 | The Daedalus Project: Yi-Shan-GuanJanuary 3rd, 2006 |
The Daedalus Project: Yi-Shan-Guan connects to “The Evil We Pretend to Do” in uncomfortable ways. Discuss.
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How, other than that many Western online players are (a) racist and (b) apparently can’t tell the difference between “Bonjour” and “Ni hao”? Neither is a new concept to me.
Hm, the more I think about, the more this entire subject really bothers me on multiple levels. I’ll probably rant on it on my blog tonight when I get home. I’ll be sure and blame you. 
I guess what I was getting at was that it connects in terms of “look, here’s someone (Nick) who clearly DOES perceive gameplay stuff as directly analogous to real life historical incidents.” I mean, I was using genocide somewhat metaphorically. When you see his screenshots of massacres of (allegedly Chinese) farmers, it stops feeling quite as metaphorical.
People are doomed to repeat history. From my point of view as long as it stays in virtual warzones like wow pvp servers it may be bad but its not as bad as it could be. People sterotype/generalize, its the way they handle what they don’t fully understand and reduce a complex issue to black and white for them. Many people don’t handle grey very well so they are more comfortable with a clear labeling system. They’re also big on bandwagoning, a subject we could get into but don’t really see the need.
Sure, I got it. The racist core behind a lot of the ranting about “Chinese farmers” has always bothered me. Both because of the obvious (racism is bad, perpetuating it in new forms such as online worlds is worse albeit unsurprising) and the less so (I personally despise the practice of farming virtual worlds for RL cash, and don’t particularly like this aspect of the argument at all.)
MMORPGs which aren’t about genocide still have problems with both xenophobia and farming. I was once in a pub in Puzzle Pirates (which has no genocide as a play mechanic, although it does have piracy) and chatted up two Chinese (Taiwanese, as it turns out) players through basically the reverse of the usual process: I know a couple thousand Chinese vocabulary words from Japanese (highly, highly unreliable, though) and absolutely no grammar, so it probably looked like the equivalent of “u hav bread plz thx” from their end. There were about five different conversations going on in the inn at the same time, and two players got very verbally abusive that “their” inn was being invaded by bloodthirsty rapacious heathen foreign pirates (arr, me matey, who said they be heath’n?). (There is no convinient feature to take a chat between multiple parties who are not guildmates private in Puzzle Pirates, nor do I particularly think the Taiwanese players should be forced to. After all, inns are for talking idly and playing hearts, and thats what we were doing. I lost my shirt that day playing hearts but thats another story.)
I’m sort of in the same boat with Lum — I hate the idea of farming with a passion and really couldn’t care for some of the ways people express that. Honestly, though, racially profiling farmers as Chinese doesn’t disturb me… my anecdotal experience indicates that that stereotype is entirely rational.
Killing farmers on a PVP server also doesn’t strike me as that problematic (or, rather, no more uniquely problematic than anything else that routinely happens on a PVP server). If anything, its a more plausible non-mechanical rationale for a PVP killing than anything else WoW offers (in a land with effectively infinite resources the only reason to fight over them is if you want the resource *now* and the person currently exploiting it prevents you from concurrently exploiting it, or if you have some preexisting qualm about allowing the other person to exploit it — farmers provide players with both incentives).
I really can’t get behind Nick’s analogy. Generally, Chinese laundry workers didn’t round up packs of wolves and use them to attack other people for having the audacity to try to do their own laundry. 
I don’t care if the farmers are from Mars. I don’t think it’s terribly relevant. I’m not trying to impose some kind of western labor standards on them. If I don’t see the game as a job, then we’re comparing apples and oranges. They’re violating the compact of the game community, both from a social standpoint, and also, in many cases, from a terms-of-service standpoint. This isn’t an inherently racist construct. There may, indeed, be some linguistic expectations, but communication is such a critical part of participating in these communities that I do not think that these expectations are the least bit unreasonable.
Yes, I have some empathy for anyone who is trying to make ends meet through gold farming. However, I am under no obligation to assume that any given farmer is, in fact, in any economic distress. I don’t know whether he is hungry any more than I know if that bouncy Night Elf woman over there is, in fact, played by an actual woman. The farmer could be my next-door-neighbor’s twelve year old son, for all I know. Besides, even if the farmer IS Chinese, isn’t it also racist to assume that he’s poor, can’t find a job, and will starve to death if you don’t cut him a break?
