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In their latest ""Biting the Hand" editorial, Jessica Mulligan talks about the changes that MMORPG's have brought to our culture. Interesting stuff:
Think back to twenty years ago, when The Marx Brothers were more famous than The Mario Brothers, computers were something you constructed a building around and role-playing games were just coming into their own. Card and board games were it; Chess, Risk, bridge, pinochle, Battleship, poker, Life, Mille Bourne, Old Maid, Scrabble; if you were a gamer, these were the type of games you played. New games didn’t come out all that often, maybe a couple interesting ones a year, if you were lucky. If you wanted to play a game, you had to find other gamers locally and then had to schedule a time and place to gather for a session. And if you were a fanatical gamer, finding other fanatics who weren’t complete and utter dorks wasn’t all that easy (right, like we weren’t all considered dorks by the school jocks and ‘soches’). And you did have to watch what you said and how you acted; these were your friends, but that didn’t mean the random insult or laughing at the wrong moment couldn’t result in a bloody nose or bloused eye. There were probably millions of us dorks out there, but we were fragmented as a community, separated by distance and an inability to communicate effectively.
A mere twenty years later, we’ve already gone from two to four friends gathered around a table, past that same group gathered in front of the TV with joysticks, to millions gathering online. With the Internet, modems and PCs, it’s pretty easy to find people to game with these days. But instead of gathering with known entities face-to-face in small groups, we can now gather singly and anonymously in front of glowing phosphor screens. We may still have local dorky friends to game with, but we also ‘know’ a lot of other people around the world, even if only for one or two game sessions. And because of the functional anonymity that is part of today’s online universe, we no longer have to worry about getting a black eye for the random insult, because it’s rather tough to reach through a phone line and smack someone. |
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Biting the Hand: Cultural Evolution
