For what it’s worth two stories that relate well to the “humanity” of orcs in our virtual worlds are: “The Soul of Martha, a Beast” and “The Soul of the Mark III Beast” written by Terrel Miedaner and both collected in “The Mind’s I” edited by Douglas Hoftstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. These two stories do a very interesting job of exploring the boundaries of “soul” and what makes us empathize with other beings, be they animal or virtual.

Why do we play at it? Perhaps because it’s better to play at it than do it?

It is not entirely unlikely that we (as a species) are genetically programmed for genocide — to split the world into ‘my tribe’ and ‘everyone else’, and to want to kill or conquer anyone in the ‘everyone else’ category. But we also have these great big forebrains sitting on top of that hostile, animal, mind, which can suborn and alter that impulse. We can seek to conquer with ideas — religion or politics or economics — rather than with swords. We can change who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ quickly and trivially, basing not on genetics or location but on ideology. And we can satisfy the impulse vicariously.

There is a certain sublime satisfaction in knowing you have conquered your foes — whether it is wiping the last piece off a chessboard, staring at a newly-monocolor Risk board, or surveying the carnage at an orc camp. The part of the mind constantly screaming “Kill the Other!” is momentarily sated — so you don’t need to feed that hunger in any other way.

Also, let’s face it — most of us are pretty powerless in ‘real life’. There’s very little room at the top. MMORPGS offer a ‘top’ which anyone can attain with enough patience, or, if not, at least a very broad second tier. (Not everyone can be in the ultra-leet guilds, but anyone can usually make it to nearly there in most games I’m familiar with.) The ability to exercise power and control virtually provides a very needed relief.

Lastly, let us not carry some analogies too far. One can easily see the falseness of dehumanizing Indians or Aborigines or what-have-you — the conquered and exterminated people are *factually* human. But a digital orc is not. It is not being ‘dehumanized’ or ‘objectified’ — it IS an inhuman object, a collection of numbers on a server somewhere. To draw too close a parallel between treating a human like an object and treating an OBJECT like an object is folly.

Consider that this is understood even subconsciously by players. Being killed by a griefer generates genuine rage, frustration, or a desire for payback. Being killed by an orc generates a sigh and a desire to learn to play a bit better (or stay out of that zone, or whatever). There is an intuitive understanding of the difference.

Now, when there’s some sort of true AI behind these things — not ‘better pathfinding AI’ but ‘HAL 9000 AI’…then we’ve got a moral dilemma.

BTW, Raph, what do you think of ‘pure’ PVP games like Shadowbane or Planetside, where the majority of the targets are the avatars of actual human beings? Are these more or less ‘genocidal’?

Is it genocide if they don’t die?

After all, the players never ‘die’ in most of these games. They go back to rez. Why do we assume the orcs, firbolgs, space coyotes, or whatever die? Indeed, they don’t — they ‘respawn’, even the ‘named’ ones, often frequently. So the game worlds are really a sort of Valhalla in which no one ever ‘really’ dies. Much like certain plains Indians, it’s not about killing, but counting coup. The ‘dead’ get up when the battle is over, say ‘Good show, mate!’, and prepare to fight again.

On another note, to the person who described the baby-killing frenzy on an old MUD….this reminds me of many arguments I got into about classic UO (Hi, Raph! Remember me from the sadly departed UO2 mailing list?) Expecting players to do anything but kill, kill, kill if there’s no consequences which matter in the *real world* — such as delevelling, which costs player’s REAL time — is folly. Games like UO killed a lot of my real-world political idealism. (A week in UO at release would turn Gandhi into an authoritarian fascist…)

Interesting post, (Im a lurker here btw, Ive never posted) However I would recommend the following books for referance:

Guns, Germs and Steel (currently very popular, however goes to the heart of your concern about the motives behind why as a pastime we choose this form of gaming construct)

Modernization (A rather older book, but well on point as to the forces which enable the construct to be popular in westernized society)

I agree some of those effects manifested in UO. I think that for me this is why I have some nostalgia for “Dreadlord Days”, not because I have a hankering to be a bandito. Going back earlier in the thread, it’s why I would say the problem with UO’s initial implementation, or any contemplated closed-economy synthetic world, would be not so much with the flawed human nature of the players, but the small size and large populations of the gameworld. Imagine a population of players the size of two or three dispersed villages in a gameworld the size of half a continent, with NPC communities five or six times the size of any player community, and capable of retaliating against a player community in devastating ways. If the players in that world suffered permadeath (or serious penalties for dying) and if players could fight each other, I think suddenly almost everyone would become extremely responsible in their uses of violence–and those who did not would be ruthlessly subject to the will of the larger community.

