Ahh, the crazy hijinks of GM created sexist NPCs
by Alphaville Herald on 23/10/04 at 2:03 pm
I was waiting for the situation to clarify before I posted on this, but it is really only getting more murky, and I do think it is very important that dedicated Herald readers check out the situation. Near as I can tell, the GMs in A Tale in the Desert 2 constrtucted an NPC trader that refused to trade with women and said something to the effect that they would make good slaves. Terra Nova reports that a player based riot ensued, but it seems more like this riot consisted of angry emails. And what was the point? Well, who knows, some sort of element introduced into the narrative by the GMs. The usual brain dead slashdot discussion has ensued (“it’s a game, get a life, yadda yadda yadda). Maybe the lesson should be this: players are quite capable of generating their own drama, so GMs (even Pharaohs) please do us all a favor and butt the f out with your third grade sociology rat lab clustermuck pschodrama thought experiments.
Thank u for your attention.
urizenus
Oct 23rd, 2004
I forgot to mention that this story was broken by grimwell.com, which has been covering ATITD2 pretty heavily of late. Here’s their story:
http://www.grimwell.com/index.php?action=fullnews&id=192
Dyerbrook
Oct 23rd, 2004
Um…I have to admit that I spent a day floundering around the new ATITD2 and got nowhere. It’s hard. But you do get to run around a lot and it’s cool.
humdog
Oct 24th, 2004
uri wrote this great article about fiction and real life and how they collide and it seems to me that this mess with the egypt people is a wonderful example that supports his ideas about bleedthrough between realities and various agreements about suspension of belief and suspension of disbelief. (my wish is that we could spend more effort discussing that kind of stuff here).
when i read the egypt item i think to myself: well this is marvelous. here are these people playing a game, but their social anxieties are
so unconsciously present to them, that they can’t put them aside well enough to suspend disbelief — they must, instead, require that the social anxieties be included as part of the game. it’s a wonderful thing to see.
the other part of this is that the egypt people are using egypt as a container or vaseline coated lens for romantic ideas about egypt. they project values inappropriately on egyptian society when they bitch about the woman thing.
this is sort of like people, who, looking at chartres cathedral, automatically assume that medieval architects and builders used modern processes like blueprints etc. chartres was built without blueprints, and so was beauvais, which fell down.
what i am always wondering when i look at games,is: why do they exist? because i don’t believe most of the reasoning about games that i hear. it interests me that online games, unlike checkers and parcheesi and monopoly, will go into experimental activities etc. it’s almost like you want to think that social exploration is so much forbidden by this culture that most people simply can’t allow themselves to do it realtime.
i’m not surprised that slashdot says what slashdot says. the surprise would be if slashdot made noises suggesting any kind of engagement with with the human.
urizenus
Oct 24th, 2004
I guess if pressed to be pity, I’d say this: games aren’t about escape from r/l, they are rehersals for contingencies that we might encounter in r/l. Yes, even loot-dropping monsters.
UrAnus
Oct 24th, 2004
As usual professor, you jumped the gun on this story yet once again before finding out all the facts, all in the name of headline grabbing drama.
Before grabbing the headlines of what you think to be drama — do what you tell your students to do — research, base it on facts, then your research will be concise, complete and valid.
About the only monster dropping loot in your real life is you dropping waste into the toilet. He shoots, he scooooores! Ahhhhhhh, bet you can’t wait to play that real life game again. You’re so full of it, playing the toilet game is an obsession for you.
urizenus
Oct 24th, 2004
Uh… sure…
*putting sharp objects out of reach… backing away slowly…trying to remember where I put that pepper spray…*
Dyerbrook
Oct 24th, 2004
Humdog, games take the place that literature and theater used to occupy in earlier centuries. They are spaces for narration, either pre-packaged or original, ritualistic or open-ended. Uri, is it anticipated life, or is it unlived life?
Still, it’s about this: yes, people should have the right to build whatever fantasy they want online. If it’s sexist and chauvinistic Egyptian traders who won’t trade with women so they can supposedly be “realistic” like centuries ok, ok, fine. But then it will be part of other people’s fantasies to crusade against them with their current-day values, and that’s OK too.
Cocoanut
Oct 24th, 2004
None of it’s okay, because it was a GM who did it (the guy who designed the game), and everyone knew that, and no one was prepared to be literally discriminated against in the game and prevented from participating in game activities and getting game goods due to being female or being a female avatar. At the hands of the designer yet.
coco
itzno
Oct 25th, 2004
Well Im bak In TSO so you can write all the crap about me again..in fair biased way..
your faithfully ITzno the man the legend
Dyerbrook
Oct 25th, 2004
Coco, game designers are acting out their fantasies, too, and expressing their cultural norms. People can either stay in the game and fight against it or they can vote with their feet and leave the game in protest. Think of all the offline games with sexist and racist themes, like the furor over “Grand Theft Auto”. Games are a reflection of the culture. I’m for keeping out of games that kind of heavily politically correct canon of speech restrictions that you find in some workplaces or colleges. But then I’m for groups of players fighting back using the same set of freedoms that were employed by the racists and sexists. If you’re going to make a fantasy game about ancient Egypt, how much high-fidelity should there be, to use Uri’s phrase from another discussion?
