Tamrielo

When’s the last time you played a multiplayer game that was purely cooperative? There aren’t many of them. Almost all of the ones I can think of and find also set you and your team against another entity of some form. Oftentimes, as in games like Divinity: Original Sin, Left4Dead, almost all MMOs, and similar, that entity is an explicit opposing force– some great monster or enemy faction or villain of some flavor. In other cases (as in a game like Mansions of Madness, Pandemic, or The Secret World), the opposing entity is more vague, an unknown that you have to give shape to before fighting.

Consider that these are the cooperative games, the ones in which you are ostensibly working together. They’re structured to create for you an enemy to fight against, and when one isn’t immediately apparent, to create one. Even cooperative games are often focused around creating adversarial relationships, and it’s generally more important that you beat the enemy than help your friends.

What does this teach us?

Well, judging from the obsession with it in storytelling, it teaches us that heroic sacrifices are some kind of ideal, rather than a costly pyrrhic victory. “Go on without me”, the doomed movie hero claims, often attempting to redeem an extended series of flagrantly awful behaviors with a single ostensibly noble act.

It teaches us that the fight is more important than the team— it should come as no surprise that teamplay games such as MOBAs have such incredibly toxic communities– the games themselves incentivize victory over teamwork, to the point where a flagging team member is a target for derision, because they “bringing everyone down”, rather than an opportunity to work together.

It teaches us to identify opponents before identifying allies, and often to distrust allies, who by some quirk of AI or differing tactics or player skill are unreliable unknowns. If there is no opponent, we create one.

Likely half of you are rolling your eyes and saying this is an overreaction; the other half are nodding along. What fascinates me about this kind of thing is that it has very clear parallels elsewhere. There’s a chicken-and-egg argument about whether games are a reflection of real world mindsets or if the real world mindsets are what create games (to wit: why are so many games about violence? is it because we are violent and games are an outlet, or are we encouraged to be more violent and games reflect that taste for violence?). I think this is a false dichotomy– the two feed one another.

I talked with someone years ago who genuinely could not understand why someone would play a singleplayer game. “There are no opponents, you’re just playing against the computer,” he told me, “how does that not get boring?” The idea that you might play a game for some reason other than establishing dominance among other human opponents was entirely out of his comfort zone. That kind of thinking isn’t inherent, it’s learned– he got heavily into MMOs for the PvP and now plays exclusively PvE raids. The hops were fairly straightforward: solo deathmatching -> team deathmatching -> team objective-based PvP -> team objective-based PvP with progression -> team objective-based PvP with progression tied to PvE -> team PvP in parallel with team PvE -> team PvE supported by solo progression.

Each step along his path taught her about some new behavioral pattern, until his behavior changed entirely. Remembering our previous conversation, I pointed him at DayZ, only to hear him tell me that he didn’t like DayZ because it was “too oppositional”. Something of a surprise coming from someone who, only a few years before, suggested that a game wasn’t worthwhile if you weren’t fighting against other humans.

I think the heavily competitive focus of games — be it against other players or against the game itself —  also teaches us to define ourselves by how we face opposition. It’s an interesting bit of identity generation, because it goes a layer deeper and teaches us to look for opposition so that we can define ourselves by how we face it.

It’s something I catch myself doing a lot– it’s very easy to see real-world situations as us-vs-them because both “us” and “them” are deeply trained to look for opposing forces. When none exist, they’re created, and you see coalitions disband and groups succumb to infighting.

At the same time, when an opposing force does surface, we come together rapidly and effectively, because it gives us an opportunity to define ourselves.

I wonder, then– what if games taught us to define ourselves in other ways? It’s hard for me not to think of Bioware RPGs here, with the sheer amount of fanfic and fanart inspired by a game that often downplays “fighting the threat” in favor of “hanging out with your friends”. I can’t help but wonder what we might look like as a community if those sorts of games were the majority, not the minority.

