Disconnected (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning) by James Carrie

Author:James, Carrie [James, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2014-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

4

Participation

To Scam or Not to Scam: A Gamer’s Dilemma

For the past two weeks, you have been playing an online multiplayer game that has about 30,000 members and takes place in a 3-D world. Yesterday you joined a club within the game. Your fellow club members, none of whom you know offline, seem very nice and have already given you lots of game advice as well as some useful equipment for your character.

Buying, selling, and trading such equipment with other players is a fun and important part of the game, but there are few rules about trading, and exchanges don’t always end well for some players. You’ve noticed, for example, that many of your clubmates brag to one another about taking advantage of new players by selling them worthless green rocks, called pseudogems , for very high prices. After finding some pseudogems while doing a joint quest with two of your clubmates, you are invited by one of them to travel to a nearby town to try to sell the pseudogems to inexperienced players for a big profit. Would you go with your clubmates to the nearby town to sell the pseudogems?

Even if you’ve never played a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) such as EverQuest, RuneScape, or World of Warcraft, you can probably grasp the key features of this scenario and its dilemma: to scam or not to scam new players.

Even so, for the nongamers out there, let me call attention to certain qualities of MMOGs that are relevant here. First, as the term massive suggests, the scale of many of these games is considerable. Some games have been reported to have more than 10 million subscribers. 1 Second, these games are deeply social. Collaboration with other players and membership in groups or guilds is often a core element of the game. Third, these games constitute persistent worlds. The choices players make stick with their characters, or avatars, for as long as they participate in the game—sort of like real life. 2

These qualities exist as points of departure from other kinds of games: board games, card games, and traditional video games in which one’s opponent is the computer and one game is typically limited to one encounter. Indeed, these qualities may make such games more similar to online communities built around other purposes, such as social networking, fandom, and cocreation.

But how should participants conceive of these spaces: as merely games or as communities in which participants have moral and ethical responsibilities? These kinds of questions have been a frequent topic of discussion among both players and scholars of video games. Some suggest that video games, even those of the MMOG variety, are play spaces set apart from real life in which alternate codes of conduct apply. 3

This perspective finds support in Johan Huizinga’s classic play theory, which presents games as “magic circles” in which moral concerns may be suspended. 4 Along these lines, some scholars and gamers argue that video games provide safe spaces to experiment with being a “bad guy” without concern for real consequences and therefore with no moral regret.

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