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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."
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.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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