May 22, 2008

MOGG Culture: Addiction or Cure?

Posted by M. Junaid Alam at 4:17PM

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Amid the media frenzy over the effect of violent games on kids or the sight of grandmothers smacking backhands on the Nintendo Wii, one crucial gaming phenomenon has been largely overlooked: millions of youth are immersed in massively-multiplayer online games (or MMOGs), sometimes to the point of addiction.

What separates MMOGs from conventional video games? Players pay a monthly subscription fee to take part in online environments crafted by developers. The game doesn't stop when you do. Instead, you choose attributes for an in-game character on the server, which never sleeps save for maintenance. One MMOG, World of Warcraft, caters to more than nine million players.

While addiction is a clinical diagnosis, MMOGs have rarely been analyzed through a social lens. What compels young people to play for hours on end? What does the trend reveal about their surroundings, their condition, and their desires? Could these games actually encourage youth cooperation and non-judgmental collaboration?

At the most basic level, MMOGs offer an appealing world. One title I played for two years is a science-fiction game called Eve Online, with about 200,000 subscribers mostly in their twenties. It thrusts players into a beautiful, immense universe, bedecked with hundreds of stars, planets, space stations, and complexes. Gameplay options are equally overwhelming: one can pirate space lanes, mine ores, develop ships, or join large player-run factions and conquer space.

But what truly captured my interest — and, for a time, most of my non-work hours — was the matchless sense of camaraderie and purpose attained when playing as part of a player faction.

We communicated and collaborated using text and voice chat, helping each other acquire ores, build ships, enter combat, and capture space. There was a clear, transparent relationship between the "work" done and the results achieved.

Older players readily assisted novices — no small task in a game as inordinately complex as this one. We even collaborated across languages and continents, working with French and Russians, whom we grew to admire, across time zones to conquer territory.

While this escapist universe was engrossing, it is also worth considering what we were escaping from. It is odd after all to neglect the real world for hours on end and spend your time with complete strangers. But in a sense, it is the real world that is truly strange, and estranging.

In real life, our routines are often to meet as few people as possible and strive to make as much money as possible. Daily living can be a relentless, anti-social and competitive rat race where stepping over the less fortunate is encouraged.

In games like Eve Online it's the opposite: we pay a nominal amount of money to meet a growing number of people with whom we share common interests.

Granted, the space ships we "built" in the game were just digital specks of dust settling on some hard disk. But we built them. And who's to say that's less ridiculous than crafting advertisements for hair products or less rewarding than sweeping floors?

Online, no one knew or cared what anyone physically looked like. No one scanned the size of your house or judged the make of your car. A certain degree of solidarity is thus integrated into the gaming experience. In class-polarized America, where wealth is simultaneously the greatest divider and the one least talked about, the ability to bypass such differences and the judgments they come with was a relief.

None of this is to say that MMOGs are the answer to real life drudgery and alienation as there are downsides to any amount of social or physical isolation.

But to claim MMOGs are merely addictive, indulgent or individualistic is misleading. In these fantasy worlds, many young people find the camaraderie and creativity that are missing from a work and life environment that emphasizes profit-making and competition above all else.

In short, the real world can use some diagnosis and treatment of its own.