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[bryant]

From one of Raph Koster's posts on GDC:

Patrick Dugan asking a panel of academics whether the cultural shifts brought on by massively multiplayer games may include damaging our conception of the nation-state as a key form of personal identity. Academics don’t quite know what to say.

Even I know what to say to that. "Yes." Rambly thoughts ahead.

Personal identity is increasingly fluid; the ability to put on an impenetrable mask ensures that. Hm. Rereading the quote, I wonder if it wouldn't be more appropriate to say "tribal identity," though. You could say that's a subsection of personal identity. I tend to reject that as necessity, though; it's one potential aspect of personal identity. And precision requires that we distinguish between the aspect and the whole, no?

Yes.

Anyhow: tribal identity. Are you a San Franciscan, or are you a member of Fires of Heaven? Both, maybe. Which is more important? It's another way of forming NGOs, of playing identity politics. Which are pretty important in MMORPGs. If WoW is the new golf, it's also the new sandlot baseball field, and the new singles bar, and the new late night campus coffee shop.

Question not yet resolved: does tribal identity solidify on a counterscale to personal identity? I'd think probably yes -- we haven't yet figured out how to have slippery faces within tribes and maintain community cohesion. (You can say community wherever I say tribal, by the by.)

One of the strong, under the radar drivers in community forming on these things is TeamSpeak/Ventrilo. Both these programs create a virtual space where you can voice-chat; in my experience, guilds keep the servers up all the time and they're used for far more than just tactical coordination. They're a new social channel. And voices are much more coherent and consistent than the faces we wear while we're playing.

Then again, voice filters exist and will be more useful as time goes by. So I'll leave predicting the future to people who get paid for it.

Comments

[michele-blue.livejournal.com]

One thought: having voice chat completely takes away the impenetrable mask (at least in characters/identities that people willingly link to the voice that's talking).

I utterly agree with you, but I think those who use voice filters and such are those folks already willing to share a bit of their "real" (and yes, I use the term advisedly) selves with others. People who want to stay behind those masks - for whatever purpose, be it escapism, insecurity, deception - will continue to do so behind whatever technology allows them to do so. Voice chat is more coherent - but it takes the mask away.

Then again, in the sandlot or the coffee shop, being masked is not that big a deal. At the singles bar? Another topic entirely (even though, yeah, that's how we met ;) ). Fascinating topic!

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

One thing that I find interesting is how resistant I am to MMORPG "tribes". I've played in probably 10 or 12 different onlin egames now, and I'm currently actively involved in 2 simultaniously, and aside from the group in CoH, which is a tiny group made up overwhelming of people I already know in RL, I've never joined a guild or whatever.

One of the draws for me in MMORPGs is the idea of being free of the politics and cliques and organizational/tribal imperatives of real life. I don't want that drama in my games. What, we hate those guys over in Granite Valley for some arbitrary reason? Bah. It's part of the reason why I don't like PVP either.