The Alphaville Herald

TSO: High School Redux?

by Alphaville Herald on 08/11/03 at 1:04 pm

Most MMORPGs have some way of marking achievement (moving up through a guild or acquiring weath, for example), and TSO is no exception; the game is designed so that one can achieve both by acquiring virtual goods and currency and by attaining social status (which is indicated by posted rankings). The problem is that the utter simplicity of hacking these vectors has allowed the official game rankings to become meaningless. If you are rich then it means you are either running maze bots 24/7 or you are buying simoleans from someone who is. If you are in the top 100 sims, it probably means that you have created a number of sims and given yourself a friend link or paid someone to give you a friend link, or exchanged friend links and then immediately broken your outgoing link. The achievement markers built into the game has completely broken down.

On the other hand, an unofficial game has emerged in TSO (or at least in Alphaville) in which social status is coveted within certain subgroups, and I only just recognized what that game is: it is high school redux!

Back in the 70s, the social structure of high school was something like the following (for all I know this is still more or less true). You have your jocks, your freaks, and your geeks. You all know how this works. Jocks don’t have to be jocks, but at least connected to them and they have to have a certain sheen of general social legitimacy. Freaks are on the margins ?darksiders by virtue of doing just a few too many drugs or getting a little too much into Wicca or whatever. The geeks grew up to be Bill Gates. The longer I live in alpha the more apparent it is too me that this social organization is being recapitulated, not by design, but by some odd self-organizing principles. And the weird thing is that people are falling into the same slots they fell into in high school, even if that was 30 years ago.

Who are the jocks in alpha? Well, to a first approximation let’s say that they include the members of the Sims Shadow Government (SSG), the sims that live in the successful skilling places, the DJs from Fueled and other radio stations and all sims that are one degree of separation from them on the friendship web. The freaks are many, but no doubt in alpha one thinks first of the B&D crowd living in the Rose Thorn Gardens neighborhood. Geeks are harder to locate, and probably for a reason: they are all playing EQ or SWG of some other geek-worth MMORPG. Still there are a few, and I guess anyone who writes for the Alphaville Herald has to count as having at least one foot in this camp.

Initially I didn’t notice this social structure at all until a friend of mine came to me in a panic about a bit of drama involving her and a jock sim (DJ) that she had cybered with. The jock girls (from a top 5 skill house) were playing some catty game with her and my friend was afraid that her reputation was being damaged and she was being socially ostracized because of her “bad” behavior. At first I didn?t get it. After all, I live in a satanic church and my avatar is a high priest in said church. I couldn’t understand why this woman was exercised by what some girls in a skill house might think. Being dismissive of her plight, I said, “this sounds like high school” to which she replied that she had the same problem in high school some 10 years earlier. Then the awful truth dawned on me: I was also recapitulating my social role of 30 years ago.

Back in the day, for some reason, who knows why, I triangulated a social position between all three camps. I think I moved pretty smoothly between freaks, jocks, and geeks, by having just enough cred with each group. But now, in Alphaville, I had The Church of Mephistopheles as my freak tag, and I had even moved it into the Rose Thorn Gardens neighborhood. I also had a lot of contacts with various members of SSG, and had collaborated with them on certain projects (my jock tag). And of course I had the interest in MMORPG theory which made me a geek. I had retriangulated the same social position!

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is. One of them is surely that the social structure of Alphaville is not being driven by anything in the actual game architecture or the reward system in that architecture. This is interesting in its own right. But the additional question of how the new social game emerged is a very deep one. In a place where you can look however you want and in some sense be whatever you want, why are so many of us (speculating that there *are* many such cases) falling into the same roles we did in RL? I have no idea.