Game On. And on. And on.
Mark Greene looks at the burgeoning growth of online gaming.
People who analyse games are a bit like people who analyse jokes – they come across as fun-busting, over-thinkers who are too busy ‘cerebrating’ thoughts to celebrate life. The trouble is that analysing a joke is, as someone once put it, like dissecting a frog: the frog dies and no one laughs. Nevertheless, games people play, like jokes people tell, are signs of the times and shapers of the future.
And the games we are playing have changed a great deal over the last ten years. One of the fastest growing sectors has been online internet games and of these the most impressive are the MMORPGs – the massively multiplayer online role play games. In MMORPGs like EverQuest, Ultima, Runescape, or the humongous World of Warcraft you log into another world and join sometimes literally hundreds thousands of others, working, training, strategising and, often, very often, fighting in an epic cause for the future of the cyberverse. Last time I logged on to Runescape there were over 200,000 people playing, whilst World of Warcraft announced in January that it now had over 8 million subscribers worldwide – 2 million in the US, 1.5 million in Europe and 3.5 million in China.
While most of these games are essentially similar to ‘traditional’ PC/Playstation fare, what distinguishes them is their sheer scope and the fact that you can play with or against so many people. Furthermore, whilst you do get to the end of a Playstation game – Lara does clamber, somersault, shoot her way up all the levels to raid that tomb, Civilization gets built, or the football season ends with success in the Champions League, the Premiership, the FA Cup and with all your players enhanced to a startling 99 out of a hundred – in Runescape or World of Warcraft, the game goes on. New unexplored areas of the world are opened, new weapons crafted, new races emerge.
Of course, if the game goes on, and on, and on, the rest of life may well stop. Indeed, much of the recent hurrumphing about these games has been round a number of sobering real-life incidents. In one case, a Korean couple went off to their local internet café and were so absorbed that they left their four month old daughter for hours. When they returned, she was dead. Similarly another gamer became so absorbed in Starcraft that after fifty straight hours he literally played himself to death. Whilst such extreme behaviour may be rare, so many of China’s 20 million online gamers are addicted that the government has created technologies that reduce their in-game characters’ abilities after 3 hours. If you spend five hours on-line then they’ll come and ‘break your character’s legs’ – in a cyberian sort of way, of course.
In real life, addictions often lead to crime and virtual games are no exception. Qiu Chengwei, a Legend gamer, was the proud owner of a virtual sabre that was worth £473. He leant it to 26 year old Zhu Caoyuan who sold it. Qiu was so incensed he went to the thief’s home and stabbed him to death. China currently has no laws to deal with in-game theft but South Korea does. And it makes sense. After all, if you have to spend time and money to make or acquire online artefacts, then theft is as real as driving off with my silver Corgi 1964 Aston Martin DB5.
This highlights one of the growing phenomena of the online world – its economy. In a number of games people are making things that you can buy in-game for real money. Beyond that, wealthy gamers are hiring people to put in the hard hours of ‘grinding’ – acquiring skills, weapons for their avatar that they would otherwise have to do themselves. We’ve become used to outsourcing ‘real’ work, now we’re outsourcing the ‘worky’ bits of our virtual leisure.
War is the dominant theme of the majority of MMORPGs but the web does offer some less martial alternatives. The most lauded is Second Life which Wired magazine called “the coolest place on the web”, an indicator of the interest that the site has created and its West Coast vibe.
In Second Life you can choose your identity, body shape, name, buy own clothes, buy your own home and create activities that others can share. You can go to church made by other avatars, go to discos and be paid to sit there to make it look busy so that others will teleport in, listen to music that people in Second Life have composed, and so on. It is in some respects similar to The Sims, except of course that you can interact with literally tens of thousands of people.
It’s free to enter but you need to pay real money (a dollar buys you 309 Lindenbucks) for real estate – essential if you want a place to share things with others. Lindenbucks change hands for all kinds of other things: furniture, buildings but predominantly for clothes in a dress-up fest that Barbie and Ken would have died for. Looking good is very important and pretty much everyone does. And if you’re struggling to get it just right or want something exotic, you can have your avatar custom-made by a professional designer. A knee-high lavender warthog with a tiara and wings and a big fat spleef with smoke effects set one resident back a modest US $8. Indeed, there is a roaring trade in all of the above with some entrepreneurs, particularly estate agents, making a very substantial living in Second Life.
