Slashdot Mirror
Online Game Event Sparks Player Riot
Grimwell Online is carrying a story entitled When does an Online Game go too far?. It details a post to a news group about a world event in the newly released A Tale in the Desert 2. The online game, which simulates an ancient Egyptian culture, was full of angry players after a developer-run event used openly discriminatory language against the female gender. Details on the event can be found at the ATITD2 Wiki, and commentary can be found on TerraNova.
ATITD itself doesn't have a whole lot of options for player conflict. It's primarily a non-combative nation-building game.
Essentially what happened was this guy was a trader, and his presence in an area was announced over the global channel. Thus, people came and lined up in the dozens/hundredish to see him.
Eventually one of the women stepped up to her place in line, the guy asked her 'Who is your master, woman?', and from there the righteous indignation began.
Players littered the area by dropping piles of sand and mud, filled the NPC's inventory (thus preventing him from moving) by giving him tons of sand, lit bonfires, spammed the chat channel constantly, etc. Eventually the NPC was forced to withdraw.
The ultimate motivation, as it has been said, was to pose a moral challenge to the players of the game. Do they trade with the nasty sexist NPC, or do they spurn him and his rare and exotic goods?
Personally I found the whole reaction to the event beyond pathetic. People rioted and basically trashed the area around the trader, but after that they went and bitched and moaned for 20ish pages on the message boards about how the developers were at fault, how they were so offended, how they were cancelling their accounts, blah blah blah. Pitiful.
WELL SAID! Wow.... I think the game developer was successful at something. Showing people not to take a thing for granted. If its in their power to pass laws, they got caught off guard for forgetting something. Once they correct this part, the developer may bring another event player out to play off of something else they forgot.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The trader was not Egyptian, he was a trader from a far away land. Take a lousy five minutes and read through some other posts before responding as if you know anything...
"The next generation of interesting software will be made on a Macintosh, not an IBM PC." -Bill Gates
I find it facinating that everyone just assumes that women in ancient Egypt were subservient. Where is the evidence for this? Contrary to public opinion, as a simple search on the role of women in ancient Egypt on Google will attest, the historical record suggests that woman in Egypt had legal parity with men.
... just as weomen hardly enjoy equal rights today in Pakistan, despite the fact that the country has had a female leader (who even as prime minister was not allowed to look into the eyes of a male).
... it leads me to believe that most of the "women" in game were actually men in drag. Although perhaps not ... it will be interesting to watch how women in the United States react when, as a consiquence of their inaction and apathy, the "unthinkable" happens and they lose their freedom of choice under Roe v. Wade and find their bodies chattal of the state for nine months again -- something most people like to believe will never happen, but the current administration for whom some many women are naively voting has publicly stated as one of their objectives. Will they riot, as so many psuedo-women have in game? Or will they engage in more intelligent civil disobedience and political activity, as they have so many times in the past to achieve parity under the law. My money, based on historical evidence, is on the latter ... which again is why I suspect so many of the "women" in this game were in fact played by men. Rioting has generally been, in most historical contexts anyway, such a "male" response.
That is debated among historians. While Egypt did have female rulers, it does not appear that women were equal among the working masses
What isn't debated among historians is that women in many other parts of the world in that day and age were not treated at all equally, and indeed were treated as property/slaves/etc by many cultures.
Had you RTFAed, you would have noticed that the character being played was not from Egypt, he was from a distant land. Historically, the odds that said culture would be sexist as hell (to put it mildly) were quite high.
As others noted, the players took modern day equal rights for granted. Something they really shouldn't be doing, in reality today with Bush et. al. bent on rolling women's rights back to pre-1960s status, and certainly not in a role playing game set in ancient Egypt.
Riotinig (in game or otherwise) is so asinine
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Not that I imagine that anyone will read this this far into the discussion, but for the record - The trader involved came from outside of Egypt, and it's not a strech to go back 2000 years and find places not that far from ancient Egypt that most definitely held this world view.
Next time you're going to plagiarize, link the article you're plagiarizing from:
s tr eam/women_egypt.html
... and this is just in artwork.
http://www.thekeep.org/~kunoichi/kunoichi/theme
If you were going to be honest in your plagiarism, you would have gotten to:
"but women are seen to be dancers, musicians, acrobats, sacred 'prostitutes', maids, kitchen staff, field workers and much, much more."
You should have plagiarized "Women's Education and Career" and "Women and the Law". Of course, your choice of plagiarism source doesn't go into the legal aspects, which I focused on, which were *very* progressive toward women (as I mentioned, even guaranteeing equal pay for equal work; they could also offer testimony for trials, start legal proceedings, determine inheritance for her children, etc).
Here's the summary of the article that you plagiarized:
"Egyptian women had a free life, compared to her contemporaries in other lands. She wasn't a feminist, but she could have power and position if she was in the right class. She could hold down a job, or be a mother if she chose. She could live by herself or with her family. She could buy and sell to her hearts content. She could follow the latest fashions or learn to write if she had the chance. She loved and laughed and ate and drunk. She partied and got sick. She helped her husband, she ran her household. She lived a similar life to that of her mother and grandmother in accordance with ma'at. She was an ancient Egyptian woman with hopes and dreams of her own... not too much different we woman of today. "
Seriously - how dishonest can you get? No surprise that you posted as AC.
Did you really name your son "Robert');DROP TABLE Students;--"?