When thinking of online gaming, what comes to my mind is the straight up competitiveness involved. But that’s what drives gamers, right? Conquering the opposing team and achieving victory, building up stats to be the best in the game. I agree the majority of players take many of these online games very seriously. However this isn’t the case for everyone who plays. There are a number of people who are just annoying, pestering attention seekers who are looking to ruin a good game or a serious moment. These kinds of people are what the gaming community calls Trolls.
Now I will admit, there has been PLENTY of times in Battlefield 3 where I have taken a jeep, drove at my own team mates, and jumped out at the last second so they just die just for kicks. And I may have possibly racked up (with a friend) a total of 50-60 betrayals in one game of Halo Reach’s Infection mode. Oh, and that time in Gary’s Mod where my group of friends were working on some fort base and I spawned near invulnerable aliens all around them to kill them at spawn. Okay, you got me…I’m a troll and I admit the title proudly!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUB1KRedXAQ
Now don’t get me wrong, I can get so into games where things will break if I loose or things don’t go my way. (Ask my 2 smashed controllers and headset…R.I.P.) And I most certainly have been on the receiving end of people toying around and being an annoyance in the pregame lobbies. I’m not annoying every time I play games. It’s only at certain times where I get in this mood where everything needs to be messed with, or someone needs a good teasing here and there.
With that all being said, I really can’t find a time where I’ve had a bad social experience in a game. A couple of family feuds over rules, or cheating here and there, but nothing where it ruined the fun of it. And this one time my friends and I have teamed up on and verbally destroyed some COD trash talkers who were picking on a kid for some reason. I felt bad for the kid and thought that they took some of their insults a little too far, so needless to say, we held nothing back.
As for changing mechanics in games to limit…I believe that no matter what online game you play, there is going to be some people that aren’t going to take it seriously. Yes the guys at Geek Nights and Extra Credits make GREAT arguments and hey, they may be 100% correct about fixing the situation. With games involving face to face interactions, compared to over online interactions, you are going to most likely have different outcomes no matter what you do to the mechanics. My opinion is that, with online gaming, you cant control and restrict every “Troll” in every lobby and game that goes on.
So as for myself changing the mechanics of the games where I am the instigator, or person trolling. I wouldn’t. Maybe a heavier monitor over games with people that include racism or sexual harassment in their time online. This is a problem that a lot of gamers don’t consider to take as serious as they need to.
You make an interesting argument. I asked you to come up with a plan for how to reduce bad social interactions by tinkering with a game’s mechanics. Instead, if I’m reading you right, you’re suggesting that it’s generally better to leave mechanics alone, even if people sometimes abuse them, because it’s genuinely fun, sometimes, to mess around with them, improvise, and to see what you can get away with when you deliberately try to screw with players by riffing on the game’s mechanics. That’s interesting argument–something I hadn’t considered. You’re pointing out an interesting trade off. Yeah, maybe we can get more “polite” social interactions by limiting what players can do to each other in-game, but is it worth it? Maybe it’s better to give players more freedom, even if they abuse it, on the grounds that they’ll do really cool, funny things when they have that freedom.
I suspect that I have thinner skin than you–that being grieffed and trolled upsets me more than you. Still, I had to laugh at the link you shared–the betrayal spree in Halo. And the prank you played in Gary’s Mod…. Brilliant.
And it’s not just that the trolling you’re describing is funny. I’m seeing a connection between it and some of the stuff we discussed yesterday–the idea of emergent complexity in games. One of the other videos I saw on youtube, when I watched the betrayal spree, involved finding new ways to harass AFKers in an MMO. In order to grief the AFKers, the players need to dream up some pretty clever ways to subvert and tweak the game’s mechanics. Arguably, they wouldn’t have had this opportunity to explore them if, instead, the game placed limitations on how players can interact with each other in-game.
Anyway, very thoughtful post. It’s given me a lot to think about.