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OMG it’s an MMOG! |
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Social and Economic Evolution of Online Gaming |
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Social Impact of Online Gaming |
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Online gaming communities are subject to many of the same social and psychological intricacies, pressures and relationships of real life communities. Dependencies that develop as a result have been characterized as obsessions or even addictions, on par with gambling addictions, and a July 2004 study by the Daedalus Project revealed that as many as 40% of online MMOG gamers consider themselves to be addicted to playing. No universally-accepted definition exists, however, for “online gaming addiction,” and studies to characterize the nature of dependencies find difficulty in using the term “addicting” in studies requesting behavioral self-characterization, since “addicting” in online slang simply means “fun.” Additionally, no studies were available for comparison to determine how other recreational genres, for example golf, might compare in a survey on the level of self-characterized addiction observed. Attention-grabbing headlines, especially in China and South Korea, feature the all-too-common death of an online gamer playing to the exclusion of his physical health. Chinese regulators recently began a crackdown on underage gaming, forcing MMOG hosts in China to cap online participation at three hours a day for those under the age of 18. Online forums for ex-gamers, such as Game Widows from Everquest and WoW Detox, exist to allow those who have quit an online gaming community to vent frustrations and share experiences with others. Online communities are centered around the young male demographic, who make up not only the largest consumer segment but are also the most volatile in regard to preferences and patterns of activity, according to the Daedalus Project. According to Richard Bartle, game researcher and co-author of the first multi-user dungeon (MUD), the attraction inherent to online gaming can be explained by the following characteristics of the MMOG:
1) Achievement: (Acting on the World) in-game goals such as those in WoW — leveling, collecting loot, completing a particular quest or killing a particular mob, mastering the game.
Results of the Daedalus Project confirm some of the most common reasons behind extensive gaming, although with slightly different emphasis:
Online gamers tend to be concentrated in the coveted and unpredictable 18-34 demographic, with the average gamer playing 20 hours per week. The great success of MMOGs has led to the interest in attempting to design an educational MMOG, which could teach young children mathematics. The game strongly backfired, because the children: “...transformed the game to accommodate social interaction. With these transformed ways of playing the game, they managed to get to the top of the high score list while avoiding the educational parts of the game.” Creation of educational games must compete against the accommodation of social interaction, and until now has so far proven impossible. The same issued also crop up in regular MMOGs, where players attempt to bend the “rules of the world” in order to accommodate their own social goals. Online communities are also notorious for their piecemeal approach to culture and linguistic identity formation. Whether limited or enabled by the technology, gamers have proven adept at turning any online community into as much of a user-dominated domain as possible. The simplest example is the extensive use of user-defined jargon: “At first blush, the use of language within such digitial worlds appears rather impoverished...riddled with abbreviations, typograpohical errors, truncations, syntactic erosions, specialized vocabulary…”
Massively Multiplayer Online Videogaming As Participation In A Discourse, Steinkuehler 2006
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The Curious Coevolution Between Worlds Both Fantastic and Mundane |