Not sure I see the connection either. The previous post was about our treatment of inanimate objects with human features (NPCs) saying something dysfunctional about the games. The link in this case is about real people treating avatars they know full well are avatars of other human players in bad ways, with a racial subtext.
This phenomenon seems to have more to do with in-world vigilantism: a response to what some people evidently feel is a serious threat to their online community that lacking other resolution instruments is taking the form of violence against an identifiable group of others.
The difference was previously you seemed to be arguing that we should start to attach human murder tabus to mobs because the designers’ backstory said they had a culture, and they looked a little human. Debatable, at best. This instance is of accepted, existing tabus being knowingly waived in a game world, in part out of racial bias. Given the circumstances, it is just as understandable, but significantly higher on the inhumanity scale all the same.
Whoa there — I was not at all arguing that we should attach human murder taboos; I was arguing that there’s something very interesting going on when we set up situations and game systems strongly reminiscent of real world situations that we find morally repugnant, and then blithely ignore all the meaning that is fraught with.
Of course Nick’s post is not directly comparable; he’s talking about real people. However, the extensive historical analogy he draws is a parallel to the one I was drawing, and to me anyway, it made both suddenly resonate somewhat stronger, in a “look how we recapitulate history” sort of way.
In reading the “Evil We Pretend” thread, what strikes me is how races are always constructed as distinct biological things (can’t be mixed), how certain races are born evil (once evil, always evil), and the notion that certain races simply won’t ever get along (which is certainly an eerie notion given the current RL conflicts).
What’s really kinda scary (and what I think strikes both Raph and I) is that the genocide in Raph’s post (tied to virtual “ethnicity”) and the genocide in my post (tied to real “ethnicity”) are not critically challenged as genocide, but handwaved as “pretend fun”.
Why is this scary? Really, why would you critically challenge in-game genocide as genocide? Wouldn’t you first have to challenge in-game killing as killing? Is there any useful meaning in looking at things this way?
Do I really need to ponder the moral significance of sinking a naval battlegroup, when I play Battleship? Does it say anything about my personality — my hopes, dreams, and aspirations — that I would play this game in which I sink ships? Of course not.
I’m even a bit worried that we may potentially trivilize real crimes against humanity by bandying about the same terminology in our play spaces.
What I do find scary is the fomenting anti-Chinese racism implied in some of the anecdotes that Nick provided. Interfering with a gold farmer is one thing, but interfering with a player simply because he/she speaks Chinese is downright offensive.
I can’t really get terribly upset by something like this. Mostly this is a listing of a dozen or so anecdotes that only confirm to me: “MMOG populations contain a large proportion of ignorant and/or immature players”. Yes players resent the practice of RMT and those who enable it. Yes players well, kill other players en masse in PvP games. It’s always for one stupid reason over another.
But I didn’t need to go to MMOG’s to see this. I could have seen mass-”murders”, name-calling, immaturity, etc., in an online game of Unreal. But I take it for what it is: 15 year old players (and immature 35 year old players), playing a game where effectively killing other people is the intended challenge and has little meaning other than that.
It’s common in our industry to have to combat the stereotype that video games create violent tendencies in our young kids. Support for this stereotype usually comes from anecdotes. And we usually have to reply that virtual blood is well, just virtual blood, and the result of a game, and that players playing the game realize the distinction. And outside of a handful of those already well on their way to the loony bin, studies tend to corroborate this. In this case there is certainly immaturity and even racism among several. But to say that this stems from the game, on the basis of anecdotes, goes too far IMO. I wouldn’t deny that these players do exhibit immaturity and even racism, at times it is rampant and not only in games. But there is a difference from bringing these traits TO a game and learning them FROM a game.
Nick, I see the superficial similarity, but in other ways the problems are apposite. Attempts to rein in farming/camping are a protostage for a virtual community trying to impose some behaviour standards/resource sharing guidelines in virtual space, as vigilantism has historically been in some cases a precursor to more formal justice. Whereas Raph’s previous example is of aberrant behaviour in the absence of any offsetting feedback/justice mechanisms (such as those same community standards).
Imagine if Raph got his wish in the previous post referred to, and farmed NPCs were smart enough to be recognized as something more than just a fixed resource. I’m not even talking emotional complexity… it would probably be enough just for them not to respawn in the same damn place they’ve died at 300 times before that day in most cases. That would drive up local scarcity, thus increasing the incentives for paid farmers, especially those that can benefit from time zone/repopulation time differences such as those living in China in this case, and inevitably increase the aggro from the rest of the player community against that group.
