Monday Mutterings: Player Accountability
Dialogue, 2003-11-24

"This job would be great if it wasn't for the customers." - Randal, Clerks

What, in the end, are we playing when we log into our favorite online games? Are we playing a version of quake with swords and "characters", or are we entering a new world populated by other players? Are we killing rabbits and taking gold, or are we getting together with other players to form mutual protection societies?

In articles here and on other sites, editorial writers have discussed some of the problems with the MMOG genre. Consistently, the capriciousness of other players comes up as serious problem in-game. While gamers want to play with other people (hence the Massively Multiplayer shtick), they don't really want to deal with jerks. This is an understandable and certainly not unreasonable thing to want out of a game. It's something we expect out of everyday life, after all. The reason that people don't go around killing, screaming epithets at young children, or suggestively describing unspeakable acts in real life is because of one key element missing from online games: Accountability.

Accountability is prevented from taking root in online games because of the facelessness and mutability of avatars. In games like Everquest players can have many different avatars spread out over several servers. This allows players to harass others, make bad-faith trades, and kill steal without having to deal with the consequences of their actions. Long-term behavior like this can lead to GMs taking an interest in the player, but for the most part gamers like to self-police. It is impossible to do this when the female elf that's giving you trouble could show up tomorrow as a male dwarf.

A crucial decision has to be made by future game manufacturers. Do you, or do you not, want your MMORPG to be a social experience. If the answer is no, that is not necessarily a bad thing, but I would suggest that there already exist many games that can fulfill that sort of need. Diablo 2, Counterstrike, and Quake 3 all allow you to interact with other gamers in a multiplayer environment while avoiding actual social ramifications.

If the goal of a game is to promote an actual society, then hard decisions have to be made. Star Wars Galaxies made an important first step by limiting players to one character per server. This cuts out the possibility of "mule" characters, and forces players to very seriously consider their actions. If they want to escape bad karma, they'll have to either reroll completely, or abandon the group of people they've been interacting with for a new server. This first step towards accountability should be shored up by others. Games like Mutable Realm's Wish in which there only exists one "server" and all players of the game participate in events together is another step forward. A game like this combined with the ability to only make one character ensures that players will take their actions seriously in-game.

A one-server, one-character approach is obviously a very different world than the one we're used to right now. A convenient way to get around this problem initially would be to display all of a player's characters on a particular server somewhere in the information of each character. So if you're playing a PKing player and log out to conceal your identity, your victim can still find you even if you happen to be wearing a different name and body. This all-character lookup would allow more than just knowledge of past crimes, and can show us the flip side of player accountability.

All social interactions in online games can be challenging. Irregardless of whether you've been a saint or a devil in the past, rerolling or moving to new hunting grounds can mean that you're back to peg one on the social totem pole. In addition to keeping track of other characters used by a player, a player's profile could have a rating system perhaps not unlike that used by Ebay. Whether a simple thumbs up or down, or a more involved commenting system, allowing other players to make observations about a player would dramatically change the playing field. Good will in one area of the world can bring rewards on the other, as people look at your profile and see that you're a consistently good customer and a helpful player. Similarly, bad transactions and choices can ensure that future fellow players are not taken in by any confidence jobs. The threat for griefing via a system like this is problematic, of course, but even given that possibility, I feel the rewards would outshine the negatives.

Player accountability is an important aspect to consider in the future of online worlds. If more advanced concepts such as self-governance or policing are ever going to see use in future games, making sure that players are accountable for their actions (and votes) is going to be crucial. Making players think twice about their actions will also begin to move us more towards what game-makers have been reaching for since the first online realm took shape, that of a true world. Because, how can you take seriously a world where you can get away with murder?