Rob Fahey on games, media, journalism and politics.
Mostly this weekend, I’ll be at the Frightfest film festival in London - a delightful mash-up of upcoming horror, fantasy, sci-fi and gore flicks, spread over four days. I’ll be updating comments on each film to Twitter - you can follow me here at my Twitter page.
Quick personal life update. I just got back earlier this week from Amecon, which was a hugely enjoyable weekend. Anime conventions have transitioned over the years from being the preserve of a small sub-genus of bearded, sandalled science fiction nerds into being a bizarre melting pot of subcultures and groups, a process which I continue to find genuinely fascinating. Granted, they’re unified by the fact that to an outside observer, all of them look like they need to get out a bit more - but the sheer range of different interests and subcultures represented makes the events fascinating all the same.
Ayacon, a convention with which I was involved for many years, is probably going to run next Summer for the first time in three years. I made the announcement of this at Amecon - apparently despite having 14 committee members, none of them can actually speak, so I was chosen to go on stage despite having left the committee a couple of years ago. The last Ayacon, in 2005, remains to my mind pretty much the best attempt at embracing and expanding upon the subcultures and interest groups who have flocked to anime conventions in recent years (Amecon, for all that it’s a great event, has generally stuck to a more traditional line). I don’t know how (or even if) the present organisers plan to continue that evolution, but it’ll be really interesting to watch.
I also took the rather heavy-hearted decision this week to hang up my Paladin’s shield and quit World of Warcraft. The basic, underlying problem here is that the destination - the fabled “end-game” - simply isn’t as much fun as the journey, the narrative driven quest to reach level 70. More specifically, I essentially played from level 1 to 70 as a single-player game - and it was great, probably one of the best singleplayer RPGs I’ve played. At level 70, however, you don’t have any choice but to play with other people, so I joined a couple of guilds - first a relatively hardcore guild who wanted to burn through content and do really well, and second an ostensibly more friendly, unfocused guild.
My problem with “other people” in WoW stems from a basic, horrific failure of social skills and interaction in many of its players. Even those who are friendly and helpful can display shocking social immaturity when push comes to shove. In a virtual world where the consequences of your actions aren’t right in your face, and where authority often rests with the first person to click a button rather than being conferred by effort or merit, people feel free to act in a manner which they’d be terrified to assume in their day to day lives.
For me, the final straw came when a close friend was booted out of our guild for no good reason, other than that he’d rubbed someone up the wrong way. With no willingness to make a sincere apology or change things to prevent something like that happening again, I left - for fairly obvious reasons. Ironically, accusations were thrown pretty swiftly of “taking the game too seriously”; I say ironically, because to me, my placing of my real-life friendship ahead of the game in importance seems to suggest quite the opposite. I don’t care about WoW enough to have it impact on a real-world relationship in that manner, and after a couple of shit guild experiences, it’s become apparent to me that I don’t care about the game’s population enough to bother with it at all.
(Frankly, it was probably in danger of turning me into an anti-social git anyway, although it’s admittedly been bloody nice to have something to distract me from a litany of toothaches and chest infections for the past few weeks.)
All of which leaves me with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth, but which more than anything, makes me fascinated to know what research has been done into the difference into how people react to things in a virtual world compared to the real world. I know there was an odd experiment a while back in which someone viewed the world through a screen displaying an image from a camera mounted above and behind their head - effectively giving them a third person perspective on the real world - and it was found that they lost many basic social inhibitions, being more willing to invade people’s personal space, for example.
If such a simple change makes us ruder to one another, it’s no surprise that a consequence-free virtual world changes our interactions in ways that are not entirely positive - although one does wonder whether the next generation, who grow up with virtual worlds as simply another social tool, will end up developing their own social rules that encompass virtual worlds more thoroughly than our own conventions do.
In other news, my dentist did the most painful thing a dentist can possibly do to me today - she gave me an outline of the costs for the rest of my treatment. It’s going to be running close to £5000 by the end of the whole thing; needless to say, I’m not exactly happy, but what can you do?
Technorati Tags: Amecon, anime, Ayacon, dentist, MMORPG, anime conventions, videogames, World of Warcraft
      |