I play a popular online game called World of Warcraft, or WOW for short. It’s just one of many MMOG’s, or Mass Multiplayer Online Games I’ve played over the years, and if anything will bring out the true character of a person, it’s these games.
There was a saying in my youth that I don’t hear anymore, no doubt because of the changing times, that the best way to learn about peoples character was to take them on a camping trip. Well, camping gear was pretty simple and the countryside was pretty rugged and remote, not like now, so you had to tough it out when you went camping. There were lots of minor and major nuisances and dangers and you often had to overlook a lot to have fun on the trip.
Now we have the MMOGs and people running around in virtual landscapes that are like minefields, with lots of built in traps and snags. The games are deliberately set up to be frustrating and irritating, what the designers refer to as “challenging”, and people can get on pretty short fuses.
The thing that impresses me the most is how pitifully few players are willing to help anyone else, but want everyone else to help them. All of these games feature “guilds”, which are basically player clubs where the game programming allows all its members to communicate with each other at once. It’s called Guild Chat. If you join a guild and just watch the guild chat scroll down in its little box, the organization of the guild, or lack of it, soon becomes apparent.
I just quit the guild I was in, tonight, after waiting about a month for someone in it to demonstrate that the guild had something to offer new members. But it didn’t. It just turned out to be another elitist clique.
It reminds me so much of our national politics. You’re either In, or you don’t exist. Self-centered aloofness has become the norm not just in politics and games, but in the general attitude of Americans. You can’t make conversation with a store clerk like we used to, they want you to go away. People simply do not talk to strangers anymore and they don’t have much to say to their friends, either.
Making friends has become a lot harder to do. People don’t want to know you or hear what you have to say, and I think it’s mostly because we’re overloaded with people. You can go out into the country where people are few, and still strike up a conversation in the local grocery or hardware store. Even there, though, friendliness is on the wane.
We’re becoming a Massively Multiplayer world. It’s funny too. The virtual realities of those games is even worse than real life. You won’t find one happy, joyous virtual reality in a carload. There’s a clue there.
BS, do you had watch the movie GAMER?
That’s the perfect portrait of stupidness, empty souls on MMOG Madness.
A stong, punk criticism on fake reality games as “Second Life” — but in the movie plot, the users really LIVES on real another REAL people — in flesh-and-blood. The gamers minds control the body of their ‘SLAVES’ (in fact, customers paid to allow being controlled as slaves some hours per day) in the interactive game “SOCIETY”.
In an crucial scene, we watch a man ‘living’ in a woman’s body — and having sex with a man ‘lived’ by a women.
A critical action movie, starring Gerard Butler (King Leonidas in “300″) and Michael C. Hall (“Dexter” TV series).