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The evil we pretend to doDecember 30th, 2005 |
Since the Admiral [Columbus] perceived that daily the people of the land were taking up arms, ridiculous weapons in reality…. he hastened to proceed to the country and disperse and subdue, by force of arms, the people of the entire island… For this he chose 200 foot soldiers and 20 cavalry, with many crossbows and small cannon, lances, and swords, and a still more terrible weapon against the Indians, in addition to the horses: this was 20 hunting dogs, who were turned loose and immediately tore the Indians apart.
- Bartolomé de las Casas, writing on the Spanish genocide of the Arawak on Haiti in 1495
Why are most MMOs about genocide?
I can hear the reaction already. “It’s just a game.” “That’s stupid.” “We’re just pretending.”
I’m more interested in why exactly we pretend this way.
Let’s look at the facts: the classic Diku model is rife with intriguing cultural assumptions. Among them:
- There’s two broad sorts of people depicted: conquerors (“real people”) and victims.
- Among the “real people” there’s the heroes, and the serfs.
- Among the heroes and serfs alike, there are what get called “races” but are really species; but these are treated in terms of gameplay less as races and more as a well-disguised form of job choice.
- The victims are generally portrayed as intelligent beings who are native to the places where they live.
- The primary purpose for existence of these beings in the world is so that gold may be mined from them, experience obtained, and the ‘heroes’ may climb higher in their civilization’s hierarchy.
- These beings are slaughtered by the thousands with no care for consequences, and indeed, there is an endless supply of them.
- The victims are generally portrayed as ugly, stupid brutes.
As George Washington described the Ohio Indians, the mobs we harvest in the MMOs can be seen as “having nothing human but the shape.”
Now, the game (in a strict ludological sense) that is offered is of course not one of genocide. It is one of attriting hit point bars using a variety of defenses and offenses. It is a simulation of combat, and slaying orcs is presented as the narratological means to do so. Success is rewarded with greater options and challenges in this combat game.
And yet, the experience of a game is not solely in the mechanics; it is also in what I call the dressing, the narrative details and the metaphor in which those mechanics are encased and then presented to the player. (For more on this, you may wish to reference chapter ten of A Theory of Fun or my earlier MUD-Dev postings on the topic).
The dressing of classic MUD gameplay is unrelievedly classist, strongly colonialist, and carries more than a hint of racism. These things are then mirrored back into the gameplay.
It was a fearful sight, to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.
— William Bradford, describing the British burning a Pequot Village during the Pequot War in 1636-7.
It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men.
– The Narragansett tribe, erstwhile allies of the British, decrying the British tactics
[The Narragansett style of fighting is] more for pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies.
– Capt. John Underhill
We can debate whether or not the hobby that so many of us are engaging in is somehow damaging to our psyche, or shapes us in unpleasant ways. The jury is rather out on that. However, we cannot deny the powerful role that media have in shaping a cultural consciousness. There’s a fine line between propaganda and art, really. And we’re certainly not on the moral level of the colonial powers who massacred native peoples across the globe. After all, it is just pretend. “More for pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies.”
However, dressing is largely independent of mechanics. I’ve often used the example of the silly Flash game of popping bubble wrap, which is functionally extremely similar to the act of firing in a first person shooter: you line up the cursor and click on something. In fact, games such as Pokemon Snap and the brilliant Beyond Good & Evil appropriate the shooting mechanic and dress it as shooting a camera. The formal abstract models that videogames provide are tied to genre by convention, not by requirement, and can be dressed in any number of ways while still providing similar enjoyment. On the flip side, choosing the wrong model can also damage the enjoyment to be had from the game.
This boils down to the uncomfortable notion that our games are about genocide and grave robbery because we want them to be. They come from a tradition, after all, a tradition of mythic literature that by and large isn’t all that politically correct.
The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and under that a fine bow… We also found bowls, trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered up the body again.
— a Pilgrim colonist’s journal describing robbing a Native American grave
Many of the core sources for roleplaying games emerge out of the narratives of cultures that were far from idyllic. Our notions of trolls and dragons are powerfully shaped by Scandivanian cultures in terms of their behavior — a mythology wherein the notion of Heaven was to engage in battles every day. The iconography of advancement in our gameplay sources such as AD&D was derived from feudal Europe, a heavily stratified class society (one might even say caste society, given the importance of heredity).
Something happened, however, with the greater instrumental play that CRPGs carried with them, and then with the way the play changed further as it moved into a multiplayer realm. In Germanic myth greed is a deadly sin. Dragons become dragons because they were greedy (witness Fafnir in the Ring Saga); great kings were accounted “gold-givers” in Germanic tribes.
