Because the mandate to create responsibly does not end with the ESRB rating.

Do I correctly understand you, then, as saying that everything — no matter how it is labeled or marketed — must be appropriate for children, and that it is not “creating responsively” to produce something not intended for children?

Do I further understand you that the only responsibility involved is that of the creator, and that the parents bear no responsibility to select appropriate material for their children?

If so, I totally disagree with you on both aspects.

The world does not consist exclusively of children, nor does it revolve around children (especially your children). There are some things in the world that are for children, and some things that are not. In the case of computer games, there are convenient little labels on the boxes that tell you which of those things you are looking at. Saying “but I want to let my kids play WoW, even though the rating says they’re too young” is on a par with “but I want to play Shadowbane, I just don’t want other players to kill me.” That’s not how it works. If you play a PvP game, you can expect to get PK’d. If you play a microtransaction game, you can expect to shell out $$$. If you play a T-rated game, you can expect to see people acting like teenagers. If you don’t like those aspects of the game, then don’t play a PvP game, don’t play a microtransaction game, and stick to Toontown or the Hello Kitty MMO. There are games for everyone, and nobody has a right to demand that games be changed from who they’re for into games customized for themselves.

In the case of WoW, the game provides multiple options to keep your innocent little children from seeing naughty words. You can leave the language filter on. You can leave the trade and general channels. You can make heavy use of the Ignore feature. You can join a guild geared towards families with pre-teen children (yes, they exist). You have options. The fact that you choose not to exercise those options is not the fault of the game designers. And, of course, one of those options is to not allow your children to play a game which is clearly labeled on the box as not being appropriate for their age.

None of those options, though, are to demand that the entire world, and games in particular, be made over into what you think is “safe and appropriate” to children.

Who decides? Would you let Jack Thompson decide what is appropriate? Or Jack Chick?

You see, in a system where everything is required to be safe and appropriate for children, you aren’t the one who gets to decide what is and what is not appropriate. Someone else does. Maybe it’s someone who thinks that war is bad, and prohibits all PvP. Maybe it’s someone who thinks that violence is bad, period, and prohibits all combat. Maybe it’s someone who thinks cliques are bad, so guilds have to go. Maybe it’s someone who’s a Christian extremist, so magic can’t be allowed. Maybe it’s someone who’s a Muslim extremist, so all female characters must wear burqas. You see where this is going? When you demand that someone make the rules, there’s no guarantee they’re going to agree with your rules.

The only way you can have any hope of a game that matches what you want for your children is for there to be a wide variety of games, where you can pick the option that matches their preferences. True, that requires a certain amount of effort on the part of parents, rather than just offloading their responsibility on the world at large, but parental responsibility has served civilization well for thousands of years; changing it seems like a bad idea. If you don’t think a specific game is appropriate to your children, don’t let them play it.

No, it isn’t irresponsible for a game company to create a game for teens or adults, any more than it’s irresponsible for a car company to build cars, even though little children can’t drive. It’s irresponsible for a parent to allow their children to play a game that is not intended to be nor marketed as “safe and appropriate” for children, and then complain that they got what they paid for.

1) XP debt in CoX is utterly trivial. Especially with the Architect system, and rested XP bonuses — there’s a cap on debt, and it is low, and an eight-man team can easily burn it off in a single mission. And you still gain influence ($$, effectively), even while in debt.

2) While I’m not 100% informed about where Twixt hunted, if it was largely limited to RV, as you seemed to indicate, RV is level limited, and you can’t even enter until level 40, which by then debt really means even less because you’re moving from “uber character” to “really double super uber”.

Further, there are no “player events” in RV in the UO sense — the only kind of PE you’ll have is a group of non-PvPers massing to get a few kill-AV Badges (that probably take two teams of 8 to do smoothly). While, yes, the design of this is to feed sheep into the woodchipper on the part of the devs, there’s really only a tiny fraction of the playerbase that’s Badge-whorish enough to care to do that “content”

(I say this as a Badge whore myself, whose Badger still doesn’t have 4 of the 6 possible because RV raids are a really really rare occurrence on the server I play on) (even after five years of playing, sheesh)

But, really, on the scale of “PK Guild raiding an UO player town based event”, this really rates a “2″ at absolute complete most. It is a dick move to not let the sheep-ish badgers get their RV AV Badges, but it sadly is 100% legal, even by Eula, by Dev design.

(The design problem is that, as I said, it realistically takes at least 2 8-man groups to “raid” RV and spawn the AVs for the Badge, but if you’re not in an active Super-Group, you have to call on open channels, and that INVARIABLY draws some wolves. If you don’t have to call, then you probably will have zero PvP opposition because PvP in CoX is largely not fun and there’s not a high population of people naturally fighting one another in RV)

Again, don’t disagree with the specific pointsor overall message, but I think you overplayed the Actual-Impact as it relates to CoX.

-B

And he should do it from a disinterested perspective, his current study having been invalidated from the moment he chose to be a participant rather than an observer, and worse than that, to be a participant seemingly less for the specific purpose of stimulating a response than because he enjoyed being one.

If I walk into a public area and start yelling insults at people and making obscene comments, I will eventually get arrested. I keep doing it and I will probably end up spending time in jail and getting fined over and over. Yet you look at WoW’s chat channels and you can find some pretty vile stuff, but Blizzard doesn’t seem to care. They just want your money. This is what Sullee is talking about. Heck, all they need to do is slap a ‘gameplay may change with online play’ or something like that on the box and they don’t have to take any responsibility. Nice deal.

People want societies and communities to form, but without any real way for them to police themselves; you will always end up with jerks causing chaos. If you can’t give the tools to the players, then the developers need to do it. Without it, you will always have the jerks running the show, unless your community manages to stay small enough.

Of course, I am guilty in this also. I continue to play WoW with my wife and kids. I am telling Blizzard that I am ok with the fact that they don’t enforce their own rules consistently and avoid responsibility for what happens in their own game. I guess I have just accepted that this is how it is, and deal with it. But I am one of those people who are looking for the ‘next best thing’ and part of it is that I am sick of online games being full of jerks.

Your job as a member of the social group is to discover and understand the rules, not to debate their value. If you want to break them, go ahead – but you will get the stick.

Honestly, this is something I’d expect to see in a two page Sociology 101 paper. Perhaps you should run this by some of your colleagues. Was it peer reviewed?

People do grief other people in RL, all the time. Not everyone, not most people, but something similar to what we see in MMOs on a percentage basis. And really, you kind of pointed it out with your road rage analogy. It does happen.

The thing is, when it happens in RL most people shrug it off with a groan. Jerks on the highway following you up the ass end of your gas tank at 65 miles an hour, trying to steal your girl, your job or position, backstabbing an idea of yours, etc., are all fairly common. Robbing stores, bar fights, embezzlement, are more serious forms of RL griefing.

What’s important is that people learn to deal with it in RL. They don’t like it, of course, but just deal with it and move on. It’s an important part of life lessons we learn as we grow up. And in any social gaming, it’s going to be there too. As we can see. But the response is all wrong. Players want it removed, and producers and developers want to remove it. