The two articles I chose were about online gaming, specifically MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games). This is a topic that has only somewhat touched my life. I love RPGs; they’re my favorite type of videogame. I love solving puzzles and becoming involved in a storyline, and ever since Pokémon, I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for devoting hours upon hours to tedious leveling up.
However, MMORPGs are a beast I have yet to conquer. World of Warcraft was fun and everything, but not worth paying for a monthly subscription, and the social aspect of it doesn’t appeal to me either. Playing a multiplayer game with people who are right next to me is fun, but trying to play with someone on the other side of the internet quickly frustrates me. Somehow, I always manage to find the jerks who walk away from the game when they start losing, and even when I can manage to find someone reliable, then there’s waiting for them to come online, and trying to coordinate being on together, and then after that, you can’t walk away without disappointing the other person, even though realistically you’re both exhausted because it’s 3am and you’ve been playing for 6 hours straight.
This doesn’t appeal to me, but millions of others have made it a way of life.
The first article, Game Censorship, had three key sections: Virtual Economies—Money & Property, Virtual Gambling, and Deviant behavior. The first section addressed the issue of property in online games. Most online games have their own money system by which items earned in the game can be bought or sold, but some players will sell their rare or powerful items (usually on eBay) for real world currency. This matter has sparked a controversy, as well as laws about the ownership of virtual property. The article questions how and if laws should be applied to owning virtual items or even virtual land (such as in the game Second Life). Obviously, these matters are rather clear-cut in the real world, but courts have been hesitant to set new precedents in the case of online incidents, and there are no laws as of yet that clarify the situation.
The second section notes that actions may soon be taken against gambling in MMORPGs, even though it is done in the currency of the virtual world, not actual, real life money.
Finally, the third section dealt with deviant behavior specifically in MMORPGs and how laws should transcend real life into the virtual world. I. e.: does raping a virtual character “count,” should someone acting as a virtual character have freedom of speech as that character, and can the concept of libel be applied to someone’s avatar (game persona)? The conclusions the article came to were that there aren’t any real answers to these questions yet, but the approaching legal battles that will determine those answers are probably unavoidable. MMORPGs are too big a part of too many peoples’ lives to leave all of this in legal ambiguity.
I thought this article was really interesting. It posed a lot of really thought-provoking questions, though it didn’t really offer many solutions. I especially thought the topic of ownership in a virtual world would be fascinating to explore. Obviously, the things you, as a character, “own” in an MMORPG aren’t real, but they do represent an amount of effort, and certainly a time commitment. Losing an item, especially a rare or valuable one would be very upsetting, but it still wasn’t an actual piece of property, it was just some code in a game. I can imagine being very upset, maybe for a little while, but it certainly doesn’t seem life-shattering to me. On the other hand, I’m not a devoted gamer with countless hours invested in a character in an online world.
As tempting as it may seem to start making laws about property on the internet, and as cool as it would be to have an office in government devoted specifically to managing online gaming laws, I don’t really think it’s the government’s place. These games were created by companies who should have complete control over what goes on in their servers. If anyone should be handling these issues, it’s those companies, not the government. This eliminates the problem of different laws applying to gamers from different countries: if the companies make the rules, they apply to all of its players, no matter where they’re from.
The second article was more concerned about addiction to online gaming. It compared MMORPGs to gambling or even alcohol addiction. The argument presented in this article outlined a serious problem. Although many of the millions of MMORPG players have perfectly normal and healthy gaming habits, there are some who do have a serious problem.
[In] an online survey of more than 40,000 MMO players, the average player is 26 years old; most hold full-time jobs. Seventy percent have played for 10 hours straight at some point, and about 45 percent would describe themselves as "addicted."
This kind of gaming behavior led to the creation of Online Gamers Anonymous, which uses a process similar to Alcoholics Anonymous to help players overcome an addiction to online gaming.
Okay, given, there are some troubled people out there who use MMORPGs to escape their problems. This idea was represented in the article (compared to watching television or reading a book, neither of which we would label “addictions,” even if done frequently or obsessively). Still, the concept of online gaming as being harmful and addictive was pushed much more heavily, and some of the content even suggested that this obsessive playing was a direct result of something intentional made by the creators of the game. This made me angry. Given, the layout of the article was aggravating to begin with (crammed into a tiny, constrained column, most of which was taken up by obnoxious adds), but don’t gamers have any personal responsibility?
Yes, there may be pressure to continue playing even if you’re tired or hungry, but if you’re too stupid to get up and feed yourself because you’re in the middle of a game, how is that the game’s fault? Do we really want these people in the gene pool? If leaving the game is such a big issue, grab something to snack on before you sit down. Is that so hard? And these help groups—not to knock them, because it’s a great idea. I’m sure there are a lot of people who need help dealing with gaming addiction, but I don’t think the game itself is the problem. Obviously, if you’d rather be playing Everquest than eating or sleeping, and you spend more time in a virtual world as some made up character than you do in real life, you’ve got personal issues that need resolving. If not videogames, these people would find some other way to escape reality, and that is real problem, not that the game is too much fun or whatever other nonsense anyone wants to use to explain a gaming addiction.
Even though these two articles dealt with very different social impacts of MMORPGs, they both made the same overall point. Online gaming is a huge part of our culture today, and its growing. We can’t just ignore it. Whether that means that countries need to start making laws to control in-game conduct, or that we need to start forming support groups to remind people that there’s a real world beyond their computer screens, this is a factor that touches our lives.