together or help each other, were allowed to do anything they wanted.. that was a good unstable element tot he game. You'd be having a great party kicknig some ass and suddenly a Forsaken woudl show up and maim half your party... and then you would spend an hour chasing him down.

That's fun.

Re:What's the difference between Government...

[silentbozo]

Of course, without police, it takes about 20 minutes for the security guards to hook up with the gangs and play both sides of the street.

Ahh, another person who has read Machiavelli, eh? In The Prince, he makes a big stink about how mercenaries rigged the rules of the game so that they ended up with all the gold, and the states of Italy ended up with nothing but grief. Lesson of the day - hire not professional soldiers, for all they care about is staying alive and earning the gold. Instead, hire locals who have a vested interest in NOT letting someone else come in and take over...

Re:How long until we see an actual mafia MMORPG?

[Sentry21]

I mean, I didn't really see any mafia similarities mentioned that are particularily BAD.

No extortion, blackmail, etc.

Though I'm sure it could happen to someone who's far too attached to their characters, I doubt it could ever be as widespread as these other "symptoms".

I don't know about the article, but the various reports of teens in asian countries killing one another in the real world for damage/death inflicted in MMORPGs disturbs me to no end. Sounds mafia-ish to me, especially since it's usually a group of people that show up at an internet cafe and whack someone then leave.

--Dan

Re:Good Lord, what is the world doing?

[Mac Degger]

Just one thing I picked up in a meta way (ie I didn't read the studies myself, but I have read somewhere that...) is that the calculation is flawed; that 8,3 billion is only for grossed earnings on films in the US, while the ten billion is for games and paraphenelia (dunno if that includes merchandise) worldwide.

Kinda unfair comparison, that way.