Games 15 Jun 2007 05:40 pm
Deviance in Gaming
There is an excellent post on deviance in gaming (‘Deviance Revisited’) at The Gaming Bitch that I find very interesting. Online games are a very interesting thing to study from a sociological perspective: they provide a microcosm of society that presents itself in very unique ways. I love being able to take what I learned in some of the ‘other’ courses in college and apply them!
Sociologist Robert K. Merton’s theory of deviance describes anomie as “a discontinuity between cultural goals and the legitimate means for reaching them”. This provides a set of modes of adaptation on how to reach (or not reach) goals set up by society. Criminology uses this theory quite extensively.
The Bitch equates society in this theory with game developers (or really, a game design in general), where a set of goals is put forth for the players to achieve. The players then fall into one of the modes of adaptation from the diagram above to achieve (or not achieve) the goals.
Conformist: These are the players who play exactly as intended. Obviously these are the designers’ best friends, and this is probably the majority of players. These are players you typically will NOT see complaining on the boards, unless of course its about one of the other types messing up their current goal reaching adaptation mode (look at that use of terminology!).Obviously conformist players are great for a game as they’re doing exactly as intended, and not making things difficult, but in many ways nothing new is learned from these players.
Ritualist: These are players who play the game as intended, but don’t buy into the goals. The Bitch sees this as one who will stay below certain levels, or goes exploring in the game instead of leveling. In many games, and depending on your point of view, this could include a lot of the craft-only type people, or the primarily socializing people. By perfect definition, this is a hard one to pin down.
In my mind, the name ‘ritualist’ describes what I think this category may consist of within MMORPGs: the catass or pure grinder. They use accepted means to grind their way to the end game, instead of using grouping, quests, etc. They would rather bypass much of the content that the game designers wished players would go through just to get to the end game. Like I said, this isn’t a perfect fit for this type of player, but I think its probably the best fit.
The group that exhibits ritualism more obviously is the gold/account farmers. They use accepted means (for the most part) to grind out money, not for the purpose of playing the game, but for another purpose.
For the most part, ritualistic players players are a detriment to the game, but may indicate that something in the design is driving this sort of activity - whether it is by demand (in the realm of RMT) or because the content in the game is not interesting to the player (the catass).
Innovator: These are the ones that accept the goals, but don’t believe in the accepted means to get to those goals. Like The Bitch says, the title is misleading, because in the realm of MMORPGs, this is the exploiter, or the RMT buyer. These are the players who will do anything to get to the goals, regardless the means.
In some ways, innovators are as valuable as the name implies. Innovation means inventing new ways to get to the goals, and thats what these players do. There is probably a lot to be learned to either stop this activity or to adapt to bring it into the realm of the acceptable goals. Games with legitimized RMT (like the EQII Station Exchange) change some of these users to being in the Conformist group.
Retreatist: As The Bitch states, this is the griefer. They don’t care about the goals, and they don’t care about the gameplay. There is little positive that these players contribute to the game. A lot of these characters border on the Innovator or Ritualist to get to higher levels of Retreatist so they can just grief some more.
It’d make everyone’s lives easier if retreatists just… retreated - went away. Lots of time is spent in customer service, or within development dealing with these users, building ways to thwart their griefing. I’m not convinced that the existence of griefing is the result of any specific design problem or decision.
Rebel: Players who ignore the means and goals, and invent their own. Some of the examples The Bitch uses I think actually don’t represent this group. Mastering tradeskills, or completing every quest are sort of built in goals already, and typically they do this by accepted means.
Who I do think works in perfectly rebels are those that invent what are typically called ‘emergent behaviors’, or games within games. EQ raiding may be a good example of this. Other examples are doing footraces around areas hide and seek contests, or other, mostly social, games within games already there.
Many developers see rebel behaviors as good signs and are typically encouraged. It says the game is accepted and powerful enough to warrant good invention and ideas which do not negatively impact other gameplay systems. It definitely gives you a good feeling about the game and community as a whole when emergent behavior happens, because its typically a heck of a lot of fun.
Thanks to The Gaming Bitch for bringing up this topic, because it is definitely one of those things I think is really interesting. There is chance for a heck of a lot of sociology and psychology within virtual worlds. It can help describe behaviors we see already, and help to design new games and gameplay systems to bring more of the players into the conformist group - which is the goal of game developers and designers in general.
on 15 Jun 2007 at 7:05 pm 1.Aaron said …
The “rebel behaviors” that developers like can probably be more accurately said to fall under Innovators. Actions in the Innovator category are sometimes beneficial. For example, players in the original Everquest developed trading centers in unexpected areas to connect distant markets.
I would expect people who reject both traditional structures and traditional goals to be much less common in gameworlds than in reality. In reality, rebels are more tightly bound to the setting they dislike. It’s a hell of a lot more difficult to abandon a nationality than a game. A dissatisfied subscriber has made an monetary investment which encourages him or her to stay a little longer, in case satisfaction will finally present itself and justify the expense. But in gaming, as opposed to real life, it seems much more likely a would-be Rebel will eventually just walk away.
By that reasoning, would the true Rebels who remain often be misanthropes? It’s one thing to try to change something within reach of your ideals, but not many would remain in a game to drastically and consciously reshape they’re gameplay experience.
The players who are consciously dissatisfied with the game and remain to enjoy it in a productive or harmless way (albeit, one outside of given structures and values) are certainly satisfied by some aspects of the game. In which case, how well does the Rebel label apply?
I’ve soloed quite a bit in group-oriented games, like the first EQ, Shadowbane (after the starter isle), and others. I mostly avoided quests, avoided intended routes of travel, and tackled encounters designed for a combination of classes. In such ways, I was often avoiding both traditional structures and values (like the best loot and best levelling avenues), but I stayed and enjoyed the games by using the game’s assets to form an atypical play-experience. So I suppose I would qualify as a Rebel in those games (though not in other MMOs). In those cases, I rarely affected the game or fellow players in any way, good or bad.
But when I did affect them, it was probably through being able to tell of unique experiences from off the beaten path…experiences which may inspire others to try and explore new areas of the game. For example: in SWG, I liked to bring creatures back with my Creature Handler which few players would ever see (because they were from out-of-the-way areas, and weren’t statistically the best pets).
Sorry for the length.. =/
on 15 Jun 2007 at 7:25 pm 2.OnyxRaven said …
I appreciate the comment regardless the length :-).
I was trying to follow the stricter definitions of each of the groups - that is whether they believe in and strive for the known ‘accepted’ goals in a game, by using the known ‘accepted’ methods to get there.
The emergent behaviors/games that I described (sans the raids) don’t really follow either of those - they’re completely outside the game and its goals, but people still enjoy it. You’re right, raids probably do end up under Innovators - that is, breaking the ‘accepted’ methods to achieve the goals. The markets you speak of also definitely fit there.
But what about in-game weddings, or even Machinima within games that really have nothing to do with the game or its goals? These really do belong in the ‘rebel camp’ I think.
I don’t think that any one player really stays in one mode of adaptation. I used the word ‘player’ a bit too specifically maybe - there are actions or behaviors that each player participates in that can be under one of the modes, but as a whole, the player may ‘generally’ be another one.
Like most categorizations, I think a lot of it is up to a bit of interpretation.
on 15 Jun 2007 at 7:32 pm 3.OnyxRaven said …
BTW I am going to freaking kill the WordPress post editor - every time I try to insert proper line spacing it puts it right back the way it was. ARG!