Second Life isn’t a pornographic site but it has its zone and thanks to people like Stroker Serpentine of Strokerz Toys there is, according to the PR, a lot to explore. And buy. Still, if this all seems somewhat fringey it’s worth noting that corporations like, for example, Wells Fargo, are opening offices in the virtual world. That said, the main thing in Second Life seems to be chat.
Second Life provides the anonymity and fluid identity of a chatroom and all the fun of carnival or of some extended fancy-dress party. I logged on as Lovejoy Greene. Greene obviously has a really coooooooool vibe to it and ‘Lovejoy’ was intended as a reference to the fruit of the Spirit – for those with eyes to see, and little knowledge of British sitcoms. Chatting is easy. The first person I talked to in the orientation zone was Christel Finney. With a name like that I couldn’t resist asking her (if she was indeed a she) whether it was chosen to reflect clarity or faith. ‘Faith’, the reply came. Somehow it felt better to know that there was a Christian – probably – in there.
And of course there are probably lots in there. Robin is one of them, a musician Greenbelt contributor who’s developed a meditation space called Molten Meditation. He started playing Second Life as a way to expose people to his meditation music and maybe sell a few CDs. He’s a regular now, substituting the time he used to spend on other games for Second Life. He has his own home, neighbours he’s talked to and quite a lot of experience of life in the zone. Much of it, as he points out, is rather uncreatively similar to life in the real world... fashionably dressed Second-Lifers disdain the less well attired, whilst long-term lifers bemoan the number of new people moving into the neighbourhood. No one has time to stand and chat anymore. Tourists!
One of the big differences between Second Life and other role play games is that there is no grand quest to be part of, no army to join. It is, as one friend described it, like golf – you’re talking as you’re doing something. Whereas World of Warcraft is like rugby, you’re totally immersed in the game. As such, Second Lifers probably are not experiencing what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called ‘flow’ – that state in which actions and thoughts are so in sync that you cease to be really aware of yourself, or indeed of the passing of time. Musicians, once they know the notes, often experience it and so do many gamers. You might get into ‘the flow’ in a game of Tombraider or indeed in the midst of a battle in World of Warcraft but it seems less likely in Second Life. Different games do provide very different satisfactions.
All this burgeoning of virtual activity raises many of the same questions raised by the advent of television and other entertainment technologies. However, MMORPGs overcome many, if not all, of the objections levelled at TV. They are interactive not passive and can demand a whole host of skills – not merely speed to the trigger but planning skills, lateral thinking skills and resource management skills that can be applied to a host of real life situations. It’s also clear that there is high potential for genuine creativity in games like Second Life, even if relatively few participants use the game to develop and express that creativity to any great extent.
Furthermore, these games are much more relational than the way most, if not all, people watch TV. In most massively multiplay online role-play games, you need others to succeed, so you have to talk to them, to negotiate with them, and you do, at a certain level get to know them. In addition, in such games, when you manage to fly your avatar onto the teleport station you have actually done something. Believe me, having landed in the sea rather more times than I will admit to in print I felt pretty pleased with myself. However, when you’ve watched a TV programme, your only achievement is to get to the end of the programme. Of course, in some cases, that may indeed be an achievement. I’ve never managed it with Coronation Street or East Enders.
Clearly, however, there are important questions here about we are using our leisure time and whether our leisure activities serve to help us flourish as whole human beings or rather serve to hollow us out. At one level, any leisure activity pursued to excess, including reading Shakespeare, can become addictive and destructive of the personality. Nevertheless, this does not make all leisure activities equal, nor can we dismiss the content and values of games as irrelevant, however well they develop our strategic thinking skills. Similarly, we can’t ignore the reality that we live in an increasingly fragmented, lonely culture and that whilst online gaming provides a certain level of relationship, it by no means meets the deeper human needs for the directness of contact that is the usual requirement of genuine intimacy, of knowing and being known.
Last night, I asked Tomi, my 12 year old, whether he’d prefer to be playing Runescape with a friend or out in the woods playing the game where he and a mate try to sneak up, with the stealth of an Apache, on a watchful target parent without being detected. The woods won. Online games have their pleasures but I have a hunch that, given the choice, many people would rather be doing something else – if only if it were a little easier. And we could remember what it was. If we ever knew.
This article was first published in Christianity magazine and is reproduced by kind permission.
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