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.

Comments

Speaking as a player...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not Historically Accurate

[chollowayss]

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...