Icarus Studios News

(Continued from Part 2)

Worth examining, whether you personally enjoy them or not, are PVP games in general, and the subject of guilds. They are two social systems on different ends of a spectrum that focus on the players, not on what they see. The point in examining the features that utilize this tactic, whether intended by the original design or not, is that if your environment is intended to support a group, or system of groups, the players ARE your game. The system is not your game, nor the setting created by the system (the main subject in a single player game). If you don't focus on your players or their community as being one with the identity of your game, you render them virtually synonymous to NPCs—at least, insofar as their relation to other players will ever be viewed. In an unexpected turn of events, this is the same quality that makes griefing seem reasonable. Even normally polite people can turn into jerks when conditioned to treat every character they see as an NPC. This conditioning doesn't have to be blatant to be effectual.

The inability of most mechanical designs to provide the freedom necessary to experience a living group or choice as something separate from the game itself ultimately creates the disassociation problem which we frequently blame on violent story lines or bully players. If a user never sees another user being presented as anything other than part of a system for which they pay to amuse themselves, then all other customers (i.e., real human beings) become nothing more than NPCs. Once treated as a nonliving entity, there are only two things you can do: quit the game or act out human drama in protest, a solution which, while possibly cathartic, only creates problems for others. I have never been in a guild free of the cyclical troubles and dramas famous to long term MMO player groups. These always seem to start with frustration at a mechanical game problem, but, in turn, promote the growth of social problems. It's a testament to how strangers can get along that to survive these troubles, the social bond does double duty and pulls the game mechanics out of the pinch every time, even though the social quality is what gets injured the most.

-Miri Funderburk, Virtual Worlds Team