Well my workday has begun, but to comment quickly:

While I agree that narrative has a power, when I read a book, or play a single-player game, I don’t agree that it has much power in the world of an MMO. I won’t deny that graphics and narrative context provide a lot of flavor to games. Colonialization or Civilization both use the colonial themes to provide interesting backdrops to their games. But it is only through in-game sets of actions and consequences that these various games really embody anything even narratively analogous to the moral issues of colonialism. And even then there is a very clear rift between moral issues and these games. That I invariably play the role of conqueror in these games has little moral content outside the context of the game.

I’ve long ago given up arguing that a game shouldn’t be judged on its graphics. But that doesn’t mean that I think that graphics directly create meaning in a Virtual World. And I really don’t think that the narrative structures of these games are much more than a certain flavor of graphics. A game could indeed have very interesting narratives that I could be interested in and engaged in. But these narratives are really just internalized short stories or novels in a virtual world if they don’t somehow attach to the world through gameplay. They still have no meaning, other than passive enjoyment. And ultimately, I’m just not that interested in them because I can find far better short stories and novels in this world. And because the meaning of actual world-influencing gameplay is vastly superior. Ultimately I find an over-emaphsis on narrative to just get in the way of the virtual worlds I want, worlds that don’t have to try to distract players with internalized short stories but instead realize meaning through gameplay providing interesting actions that players can take which match to interesting consequences in the world of the game.

Several good replies which I think are saying what I am saying: meaning is derived from gameplay. I think you are trying to link morality to flavor text and graphics in a way that doesn’t follow. I think that we could say that most characterizations of morality attempt to study consequences derived from actions taken in the world. Colonialism won’t exist in games until players are actually subjugating real people and taking over access to game assets/space.

And such subjugation and abuse could take place in a virtual world that was otherwise completely uncharged with meaning. It could be a world where avatars are simple polygons and there is no backstory whatsoever but where some players are able to remove other players entirely from play or otherwise virtually enslave or conquer in a meaningful manner. It could take place in a game that had no violent actions whatsoever. For example, as ATitD was in beta (and I didn’t play it after release) it was feasible to do just about anything with laws. This could include banning players from the game or simply creating such huge taxes on gameplay that it was essentially impossible for them to play (while I’m not sure how far Teppy would have allowed this to go, there was definitely the potential to subjugate through the in-game practice of law creation). And in many such economic games it is possible to “war” through economic means, monopolizing useful resources, undercutting other sellers, etc. You don’t need actions that are animated as violence in order to have the potential for one group of players to mistreat or even subjugate another. Animating an act as combat is must skinning a game with a certain familiar action sequence — it doesn’t imply moral content no more than skinning the same action with knitting animations would imply a dearth of moral content.

Maybe a solution is to remove the geoncidal factor of the games. why have free roaming NPC’s to be slaightered by the thousands for loot and gold?

perhaps a balanced quest system may work better in upcoming mmo’s where instead of just kill/loot/repeat you have to apprehend criminals, break a racket, assassination? You could also move onto NPC protection missions, escort/chaperone missions. Protection of a settlement for x amount of time?

I particularly liked an earlier comment from Big Mad Adrian about the camps that spawn and grow if not culled and removed in a timely fashin which could lead onto invasion of player populated areas and permanent loss of structures and items. This reminds me very much of the assassination completed in EVE online where a corporation lost somewhere in the region of 30 Billion in game credits in a perfectly legal heist. give people a reason to defend territory instead of roaming aimlessly slaughtering and pillaging for their loot.

Sure, but now you’re just reprising the Milgram experiments, aren’t you? If an authority figure reduces an act of possible pain infliction so that the subject can press a button and never have an idea what will result on the other side of the wall, no one minds pressing the button. But at even the beginnings of indications that the button is inflicting pain (moaning, pleas to stop, etc.) the subject’s psychic resistance to obeying the authority figure grows… not as fast as most of us would like, of course, but it still grows.

