 When we are faced with an enemy, a person or group of people wishing to do us harm, we can view this as an opportunity to develop patience and tolerance. We need these qualities; they are useful to us. And the only occasion we have to develop them is when we are challenged by an enemy. So, from this point of view, our enemy is our guru, or teacher. Irrespective of their motivation, from our point of view, enemies are very beneficial, a blessing.-- His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, An Open Heart (2001)
Where is it written that the best that can be said of massively multiplayer online games, psychologically, socially, morally, is that old saw catharsis; That, at best, MMOs offer pre-emptive release in play of emotions and ill-considered impulses fraught with danger to self and others in so-called "real life"? Better kill here, than kill there.
Or more pragmatically, more cynically, that, akin to imperial-militarist sport, such as American football, the "team work" and interpersonal skills required in MMOs to organize, discipline and deploy players in virtual combat operations, develop and demonstrate generic, transferable "leadership" qualities equally applicable to serving the Corporate Order. One hears rumors of a generation unabashedly putting WoW Guilds and 40-man instance runs on their resumes. Easily overlooked in all this is the fact that MMOs -- and I mean especially, even exclusively violent MMOs -- offer an entirely different realm of play, of testing, probing, imaginative pre- and parallel engagement with the psychological, social, moral dilemmas and required discipline of "real life." This other realm of playful preparation and contemplation of the "real world" is easily overlooked because its prerequisite is a fundamentally moral choice, one all too easily elided in thrall to what everyday has long counted the way of the world. To open most any violent MMO to this realm of psychological, social, moral contemplation, training, discipline, education, all it takes is a simple refusal to kill: War Is Over If You Want It
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 The accord announced Sunday, June 26, 2011, between CCP and the players' representatives of the Council of Stellar Management, is doubtless a positive step toward CCP's better understanding of the stakes the CSM-represented player base holds in EVE as an MMO game.
How could it be other than reassuring to read, "It is CCP‘s plan that the Noble Exchange (NeX store) will be used for the sale of vanity items only. There are no plans, and have been no plans, as per previous communication and CSM meetings, to introduce the sale of game breaking items or enhancements in the NeX store"?
Though accepting the overall gesture, many have strained to find some ominous portent in these words. Most noted has been that there is no explicit promise never to develop such plans; that there is no promise never to introduce a micro-transaction revenue model to sell so-called "gold ships" or "gold ammo" or other form of in-game advantage. Only that such plans do not now exist, despite the possibility raised in the leaked "Gordon Gecko" Fearless publication.
The same suspicions find leeway even in CCP's affirmation that "The investment of money in EVE should not give you an unfair advantage over the investment of time." How much marginal advantage might some future micro-transaction items fairly confer short of the "unfair advantage" of outstripping "investment in time"?
The problem with paranoid inquiry, however, is that no assurance in words can ever suffice. So we players of EVE must largely content ourselves with waiting to see what the words of this accord come to mean over the months and years ahead.
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 Here I am, lost in space yet again. I hate the game EVE, sometimes quite passionately, yet here I am for the third try. It seems that some games are designed purely for game aficionados, those "in the know". To me at least, EVE has always seemed to be that type of game, particularly the earlier versions. A prime example of this was my very first foray into the game, as usual, at the behest of a friend who was all hot and bothered about this "new" game. He wanted me to join him in the game and was impatiently waiting for my arrival as my antiquated computer attempted to grind its way through loading the game.
Well, basically if you don't have the latest in a high tech graphics card you aren't particularly welcome in online games. This sentiment isn't particularly broadcast, but they have to dumb down the game for you. If you are going to be playing an on-line game, it is assumed you have a graphics card worthy of the endeavor. Basically, if you have to ask, you don't have one. So, impatient friend waiting in the wings, after much cursing and swearing and miscommunication, EVE finally loads. It has taken hours.
Now, games always load full screen. I tend to think that this is just an expression of their underlying egotistical belief that they are all that matters in any world, but I am told the graphics card just runs better full screen without other windows with which to contend. I still think it is over-weening egotism, but I'll leave that for future rants.
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The White Rose Conventicle, as an avowedly pacifist virtual organization, represents a constellation of ideas, ideals and intuitions I've been kicking about for quite a few years by now, ever since shifting the preponderance of my game time from the first-person shooters I'd played since DOOM (1993) to MMORPGs, starting with World of Warcraft, which I joined on Dethecus in 1995.
I want to be clear. It is not symbolic violence, per se, that disturbs me. For pure mindless joy and giddy terror -- and I can get into it -- no weapon has yet topped the pump-action single-barrel shotgun of the original Doom for leaping, blind, around corners and charging dangerous doorways, solo-berzerking or co-op with textbook Marine squad tactics. Neither is it, continuing in the ID Software vein, a simple differentiation between bot and human enemies that stirs my pacifist disposition: I still find the space for play opened by the smaller "courts" of Quake III - Team Arena as elegant in their way as the finest jostling mid-air ballet of professional basketball.
All games, all team sports are symbolic warfare. We understand that. We accept that. The overriding theme of "Fair Play" and "Equal Chances" weave their redemptive spell, whether it be Team Fortress II or Warsong Gulch. It is "game." It is "sport." Not "reality," not even "virtual reality." And within the fictive buffer of "game" or "sport," symbolic violence goes down easily, whether the "tag" be represented as a touch, a flag, a tackle or a virtual death.
No, what disturbs me is not symbolic violence, in itself, but the surrounding atmospherics, the unquestioned rhetoric of hate and anger which, no mere symbol of something other and outside, but itself comprised of language and emotion, in fact performs itself, asks by design, by setting, scene, story, by task to be performed in-game -- the very same range of language and emotion that speaks murderous even genocidal rage in the larger, real world outside. What disturbs me is the clear appeal to far too many MMORPG players of the vituperative cult of one-up-manship that, stoking a strain of Hobbesian vain glory, finds elevation for self in the degradation of others, expressing itself at its furthest, most offensive and at once so casual unexamined extreme in the discourse of chattel slavery: he was owned.
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