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.
The irony is that all the women playing the game were actually guys pretending to be women.
Seriously, though, this guy could end up with a lawsuit on his hands. I think he would be wise to issue a public apology pretty soon.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
If you're just playing the game to have some fun, and don't care about historical "accuracy" or at least realism, this would be annoying and possibly offensive.
If you're playing it to experience a world, I think it's completely in line. Slavery, racism, and sexual discrimination are all part of history (and our world today), and being confronted with them in a online gaming experience could be much more powerful than, for example, reading in your textbook that Denmark abolished the African slave trade in 1803.
While a good deal of posters will take the objective viewpoint, I don't think you'll find a ton of sympathy for the female players here in slashdot.... Let's face it, most of these folk happen to be guys that are discriminated against by females every day.
Anyone who has played the game will know that ATITD is about roleplaying and community. It is about building a civilization, and rising as a civilization to meet challenges. I haven't played the game in a year and a half, but I think most of what was true then holds true now.
The incident in question (for those who didnt RTFA) involves a game event where a staff-controlled character, a merchant, travelled the world and traded with people. Females were treated as slaves - which, given the place and time that this role playing game portrays, was not necessarily an inaccurate representation. Should a game whose purpose is roleplaying (and to an extent, re-enactment) set thousands of years ago, represent modern day values? That is up for the players to decide. They took for granted modern day values, but never passed any laws to enforce them (which was entirely within their power).
So when an event-character comes along, behaving perfectly appropriately given the location, era, and currently enacted laws - yet inappropriately given modern day values - people are expressing outrage...
If the players wish to truly do something, a riot is the wrong way to go. This is a game that they have control over, and this was a challenge that was presented to them in game and should be met in-game. The players should use the legal system within the game to pass an equal rights act and abolish slavery.
Keep it in-game, where it belongs.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
As a role player, I've played racist character (both for human races and various clans and/or species), sexist characters (try playing a 150 year old vampire from the deep south with*out* being racist and sexist), sadist, psychotic, mentally deficient, masochist, martyr, zealots of various natures, and members of the opposite sex plus a dozen races, species and creature types.
What the *hell* do they think role playing is?
Role playing the concentration camps of WWII results in some very dark moments and the introspection lasts long after the game is over - much the same as reading a powerful novel or history of the era. It makes for powerful literature, which is what role playing can be. The strong themes of discrimination exist historically, and since much of role play (including this work) often pulls from history, to exclude those aspects is to whitewash who we are and have been as human beings.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Nice try at being funny.
According to the article, it's an online game and one of the developers made a plot character that refused to trade with women, calling them slaves, etc...
Apparently he just wanted to bring out the fact that in ancient egypt, the role of women wasn't exactly like it is today, but a bunch of women are standing on their "right not to be offended by anyone, even in a game" and quitting.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
The sad thing is, history is still repeating itself today. Instead of complaining about how people are treated in a game how about complaining about how people are treated in real life. Get out of the basement people!
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Discriminatory language, riots, angry people... This is nothing! I once heard about an online game where one of the characters has commited a murder! Can you imagine?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
In the event, the trader was from a far-away land, not Egypt. He was role played as a trader from a land where women were considered property, and was just expressing his beliefs. And really, I don't see how it can be considered sexist since many males play female characters and vice versa. Another point that can be made is that there has been "sexism" in the game since it was first created, since female avatars have always been able to weave canvas and linen faster, as well as reproduce certain vegetables and vegetable seeds better than males. It's strange that only once the tables are turned do we hear the complaints.
"The next generation of interesting software will be made on a Macintosh, not an IBM PC." -Bill Gates
And I suppose a WWII game that had Nazi Death Camps for Jews is anti-Semetic?
Live forever, or die trying.
Yeah, I said it. I'll say it again. "Chick."
:P
As in:
"Who was at the party last night?"
"Oh, just some chicks & dudes you don't know."
Because, like all men, when I say chick, I really mean "subservient ovary."
Again, more of that victim shit. You react as if I've slapped my own mother (or yours, perhaps) across the face by using the word "chick". Ludicrous. The 90's called, they want their Politically Correct hypersensitivity back.
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.
I woudn't consider the historical revisionists who claim that Nazi death camps didn't exist to be from the "left". And, it seems like the major proponent of the "pirates don't rape and pillage" crowd are the writers of poorly researched historical romance novels and bad Hollywood movies. In other words, generally stupid but hardly pursuing a devious political agenda. Finally, I've never heard any one ever claim that slavery never happened, but I don know a few people who claim that the slaves were actually better off before the "war of northern aggression".
In other words, please don't lump all hyper-sensitive morons with those of us on the "left" that actually believe in the first amendment and I'll try to remember that not all of you on the "right" are racist, ignorant, religious fanatics. Deal?
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
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
While those saying "it's only a game" are making an often heard point, I haven't seem much discussion along the lines of why I think this was an interesting event. (BTW, I'm lead designer of ATITD.)
To a new player, ATITD can seem like a game about building "stuff." You build your camp, your compound, your character. If you play a long time, or play smart, you can excel in all of that. But the real challenge is that it's a game about building a perfect society, and that is *hard*. It's hard in RL, and if I'm doing my job correctly it should be hard in the game.
Along comes a foreign trader, with shiny new goods, and an attitude that's totaly offensive, totally out of line with the culture that has developed in our Ancient Egypt. Would you trade with him? Would you put aside your morals, if it meant you'd get an advantage that many people don't have? In real-life, would you patronize a store that had a "no jews allowed" policy? What if they had *really* good prices? Would you do it and hope nobody saw? Maybe feel guilty?
The best books, movies, television - can provoke a range of emotions. I like books that make me feel happy, enraged, triumphant, guilty, enlightened, sad. I want to have all of those emotions available in an MMO, and emotions occur in players, not characters.
So, to create emotions you have to do things to characters that the people behind them will react to. The only question is how hard is it ok to push? So hard that the person kills themself? Of course not. Did this event push too hard? Certainly for some people it did.
I'll continue to make it hard to build this perfect society. If that means we trade subscriber counts for a more memorable, challenging experience, I'm confortable with that. After all, if I were optimizing for subscriber counts, I'd have done a combat based game. Hell, if I were optimizing for money, I'd have been a lawyer!