The designers of MMOGs to date have reduced the act of killing NPCs to the equivalent of simple Milgramesque button pushing sans any consequences, and players are responding accordingly. The most likely way to bring that emotional identification back without completely voiding the kill-to-advance concept would seem to be to make NPC behaviour more complex, ie, to give the action at least some kind of perceivable negative consequence (Early-UO-style zone depopulation, powerful NPC avengers, non-zerosum faction aggro, etc.). Not simply with the intent of rewarding non-genocidal behaviour, but to make the NPC groups recognizably more human and start triggering people’s emotional buttons, as well.

Of course, then you need to offer an alternate equally fun, ethically-sound advancement path, or the concientious will just stop playing and you *will* be left with a world full of sociopaths. But as the best implementations of crafting seem to have shown, simply offering an alternate kill-free path by itself is not enough when there’s still that room full of Barbies to behead.

PS: The argument assumes that it would be possible to identify standard MMOG farming of goblin-style mobs would be identified with genocide by a rational person. It could as easily be that the games have not risen to the level of being able to make NPCs that trigger those kinds of moral judgements. Given our seemingly almost infinite capacity to anthropomorphize anything, it’s hard to imagine if the goblins didn’t display a more obviously human range of activities, etc., that these kinds of moral reflexes wouldn’t start kicking in among more people.

The analogy would be a potential employer who shows you to a room full of Barbie dolls, and offers you a reasonable hourly wage to rip the heads off them looking for… I don’t know, say uranium or something. Sure, the Barbies look human, but I doubt that would prevent anyone who needed the work from committing Barbie genocide without qualms.

Now, if the Barbies started running away or begging for their heads when you entered the room, well then I figure it would be a little harder for people to do the same work. More complex NPC algorithms could well lead to emergent humanity. At least it’s never really been tried. It is probably too early to talk about a MMOG-player’s penchant for genocide.

And no, in this one thing (unlike so many other current MMOG dilemmas) I don’t think experience from text MUDs, etc., counts. It’s the visual triggers that, more than anything, will ultimately stay our hand.

You quote Las Casas… but even Cortez and Pizarro had to deal with the Papal bull that declared the inhabitants of the New World were of the human species (having passed whatever real-world Turing test analogue had been required). That’s why before each slaughter they had to push a priest out front to offer the heathen a theoretical chance of conversion first. MMOG NPCs are nowhere near the level of being mistaken for members of the human race, and are being treated accordingly.

This is an interesting direction to go off of the Terra Nova discussion of evil and the Horde, and one more productive to my own cast of mind, certainly.

I think however there’s some other complexities to consider here.

First is that combat in MMOGs doesn’t just deal with genocide/warfare against sentient Others, but also simulates or textually represents hunting non-sentient animals (for food or other harvested goods). Also one is killing non-sentient pests or menaces to communities (e.g., rats and so on).

If you think of the mobs that players kill in a DIKU-descended MMOG, at least half are animals of some kind, I think. To take World of Warcraft, for example, if I’m questing in the Hinterlands as a Horde player, I’ll be killing: trolls (sentient Others), slimes/oozes (pests), gryphons (animals, but represented in-game as a gesture of warfare), owlbears (half-sentient animals, hard to know how to add them up), wolves (animals), elves (sentient Others), turtles (animals).

The problem in the case of either warfare or hunting is that MMOG worlds are non-consequentialist worlds. The only consequences of action appear as persistent effects within the player, and those effects are largely about empowerment and accumulation. The only place where those effects have world-persistence in mind is in reputation, and even there it’s about sheer numerical models of numbers killed or quests completed.

To be consequentialist worlds even on a simple level (e.g., I’m not talking here about magic future technology where we have fully emergent designs for persistent worlds that respond in unplanned ways to player actions) we’d have to have far fewer players, far bigger worlds, and responsive spawning models & closed economies.

Right now players breeze by killing creatures and enemies in their thousands because players are crowded in their thousands into very small topographies and surrounded by non-naturalistic spawning. You can’t have enemies be perceived as other sentients until they appear in meaningfully finite numbers, respond in meaningful ways to being killed, and where players are far and few between inside very large spaces. You can’t think about what it means to kill animals for resources until there is a finite supply of them; if there is a finite supply of them, there have to be very few players inside extremely large worlds, or the worlds get stripped barren in a matter of seconds.