It’ll be even worse yet if people started someday to honestly see the mass-offing of NPC mobs as genocidal and therefore as something they needed to conscientiously oppose themselves with their avatars… the manifestations of hatred against those then still playing/killing pixels/genociding, depending how you look at it, to make a RL living (people who presumably would have fewer qualms as a whole) likely will be much more ominous than what you’ve documented. There is some truth to the saying that the only human held in lower opinion than a slave is the slave trader: whichever one you humanize, you inevitably risk demonizing the other.
In a way, taken together you’re taking the two closely overlapping sets of people (NPC kill-farmers) and saying on the one hand the intersected subset is exhibiting a kind of genocidal behaviour, and on the other hand they shouldn’t be discriminated against for it. I’m not sure any moral system one could design could manage to contain both those ideas simultaneously for long.
Why is this scary? Really, why would you critically challenge in-game genocide as genocide? Wouldn’t you first have to challenge in-game killing as killing? Is there any useful meaning in looking at things this way?
Given the lengthy, thoughtful discussions that ensued here on this post, the previous one, and on Terra Nova, it seems that yes, there is useful meaning here, if only in exploring how we all feel about the issues and the terminologies.
I have already challenged killing as killing, at some length in the book.
Do I really need to ponder the moral significance of sinking a naval battlegroup, when I play Battleship? Does it say anything about my personality — my hopes, dreams, and aspirations — that I would play this game in which I sink ships? Of course not.
It says a tiny amount; there are people who will not play that game because it depicts violence, and there are people who will not play it because it’s not graphic enough. That’s not a very useful bit of data in this case, but it does exist. In more complex games, I’d argue we actually do start learning a significant amount about people.
For example, I think that race, class, and gender choice in an MMO avatar are nearly as useful as a Myers-Briggs test for ascertaining facts about a player’s personality.
More importantly, I think the Battleship example says a lot about the climate of the times in which it was designed — narrative here as a form of cultural critique — and about the mindset of its designer. The choice of dressing is significant, I think.
I’m even a bit worried that we may potentially trivialize real crimes against humanity by bandying about the same terminology in our play spaces.
This would imply that all the games that treat war have trivialized it. I would argue the opposite — they have often chosen to exalt it.
This would imply that all the games that treat war have trivialized it. I would argue the opposite — they have often chosen to exalt it.
What timing! I was just asking if games trivialized real wars, on the women_dev list. (You’re on that list, so maybe you saw that.) I meant it more to tease out the reasons for another person’s objections, than anything else. I don’t personally think games trivialize war any more than books and movies do, to be honest. They tap the mythical vein of war, but I’d argue that all historical subjects take on a mythical quality, the further they recede from us in the past.
But that’s another matter. What I’m saying here is that “genocide” is a strong word.
It’s a stronger word, even, than “murder,” and we very seldom use the word “murder” to describe what people do in games, unless we’re attempting to be sensationalist (like a certain Florida lawyer). Even in terms of player-killing, which is arguably the closest thing we have to anything that could be called murder, we are far more likely to use the word “kill” or “gank.” Why is that? Are we living in denial? I don’t think that’s the reason. Even angry victims, deep in the thick of things, don’t tend to use that word for the crime committed against them.
If a bunch of five-year-olds are outside, playing cops-and-robbers, do we call little Johnny a cop-killer? Why is it that we don’t?
Please read “inapposite” vice “apposite”, first line of comment 13. Sorry about the typo.
Careful, Tess! I didn’t say that were were literally engaging in genocide in these games — I said that the games were representing genocide, unintentionally and in an unexamined way. Cops-and-robbers is a representation too. We don’t call people who slaughter orcs genocides, and we don’t call little Johnny a cop-killer. But we are aware that Johnny might be pretending to be a cop-killer. Kids are in fact fairly aware of this, and often don’t want to play the bad guys. All I’m saying is that we don’t seem to carry that awareness to the MMOs. Why not?
Imagine if Raph got his wish in the previous post referred to, and farmed NPCs were smart enough to be recognized as something more than just a fixed resource. I’m not even talking emotional complexity… it would probably be enough just for them not to respawn in the same damn place they’ve died at 300 times before that day in most cases. That would drive up local scarcity, thus increasing the incentives for paid farmers, especially those that can benefit from time zone/repopulation time differences such as those living in China in this case, and inevitably increase the aggro from the rest of the player community against that group.