When’s the last time you played a multiplayer game that was purely cooperative? There aren’t many of them. Almost all of the ones I can think of and find also set you and your team against another entity of some form. Oftentimes, as in games like Divinity: Original Sin, Left4Dead, almost all MMOs, and similar, that entity is an explicit opposing force– some great monster or enemy faction or villain of some flavor. In other cases (as in a game like Mansions of Madness, Pandemic, or The Secret World), the opposing entity is more vague, an unknown that you have to give shape to before fighting. Consider that these are the cooperative games, the ones in which you are ostensibly working together. They’re structured to create for you an enemy to fight against, and when one isn’t immediately apparent, to create one. Even cooperative games are often focused around creating adversarial relationships, and it’s generally more important that you beat the enemy than help your friends. What does this teach us? Well, judging from the obsession with it in storytelling, it teaches us that heroic sacrifices are some kind of ideal, rather than a costly pyrrhic victory. “Go on without me”, the doomed movie hero claims, often attempting to redeem an extended series of flagrantly awful behaviors with a single ostensibly noble act. It teaches us that the fight is more important than the team— it should come as no surprise that teamplay games such as MOBAs have such incredibly toxic communities– the games themselves incentivize victory over teamwork, to the point where a flagging team member is a target for derision, because they “bringing everyone down”, rather than an opportunity to work together. It teaches us to identify opponents before identifying allies, and often to distrust allies, who by some quirk of AI or differing tactics or player skill are unreliable unknowns. If there is no opponent, we create one. Likely half of you are rolling your eyes and saying this is an overreaction; the other half are nodding along. What fascinates me about this kind of thing is that it has very clear parallels elsewhere. There’s a chicken-and-egg argument about whether games are a reflection of real world mindsets or if the real world mindsets are what create games (to wit: why are so many games about violence? is it because we are violent and games are an outlet, or are we encouraged to be more violent and games reflect that taste for violence?). I think this is a false dichotomy– the two feed one another. I talked with someone years ago who genuinely could not understand why someone would play a singleplayer game. “There are no opponents, you’re just playing against the computer,” he told me, “how does that not get boring?” The idea that you might play a game for some reason other than establishing dominance among other human opponents was entirely out of his comfort zone. That kind of thinking isn’t inherent, it’s learned– he got heavily into MMOs for the PvP and now plays exclusively PvE raids. The hops were fairly straightforward: solo deathmatching -> team deathmatching -> team objective-based PvP -> team objective-based PvP with progression -> team objective-based PvP with progression tied to PvE -> team PvP in parallel with team PvE -> team PvE supported by solo progression. Each step along his path taught her about some new behavioral pattern, until his behavior changed entirely. Remembering our previous conversation, I pointed him at DayZ, only to hear him tell me that he didn’t like DayZ because it was “too oppositional”. Something of a surprise coming from someone who, only a few years before, suggested that a game wasn’t worthwhile if you weren’t fighting against other humans. I think the heavily competitive focus of games — be it against other players or against the game itself —  also teaches us to define ourselves by how we face opposition. It’s an interesting bit of identity generation, because it goes a layer deeper and teaches us to look for opposition so that we can define ourselves by how we face it. It’s something I catch myself doing a lot– it’s very easy to see real-world situations as us-vs-them because both “us” and “them” are deeply trained to look for opposing forces. When none exist, they’re created, and you see coalitions disband and groups succumb to infighting. At the same time, when an opposing force does surface, we come together rapidly and effectively, because it gives us an opportunity to define ourselves. I wonder, then– what if games taught us to define ourselves in other ways? It’s hard for me not to think of Bioware RPGs here, with the sheer amount of fanfic and fanart inspired by a game that often downplays “fighting the threat” in favor of “hanging out with your friends”. I can’t help but wonder what we might look like as a community if those sorts of games were the majority, not the minority.

A big thing that stopped me blogging last year was a sense that I didn’t have anything interesting to say, not on a daily basis. Realistically, I don’t have something interesting or thought-provoking to say every day, and trying to come up with one is kind of unsustainable when I have other things to do (which I do, now!)

So, instead, when I feel like writing but don’t have a clear topic, I’m just going to label it “daythoughts” and run down some of what I’m thinking. It’s my equivalent of chatting about my day when I get home, except in my case my dog is not the most receptive. This might be interesting for me to look back on later, too.

So. Daythoughts, 9/6/17.

–I am deeply concerned by the weather, locally and elsewhere. Smoke and ashfall where I live is distressing. Monsoons in south Asia are devastating, the hurricane(s!) slamming the Caribbean and Gulf Coast are doing serious damage, and basically the predictions of increasingly dangerous weather that went ignored for so long are proving to be as accurate as the data used to predict them. I’ve checked in with my family as much as possible, but I don’t have contact info for some of my more extended family, who are going to get hit by the weather.

–I think about data a lot lately. We have more tools to know more things about more things than ever before, and we live in the Data Age. Information is one thing; we can communicate what we know. Data is a different thing– it’s empirical evidence that can be used to predict what we don’t know. If we get good enough at it, and in many places we have, we can act on things we don’t know as well as if we did know it. I can imagine a person from today with some basic modern data collection tools flashing back even a hundred years and putting them to use. That person would look like a prophet, just acting on simple behavioral data.

–Despite all of this data, we’re really, really bad at actually listening to it. I think there’s a deep-seated (learned?) distaste we have for the idea that we’re predictable to a high degree of accuracy. It’s weird for me personally, because it’s something I take comfort in, it suggests that we don’t act randomly, that we act in patterns that can be seen and understood and modeled. It’s not just a chaotic weave that we all contribute to, it just looks that way if you aren’t looking at it with the right tools.

–I wonder, often, how much of this aversion we have to being predicted is cultural. I think about trying to spend some time living in another country, just to get a feel for how differently people think.

–This is the worst time of year for me. I am reminded of the things I haven’t yet accomplished this year, the things I meant to do but didn’t, or couldn’t. It’s some combination of convention season, my birthday, and the end of summer, which is my favorite season. Cons remind me that I am not the person I’d like to be, my birthday reminds me that time continually ticks away from me, and the end of summer is a start of the cold/sunless/quiet season. It’s not quite loneliness, but the expectation of impending loneliness.

–I’m trying to engage on Twitter a bit more. It’s a platform that I really don’t like for a variety of reasons, but it’s also one of the few that I’m a part of that have expanding circles rather than contracting ones. I’d really like to meet and get to know some new people, and Twitter seems like the best avenue for that.

–It makes me really happy to play games that feel like they have something to prove. I’ve spoken before about my love of the “second place” MMOs, because they really try harder than whoever’s on top at the time, and it’s true for other games in other genres as well. Currently am very impressed by the storytelling in GW2, which is something I didn’t expect I’d say, and the anniversary event in FFXIV was really touching. I look forward to more from both.

–I’m looking forward to the GW2 expansion more than I expected. I’m (finally) caught up in the story and while I’m sometimes frustrated by certain parts of the game, I have fun pretty much every time I play. Unlocking our guild hall and working towards that is really fun.

–My FFXIV playtime has dipped, as it often does, as I’m left in a place where any progression I do either requires a full raid group or requires me grinding daily roulettes. I really don’t love daily things, and (frustratingly, predictably for this expansion) long queue times as a DPS haven’t done much to inspire me to play more.

Thoughts for today. Not sure if they spark anything in anyone, but let me know if they do.

–Tam