HAKEN'S BLOG
Blood on the virtual carpet
Tuesday, January 20, 2004 10:51 PM
Here's an interesting article about online RP.Quote:
Blood on the virtual carpet: tempers flare as 'editor' is thrown out of online town with 80,000 inhabitants
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
16 January 2004
Peter Ludlow is not just a computer gaming enthusiast. He's also a philosophy professor, with an abiding interest in the relationship between the real and the virtual worlds. So when the world's most successful virtual-reality game, the Sims, launched an online version just over a year ago, he didn't just join in for fun; he also decided that he could carry out research for his next book.
And that was where the trouble started. Alphaville, the game's fictional city, could have gone in any number of directions, depending on the arbitrary decisions of the online game players who make up its people through their chosen "avatars", or game characters.
Alphaville could have become a socialist utopia, a grand experiment in free-market capitalism or simply a reflection of the allure and the pitfalls of any real Western city.
As it was, Alphaville quickly turned into a hellhole of scam-artists, crime syndicates, mafia extortion artists and teenage girls turning tricks to make ends meet. It became a breeding ground for the very worst in human nature - a benign-sounding granny, for example, who specialised in taking new players into her confidence, then showered them in abuse. Then there was the scam-artist known as Evangeline, who started out equally friendly and then stole new players' money.
Professor Ludlow, who teaches at the University of Michigan, decided he would chronicle Alphaville's seamy reality by setting up a newspaper,The Alphaville Herald, run by his game alter-ego. He reported on the scams and the prostitution rings, and also interviewed the protagonists. (Evangeline, his most intriguing source, turned out, in real life, to be a spectacularly warped teenage boy.)
But that was before his dispassionate academic inquiry ran smack into the authoritarian brick wall of the game's manufacturer and controller, the California gaming company Electronic Arts.
The Alphaville Herald was closed down and Professor Ludlow's avatar, Urizenus, was kicked out of town. "While we regret it," Electronic Arts told him in a letter, "we feel it is necessary for the good of the game and its community."
Officially, the reason for Professor Ludlow's expulsion was that he included links in his inside-the-game newspaper to outside websites, including one that gave players instructions on how to cheat. What Professor Ludlow and a growing band of academics and sympathisers believe, however, is that his efforts to publicise the tawdry fantasy activities of real-life teenagers were becoming simply too uncomfortable for Electronic Arts to stomach.
The company wants to draw the maximum number of players to the Sims Online, one of a growing number of interactive computer games attracting audiences possibly hundreds of thousands of people. Such is the interest in the phenomenon that the Sims Online game is to be featured in a California exhibition, opening today, which will feature a real-life recreation of a room from the game.
The game is rated "T" for teenager and is sold, according to the marketing materials, as a "fun-filled" exercise in fantasy projection. Publicity highlighting the very dark place that Alphaville had become was not likely to be good for business, and could even get the company into trouble over its rating.
Shortly before he was thrown out of Alphaville, Urizenus and his fellow reporters were openly questioning whether teenage game players should be allowed to trade in human flesh, albeit virtual flesh, and wondering whether the Sims Online should be restricted to adults.
Professor Ludlow's expulsion was only the beginning of a fascinating new phase in the game. Electronic Arts, through its online game controller, Maxis, has been cracking down on bad behaviour to clean up Alphaville and, one assumes, try and boost its audience which is stuck at a 80,000 (EA had hoped for a millioCOMMENTS: 8