Almost every Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game includes a chat window where players can communicate directly to each other while also receiving messages from players near them and players in one or more selected “channels”. A new player trying to understand most of the chatter on the channels would be completely lost. Game-related messages, whether selling/buying items or trying to find a group to adventure with, are almost always very brief, to the point, and filled with acronyms. For instance “I’m looking to sell a sword with +5 to dexterity for 20 gold pieces” could be written as merely “LTS sword +5 dex 20G”.
Such abbreviations are the norm for communication in MMORPGs. If players don’t know the abbreviations and how messages structured, they would have a very difficult time finding any assistance. I remember as I was learning to play World of Warcraft, I was trying to find a group to go through a dungeon called “Deadmines”. But no one seemed to be interested. Everyone was doing something called “VC”. Eventually someone explained that “VC” refers to “Van Cleef” the boss of the Deadmines, and that an abbreviation for Deadmines would be “DM” which was already used for a different dungeon. I found that fairly unintuitive but that was how people insisted on communicating. In order to be successful, players must gradually learn and use the slang and style of the in-game communication.
One reason for the existence of all the slang is the anonymity of the online space, especially when the players aren’t in the same physical (well, virtual) region. Writing full sentences to be polite becomes irrelevant when trying to communicate basic information to large numbers of people. In a way it reminds me of how stocks are traded. Players are never reproached for not abbreviating their messages, but it is certainly an oddity in the game. Wallace states that “The Leviathan would emerge with more difficulty were it not for human willingness to conform and our eagerness to preserve a productive online group environment.” Especially the latter reason seems to fit very well with how game communication has developed. Even on specified “role-playing” servers where the intent is for players to communicate as their fictional character, I would say that 99% of the communication is identical to that of the non-role-playing servers. A player speaking in character would be looked upon as an oddity and outside the Leviathan that is every other player. Games with such massive user bases have little need for the administrators that enforce social norms like in the MUD mentioned by Wallace. The quantity of communication that a new user encounters in a modern MMORPG far exceeds the communication in a text-based MUD and therefore the new player is quickly exposed to the norms and is drawn into the Leviathan.
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http://comm245yellow.blogspot.com/2007/10/6-leviathan-of-online-gaming.html
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2 comments:
Your insight that administrative Leviathans are somewhat unnecessary in media with large user bases intrigued me because I reached a similar conclusion in my post, which concerned a message board with tens of thousands of users and only a couple dozen moderators.
Although the mods were very efficient at what they did, they simply couldn't be as effective as the community as a whole; regular users were "mini-modding" (as we called it) enough that they almost always corrected wayward newbies before we got a chance to.
I wonder if there's a definitive correlation between the size of a community and the strength and/or prevalence of the Leviathan...
In the mmog's I have played, players adhere to the leviathan to only a certain extent. In this case I'm referring to tendency for normal user to act as a moderator in large online communities. In World of Warcraft there is an option to report a player who's cursed, used racial slurs, and other sorts of bad chat behavior. A lot of the time I see people who take their role as self appointed gm way too seriously. The reporting feature is frequently abused. The chat channels in game always tend to be full of bad language and everyone knows its just kidding around. A player who who tries to enforce the rules too much ends up being just as bad for other players as one who doesn't follow the rules at all. I think in mmog's the leviathan causes players to take a middle ground when it comes to how strict the rules are enforced.
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