Dark and Light has the mob spawning system you have mentioned. After certain number(?) of mobs have been killed in the same area, mobs ‘migrate’ to a different area to protect themselves from extinction and don’t spawn in the same point for a certain time.
But this mob behaviour will cause problems in quest-oriented games like wow. All mobs and maps have been designed in the map in certain places with certain distances from each other. I will be frustrated if I was told to kill 10 birds for a quest and had to look for them for a long time.
But Genocide can be punished by a system used in SWG : Negative faction. But it’s not enough to stop the farmers. So, just imagine an advanced negative faction system which increases agro range slightly with every kill up to a point they attack you from a distance you can’t even see them. If the regular agro range of Goblins are 10 yards for example, a ‘Goblin-Master’ who killed Goblins all his life could agro them from 200 yards. There could be a point a farmer can not walk in the wilds due to his agro-range. Actually, this could be a very fun ingame content for players who enjoy challenges like me.
I didn’t say that were were literally engaging in genocide in these games…
Heh, yeah, I got that. I was just trying to figure out what, exactly, we are saying. Keep in mind, when you originally brought up the topic of genocide, I said that the whole thing had crossed my mind on a number of occasions.
All I’m saying is that we don’t seem to carry that awareness to the MMOs. Why not?
I think, on some level, we’re still perceiving it as a collection paradigm. The interaction with these things is barely more meaningful or engaging than running around, collecting gold stars.
I suppose that one reason we have this disconnect is that none of the things that we fight really behave at all like creatures confronted by a band of genocidal maniacs. If I and my foozle friends had up a camp in the forest, and a bunch of thugs came by and started systematically slaughtering us, I don’t think I’d stand around in front of my tent, waiting for my turn to be cut down. It makes no sense from either a fiction standpoint or a simulation standpoint. It’s easy to dehumanize these creatures, because, well, they sure as hell don’t act like humans.
Respawning further muddies the water. Sure, I killed 20 foozles, but they’re all there again, right where they were an hour ago. Nothing ever changes. Respawning renders extinction impossible. It’s not possible to kill off the entire foozle race. If, indeed, we engage in genocide, we are doomed to failure. The boundless population of our quarry renders the effort eternally inchoate.
Can you imagine what it would be like if you went to attack a camp, and the larger foozles banded together to fight you, while the smaller foozles scurried off into the forest to hide? Do you think people would hunt down the small foozles?
Obviously, the answer to that isn’t simple. If the small foozles have a valuable drop, yes, people will hunt them down. Players are a pragmatic lot, and if you present them with a walking bag of loot, they’re going to grab it. I don’t think the problem is with the players, though, but rather, that we have presented the creatures of our world as nothing more than a bunch of animated piñatas.
Heh, looks like trackback works
Dark and Light has the mob spawning system you have mentioned. After certain number(?) of mobs have been killed in the same area, mobs ‘migrate’ to a different area to protect themselves from extinction and don’t spawn in the same point for a certain time
Ryzom has something approaching this as well, and originally Horizons was going to. I think it can work very well, even in systems with Quests that require certain things. Obviously Kill and Collects would work, as long as any hint provided in the text is tied to where the mobs are. CoH does this with their Missions, since sometimes mob groups show up in different areas of the map (though I have no idea why they move around). In a sense, it’s also like SWG’s Mission Terminals based on a momentary cardinal direction and distance.
Basically, as long as players can be told where to go in quests that require they know, mob migration can work. And I do think this is worth exploring for two main reasons:
1) Population balancing. If a server’s getting overloaded, then mobs can be forced to migrate, pull the quests, and therefore the player characters, with them.
2) Long Tail old content. If you’ve got zones or areas that are underutilized, mobs can migrate back that way with the same result.
3) Compel and reward exploration. There will be player groups who’s sole mission will be to push a specific mob group around until they’re either extinct or they figure out their pattern of migration. Reward them for this with hidden stuff around the game world.
Of course, the main challenge does become how the content is accessed, and how to prevent everyone on a service from doing the exact same thing at the same time.
Technically, that was Kramer, not a regular trackback. It means that your blog didn’t notify mine, and instead my blog (using the Kramer plug-in) went looking for links to here, and found that one.
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