The narrative of acquisition is really a colonialist narrative. It’s the story of the Crusades, of Columbus, of frontier America, of South Africa. And in taking our heavily story-based roleplay games into the realm of spaces, we transformed nuance into outright aggression.
Consider the treatment of graverobbing in Tolkien, our ultimate source of reference for the heart of the RPG. The Barrow-downs are a dangerous place, guarded by dark and jealous spirits, and engaging in the theft of objects fom the dead is always portrayed as slipping towards evil: it lies at the heart of Faramir’s choice and Boromir’s less fortunate choice. The journey is framed by gift-giving, not by looting. Even the One Ring itself carries with it a curse of posessiveness, of acquisitiveness, and it starts its journey with Smeagol as a journey of murder and robbery. This sort of thought carries through to everything: although many have faulted Tolkien for his treatment of the Southrons, depicting them as dark-skinned men siding with Sauron, it is also clear in the books that most of the evil races helping Sauron were in fact made from the elves and dwarves and hobbits and men. In Tolkien, as in Pogo, “the enemy is us” in a very literal sense, a dark shadow of ourselves.
Where is this nuance in our games? Absent. If our goal with these games is to provide the experience of heroism, we are betraying both that ideal and our source material.
We do our players a disservice when we fail to provide this sort of nuance in our fantasy worlds. We do our players a disservice when we couch our reward systems solely in terms of antiquated feudal social structures. Yes, we may be satisfying some deep craving for a sense of power in our players, but surely we can be more creative in how we provide it? We currently base this sense of power on providing thousands of dumb brutes to slaughter and rob, couched nicely in a lack of consequence. There is no reference to the orcish agriculture that allowed players to colonize the zone in the first place, the staple crops they added to our diet. There’s no mention of the heights of civilization that they miht have achieved prior to our invading their land. There’s no mention of the reasons why they react aggressively to our appearance in their territory — perhaps because we slew their relatives?
Frankly, there’s better gameplay to be had. As designers, we could supply worlds that do have nuance, and players (who buy millions of copies of books filled with this sort of careful worldbuilding) would like it. We could think about adapting our same gameplay models to the saving of tribes rather than the elimination of them. Where’s the game for the player who wants to venture into the orcish lands as an anthropologist, and learn of and from them?
We shape the player experience by the verbs we provide. Right now, the only way to interact meaningfully with our fantasy worlds is at the edge of a sword, and through the barrel of a gun.
When dealing with savage men, as with savage beasts, no question of… honor can arise.
– Francis A. Walker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1871
All quotations referenced came from Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Aspects of this post were inspired by the related topic “The Horde is Evil” at Terra Nova.
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A lot of players don’t, certainly.
Blogroll Joel on SoftwareRaph Koster Sunny Walker Thoughts for Now Sex, Lies and Advertising
t tell by now, and this is a great list of games that most fans of the system most likely overlooked. Find out about the system’s most neglected titles, like “Little Sampson” and “Clash at Demonhead.” Stephen’s Pick:“The evil we pretend to do”: I follow humbly in Raph Koster’s footsteps. More than two years before
[...] Raph Koster philosophiert in einem neuen Blog Eintrag auf seiner Webseite über die Geister, die stets das gute wollen, und doch irgendwie eher dem Bösen verfallen sind. MMORPGs, die mehr einem Abschlachten von Zivilisationen gleichen, und der Macht der Medien auf die kulturelle Entwicklung.
Er vergleicht die Szenarien moderner MMORPGs mit der Kolonialzeit. Es gibt keine moralischen Bedenken und keine Zweifel, ein Drache steht da, der hat Gold, der muss gekillt werden! Dabei stellt er die Frage ob es auch anders ginge? Spieler die nicht ganze Orkstämme auslöschen, sondern eher ihre Länder bereisen und ihre Lebensweisen studieren. [...]
[...] Raph Koster responded to the unexpectedly hyperactive “The Horde, them’s some evil orcs there!” thread on Terra Nova with his own take on why we do what we do in MMOs. Rather than start another blog-de-ron-de-lay, I’ll simply direct you all to my pleading for more insensitivity in gaming, already in progress. [...]
[...] Just MAYBE. At least according to Raph “Too Smart For My Own Good” Koster: [...]
[...] Raph Koster – The evil we pretend to do Why are most MMOs about genocide? (tags: mmorpgs raph_koster gaming) [...]
