CRASH

"Communities in Cyberspace", by Peter Kollock and Marc A. Smith.
"Media Technology and Society", Winston, ch 18, Conclusion.

Massively multiplayer online game designers have a fairly straightforward design challenge: how to hook their audience and get them invested in the game. Story is important, and so are the game-play devices that allow a player to advance, develop a character, acquire virtual objects, or accomplish objectives. Conventional wisdom now, though, is that most people are most likely to invest themselves in a persistent massively multiplayer online game if there is suitable opportunity for social interaction. It is a prime directive of game designers to provide useful mechanisms to allow people to communicate, collaborate, compete and interact on as many levels as possible.

The internet, combined with increasing broadband penetration and alternative high speed access channels, has made a wealth of communication opportunities possible. Massively multiplayer games are but one of many modes the consumer can use to socialize, all built on the same infrastructure. As Kollock and Smith point out in this week’s article, "Communities in Cyberspace," this is a double edged sword. The ease of communication does entertain, does inform, and is in most visible ways very gratifying, but there are also social implications. Anonymity is threatened. The network provides ways to track and manipulate people’s uses and communications. To quote the article, "(Critics) do not rule out the idea that computers and networks increase the power of individuals, (but) they believe that networks will disproportionately increase the strength of existing concentrations of power." The exceedingly creepy "Total Information Awareness" proposal Darpa was throwing around after 9/11 is an example so extreme and preposterous as to be discounted by most people I know, but it isn't technically impossible, or won't be soon. And the Patriot Act is a reality that points in that direction.

Online games, however, are for the time being obsessively proprietary, and online security is increasingly a top priority. It's simple business sense -- if the game is hackable, manipulable, or even has the appearance of being untrustworthy, online players will instantly recede. There's the issue of protecting whatever personal or financial information the game servers need to store in order to authenticate the player, but more importantly games become very much less fun when there is the perception of an uneven playing field. The unintended side effect of this technology, this necessity to create very sophisticated security, is that online game environments may conceivably become a safe environment to communicate with relative anonymity. This would reinforce the trend towards the virtual worlds I've referred to before, those depicted in the novel Snow Crash. It all depends how antagonistic private enterprise is towards government oversight and intrusion.

Another reinforcing property games possess is the ability to offer personality or individuality to the user, especially compared to text based online communication. Kollock and Smith discuss, on p. 9, the way online communication removes most indicators of individuality. It is the reason email is so often misunderstood, and likely the impetus, or supervening necessity, behind the innovation of emoticons. On the other hand, online games provide new social abstractions that may allow people to become much more intense in their friendships, or much more violent in confrontation, than they ever would in a non-virtual setting. The layer of removal from direct human contact may be disproportionate, or have a distorting effect, to online relationships that simpler text based communication would not encourage.

Most likely, however, the vast majority of people will continue obliviously using email, text chat, usenet, and instant messenger with a false sense of privacy, and only the most sophisticated digerati will embrace massively multiplayer online game environments. It remains to be seen whether this is harmless for the mainstream -- it is possible that the sheer volume of communication will make it unlikely for these practices to represent much of a threat to civil liberties. If Roger’s diffusion of innovation theory describes an inevitable forward progression, with the online games industry finding itself now approximately in the early majority phase (gross revenues did just surpass Hollywood, so somebody is clearly playing games), then eventually online game developers will have to acknowledge their role, or opportunity at least, to provide and arbitrate a secure communication environment.

The possible irony, though is that the internet, originally created as a decentralized information transfer technology to safeguard government communications in the event of a nuclear attack, as Winston points out in his discussion of the supervening necessity behind its invention, may become a critical tool of communication for terrorist groups bent on organizing just such an attack.