Moral dimensions to play that synchronize with game content can’t emerge in synthetic worlds that lack consequences. It doesn’t matter if you get rid of killing and make all quests be conversation trees. There wouldn’t be any more moral dimension to play in such a game, not as a something enabled by and working within the content of the game. There’s always a moral dimension to play in terms of relations between players and behaviors that are made possible by the mechanics but not represented in the content, but killing enemies can’t become morally meaningful rather than just game-mechanical until there are consequences that flow from it–that the enemies disappear, that the enemies reorganize and annihilate one’s own communities, that the enemies sue for peace, that the stakes for a player are comparable to the stakes for an NPC (e.g., permadeath).

I’m with Scott, the model is too simple, but that’s becase its purpose (much like the purpose of whoever started the crap in this thread) is to be exciting and attract attention and controversy.

And let’s not even pretend anybody ever did HUNTING well in a mmog, or that that goony Deerhunter game didn’t make a lot of money, or that all this overly cerebral crap about George Washington’s Rationalizations about what amounts to a simple failure of communication and inadequacy (that nobody wants to take “credit” for) are useful for ANYTHING.

The idea that freakin’ amish folks like the pilgrims were genocidal maniacs or imperialistic or something is pathetic.

I think I’m still noticing a trend to avoid the roots of everything because its “too dirty” and unappreciated, but you can’t keep building on to these houses of cards without fixing their foundation in survival, its like listening to the logic of Serial Killers.

Sometimes I think WOLVES and GORILLAS have a better understanding of social behavior than you guys, being social and the benefits of working together for survival insteada killing each other is not some lofty and unnatural human concept, the fact that we do kill each other so much isn’t a result of our genius, but a result of our weakness.

The hunter is a hero to starving village, the shoemaker is a hero to all the folks with blisters in their feet, the farmer isn’t committing imperialistic genocide against his cows and plants, and the cook and poet is not the first artist in town.

Its funny that anybody is surprised our simulations suck, intelligence and the kind of understanding and abilities required to model all these complex things in a way that isn’t full of our sad little rationalizations for our weaknesses is not some kinda default we’re all born with, but I like drive-in monster movies, too.

I always thought that the most fun I had in DAoC’s RvR (outside of the bgs) was before RAs.

What was the point back then?

In WoW it made sense because you still have conflict (the PvE zones are shared, so alliance and horde mix together), but in DAoC you can still only interact in the frontiers, where you go SOLELY to kill the other faction.

The fun part in WoW is that you had the choice to attack or just mind your own business. I was even helped in a few occasions doing quests.

Ironically, while the pen-and-paper RPG industry has moved well beyond the original wargamer-ish “fight tactical battles, kill monsters and take their stuff”, successive generations of MUDs/MMORPGs have moved more and more towards the kill-and-loot forms of play. Indeed, PvP as it is ritualized in WoW is a superb expression of dehumanizing even other players — they are the enemy, you cannot even communicate with them, and their death has no meaning except for the farming of honor points. For that matter, the very word “farming” expresses how much we’ve stripped the meaning out of killing either villains or other players.

I would be glad if you could read this because it describes how fun, consistent and “deep” the PvP was in WoW before they added that horrible Honor implementation.

It was so much better when there wasn’t any “reward” attached to a kill.

Note that this also involves moving away from the model of MMORPG-as-opiate.

That said, we’re likely getting closer and closer to the limits of the potential squish-the-foozle audience.

And you are definitely an optimist.

My general and pre-college grasp of the entirety of history, specifically things like racism, genocide, and Other Bad Civ-level Things suggests that the basis isn’t necessarily an actual aversion to the thing itself, but instead an economic heuristic.

From what I know of Hitler, for instance, the rise of the German War Machine was an economic stimulus against the backdrop of the depression caused from a loss of World War I. The Jews were a convenient scapegoat for the loss of jobs, and were subsequently blamed as the root of all evil, and thus required extermination (though it began with shutting them out of government institutions, ostracization, making them low-class, etc.).