What I find absolutely HILARIOUS about this is that when players play slave auctions, or when BDSM engage in play of making people slaves, everyone in the liberal politically-correct squad in the game community says “that’s OK” and “we must celebrate this” and “it’s just a game” blah blah. But as soon as one GM makes an NPC that calls women slaves, SLH and Terra Nova and everybody and their brother is blogging about it and getting all indignant. What a double standard!
Cocoanut
Oct 25th, 2004
First off, as I understand it, the players are not able to “fight back” against the GM in the same ways they can against other players. Not sure what these are, but they involve voting. And the GMs are apparently not subject to the same rules as the other players.
Secondly, Grand Theft Auto COMES WITH its sexism in place already. Imagine if Kyle came all of a sudden came into TSO and started passing out special objects, but not to females. Females would have to get some guy to get them for him.
Thirdly, the BDSM people in TSO play their BDSM game only with each other, with each other’s express permission, and mainly on their own lots. While you or I may be offended by their entire schitck, they aren’t demanding we play along. And they aren’t in possession of some special TSO goodie only they have that they won’t give out unless you kiss their feet and declare yourself a slave.
They aren’t the designers of TSO, with the powers that entails.
Game designers can act out their fantasies as much as they like, and do, every time they design a game. However, they cannot come into TSO or any game they have already designed in the middle of its running and declare the game environment (and objects to win or trade therein) to be suddenly available only to men, or to whites, or to whoever. It’s tantamount to false advertising for the game – get the player’s money, then insult them and not allow them to play.
coco
humdog
Oct 26th, 2004
to say that games take the place of literature/drama etc etc seems to me to betray a fairly superficial understanding of games and play. lit and drama come from one human impulse. games and play come from another impulse — i say this understanding that there are “pretend” or story-telling games in kiddie culture.
i noticed in TSO that many people chose to be scammers. they were scammers in-game while protesting mightily about how nice they were. it seemed a pattern: touch a scammer and sooner or later you’d be listening to somebody tell you how nice they were in RL. i have no problem if the nice RL lady next door is the queen of scammers online, although it does put a question mark in my head — about the social game process, not about the nice lady next door.
someone will no doubt say “well. the nice scammer lady next door is like the actress who plays the evil bitch in a movie. its not real.” to me, that explanation doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work because it appears, at least to me, that the actress/drama explanation mightily over-simplifies the process of consciousness.
i think that blahblah boards are theatre and literature. i think blahblah boards are more or less run by the same impulse that runs the soap opera (and the novel, which is a flavor of soap opera).
i think that games are different. i don’t necessarily think that games are fantasy. i don’t necessarily think that games are make-believe, pretend, type stuff. games have a duende, poetic power, that blahblah boards don’t have. i think games give a powerful, but submerged, element of human consciousness and desire an opportunity to speak — and act.
urizenus
Oct 26th, 2004
wb itzno
strangely, I find myself agreeing with Coco. GMs can mess up their own games by introducing elements (sexist npcs) that mess up the spirit of the game. I would just add that when this happens and the offense is extreme enough, voting with their feet is not the only option available to the gamers. They may even have the responsibility to take action that will undo the perceived damage (protests, stikes, etc).
I also agree with Hummie about boards vs games, although I am suspicious that there are deep differences, given the similarity of pseuds and siggys to avatars etc.
Pepper
Oct 28th, 2004
The fact that someone running an online game would purposely include discrimination disgusts me. Maybe people would simply say “If you don’t like it, don’t play it” but that’s pretty much a BS rule to go by when you are already actively involved in a MMORPG.
MMORPG’s involve a whole bunch of people, customers, playing a game together, obviously after some time these people will become friends or enemies with each other. Then all of a sudden the person running the game decides to add an Non-Player trader that discriminates against avatars that were made a long time ago, without the knowledge that there was even a possibility of gender-based discrimination being in the game.
It’s terrible to do that to people. If I was playing a game and suddenly I found out that I couldn’t do certain things because of my avatar’s gender, I would be completely horrified. If it had said before creating my character “This game is based on a real society, an imperfect society that included discrimination and other things that are now frowned upon in today’s world. Please be aware that your avatar’s gender may affect your ability to do certain things in game” it would be better, at least then the game wouldn’t be misleading players.
It also bothers me that this “Pharaoh” treats the game players more like lab rats than customers. People didn’t sign up and pay him so that they could be “tested” to see how they react to discrimination. People played to have fun and possibly to get away from being discriminated against in real life.
In my opinion, this was completely out of line.