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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."
"academic papers
about videogaming"
Dream job, or make-work project?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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.
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.
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.
So the more experienced users should be shaking down newbies for gold if they don't want to get spammed? Form a gang and charge local businesses a tithe as "insurance"? Basically do everything possible to make sure all wealth flows to the top and the little guy has nothing? I thought games were supposed to give us a break from reality...
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Really, there are a lot fo similarities in how people act in MMORPGs to how mafia members are portrayed in TV and movies.
But really, most of the similar attributes seem to be GOOD things. Loyalty to guild/friends, word-of-mouth as to who can/can't be trusted.
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".
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
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
I read the paper, and it's got a bunch of points. I'll say that from a bunch of MUDs I used to play you would see the same behavior. But besides just who you know, it's also lots of being in the right place at the right time. I've had characters given cool stuff by high level people all the time. Part of it was so they could be seen as cool by the noob, and part of it was that the super cool item you just got is worthless junk at their level.
Lots of folks get good reps for just helping out noobs or on corpse runs, and you know that that rep stayed around and if they ever needed help they got it, as well as preferental grouping.
You want to be treated nice - play a female healer of some sort - groups will court you, random people will give you things. People will go on quests just to get items for you.
If you want a lone hero vs. the world, play on your home machine. If social gaming is really your style, then MMRPGs have a lot to be said for them. And in any social group, you get the mix of folks -- some will help, some will only help themselves. If you watch your friend's back, that's not mafia, that just taking care of those who take care of you.
==Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
And now not only does that guild know, so does everybody that's read the paper through Slashdot. If he hasn't deleted that character by now, I'd say he's about to!
I can't even imagine the combination of smells in that conference room: horrible body odor from the Everquest people mixed with the excessive stink of aftershave that the Sopranos guineas wear. I predict a big rumble taking place, namely the Everquest people sucking fist and nursing head wounds.
Ping?
It's nothing personal, just business. Capish?
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
Q: Whadda you in for?
A: Virtual Murder 1.
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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."
Gandalf...Gandolfini...
Coincidence? I think not.
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
Don't you remember what happens in Return of the King? When Gandalf cuts off Frodo's head and hands, and hurls him into Mt. Doom?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
The "bada-bing" catchphrase, often followed by "bada-boom" appears to be an rhythmic onomatopiea which reinforces rapid and successful execution of some mission or objective. A group whose memebes repeatedly exchange these vocalizations emphasises the importance of timing, coordination and speed of action.
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.
... Fat Tony from the Simpsons myself.
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.
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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.sht
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
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
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?
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
you're gonna sleep wit' da krakens!
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
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.