What this suggests is that the reverse phenomenon is possible: raise the economic baseline to one where all really are equal, and they will be. One of my friends describes MUDs as having a ‘genocidal economy’, and from that, I take away this: The best way to make money is to kill others.

You can cite EVE as a counterexample, but from what I know of EVE, it really IS a step above the standard MMORPG.

Really, the main problem is that we’re expecting too much from a too limited social model. The best we’ve come up with in MMOs to date is the somewhat brutal feudalism of games like Eve and Shadowbane.

Yes, but it’s still the same problem: unexplored possibilities. Or shy attempts.

If you consider here Eve and SB a tiny step forward, it’s because noone tried to do something more. And if Eve and SB have that “little more” it’s because they offer *gameplay* nodes that encouraged and valorized some new elements.

This is why the “roleplay” becomes more solid and widespread. It’s just more enrooted with the mechanics instead of just a backdrop.

So, again, my point of view is that you should find some practical gameplay hooks to realize that potential concretely.

From my point of view “gamey” isn’t a weakness. It’s the obligatory way. At least in this context.

(coherently with all I wrote recently about level up mechanics and quest systems I also think that these ideas would be easily doable in the context where I put them.

If questing is about the progression in a story and is completely detached from artificial mechanics, like xp gains and other out-of-character motivations, then you can start to bring that “content” where you want and “reward” or create “nodes” around those moral values. Or whatever you choose.

It’s just about giving relevance to those aspects in the game. But *gameplay* relevance, as in practical mechanics, choices and relationships. Not just “fluff”.)

Any better cite for that George Washington quote than the “Lies my Teacher Told Me” book? Google claims that quote belongs to a French priest named Gay. Everyone should just make their own joke here.

I think we all gave up on that thread shortly after it hit the WoW boards and hundreds of furious Horde players posted “AM NOT!”. It was a great article which was sadly far too specific.

I have to disagree about “The Horde is Evil” being a great article. It’s muddied and filled with factual errors. Furthermore, it’s core thesis is, frankly, repugnant: The author claims that because “orcs” are, by definition, evil, all orcs appearing in any work of fiction are necessarily symbols of evil, regardless of how they actually act. Change the word “orc” to any human racial group, and this is obviously a disgusting philosophy to hold.

World of Warcraft is actually fairly good at not forcing the players into the role of imperialist conqueror. Most of the sentient enemies are either soldiers engaged in active hostilities with the players’ side or servants of demonic forces. (c.f. Raph’s comment about demons with no agenda other than eating souls.)

Painting everything in just black and white is also very common in action movies. Just think of Rambo 3 for example.

However, in good books and many good movies the main character(s) change over time. They start the story with diferent feelings and diferent views than they’ll have in the end.

It would be great to see that happen (at least to some degree) in MMORPGs too. Partly you could see it in EverQuest 1 already. Players working on their faction points. Early in the game they may kill lots of faction X just to “work” on their standing later on to become friend again.

That’s of course not very ethical either. But it’s a starting point to let a player feel consequences of what he does. Some MMORPGs in development will take another step and give the players choices how to solve quests. Now wrap that up with stories that have a true meaning for the player and not just FedEx or Kill Missions with some more or less random text elements – and some ethical background mixed in.

If you like to teach the player something, you must first have a story to tell, the player realy cares about.

Bowen Research had an article a while ago, titled “Can Videogames Make You Cry?“. While I’m not sure that quests in MMORPGs could ever tear the players that much into the stories, in the next 10 years at least, I’m sure if they ever will, we will see a new dimension of MMORPG design and eventualy leave the genocide behind.

Back when I coded MUDs I loved to fool players around within quests and make them feel they did very wrong with killing that young orc over there in the end – while it looked like a good idea at first. But that’s of course a much simpler task in a MUD than in a MMORPG.

In Germany we say “ihm/ihr bleibt das Lachen im Halse stecken” – I don’t know if there is something similar in English, the translation may be “The laugh stuck in one’s throat”. That’s something that could help with ethic (and fun after all) in a MMORPG too. Give the players choices and let them feel the consequences. What gives a good reward today may turn back at you tomorrow. Of course not in a game or fun breaking sense, but in a way the player will start to think about what he does and what a real hero should do, or should better not do, on the next quest he takes.