[...] Terra Nova: The Horde is Evil terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/12/the_ho… posted by majcher at 2005-12-31 09:27# <majcher> okay, ed, you just lost me, there.<majcher> raph’s response <majcher> “The dressing of classic MUD gameplay is unrelievedly classist, strongly colonialist, and carries more than a hint of racism.” [...]
[...] Raph on The evil we pretend to do [...]
[...] Amberyl on The evil we pretend to do [...]
[...] Raph Koster – The Evil We Pretend to Do [...]
[...] Raph Koster, one of the designers behind the Star Wars: Galaxies MMORPG, has a really excellent post up on his blog: We shape the player experience by the verbs we provide. Right now, the only way to interact meaningfully with our fantasy worlds is at the edge of a sword, and through the barrel of a gun. [...]
[...] Industry vet and SOE bigwig, Raph Koster has posted a new editorial on his personal blog site. ‘The evil that we pretend to do’ poses the question: ‘ ‘Why are most MMOs about genocide?’ A heady topic to be sure, but Raph is always worth a read. (source: mmorpgdot) [...]
[...] Raph Koster has updated his blog with an entry entitled The evil we pretend to do. Here’s a sample:Why are most MMOs about genocide? I can hear the reaction already. “It’s just a game.” “That’s stupid.” “We’re just pretending.” I’m more interested in why exactly we pretend this way. Let’s look at the facts: the classic Diku model is rife with intriguing cultural assumptions. Among them: * There’s two broad sorts of people depicted: conquerors (”real people”) and victims. * Among the “real people” there’s the heroes, and the serfs. * Among the heroes and serfs alike, there are what get called “races” but are really species; but these are treated in terms of gameplay less as races and more as a well-disguised form of job choice. * The victims are generally portrayed as intelligent beings who are native to the places where they live. * The primary purpose for existence of these beings in the world is so that gold may be mined from them, experience obtained, and the ‘heroes’ may climb higher in their civilization’s hierarchy. * These beings are slaughtered by the thousands with no care for consequences, and indeed, there is an endless supply of them. * The victims are generally portrayed as ugly, stupid brutes. More… [...]
[...] This is the blog of an SOE MMO designer Raph Koster… please dont let this prevent you from reading the rest of this post! I found a link to this article on stratics and followed it just as I was browsing the net, what I found was an absolutely fascinating article, but an even moreso fascinating follow-up discussion, which is not only educated but also quite civilsed. If you are interested in MMOs at all, and think that we are only just scraping the surface of this form of entertainment, give this a read, I personally just went post after post, caught up in the discussion… http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=232 cheers, a._________________Burn the land and boil the sea, you can’t take the sky from me. -Theme from “Firefly”. Go watch Serenity. [...]
[...] Hmm. No, no parallels here at all, nope! [...]
[...] if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = “show”; var tocHideText = “hide”; showTocToggle(); } [edit]Stuff to Consider Dicta – Dicta are things we have generally agreed to be guidelines and certainties in our design. [edit]Potential Systems Mitigatable Factors Psionics – Incorporated into the Transitional Vis system. Physical fitness [edit]Good Reading [edit]Raph Koster – Thoughts and Conclusions The evil we pretend to do, by Raph Koster Do levels suck? Part I, by Raph Koster Do levels suck? Part II, by Raph Koster “levels push towards cooperative rather than competitive play” Do we therefore still want skill(s)? Skills, as done in Dragonrealms, are effectively levels in the above sense. (There’s more to Koster’s article than what I quoted; it’s a beginning, not a conclusion.) One of the most salient points is a very succinct reasoning as to why a content race does not and cannot work. Ask Kevin how oten his TrekMUSHs added actual content. I don’t know the answer, but I can make a reasonable guess: almost never. The secondmost salient point is in his conclusion. =P Ethics of Online Design Of note. Ask Michael about this. [edit]Economics Economic Stages of MMOGs (The paper itself) Economics and society [edit]Culture and Creation Constructed Languages (or conlangs) World-Builders On Creating an Earth-like Planet [edit]Unattached References History of Technology (Wikipedia) [edit]Fiction [edit]Histories Creation Story Foundation Stories – Where did the things of today come from? [edit]Why Stuff Works How Magic Works Mindscape – Only if Psionics is implemented [edit]Factbook Data Planetology – Astronomical Data, Rotation Speed, Revolution Time, Axis of rotation, etc. Celestial Bodies – Moons, Constellations, etc. Calendar (absolute) – Seasons, Weather Conditions, Major Planetary Events, etc. Calendar (per culture) – Celebration Dates, Month and Year layouts, etc. Based on above. Cultures [edit]Cultural Idiosyncracies Games Card games Dice games Board games Chess variants Go variants Bluff games [edit]Systems [...]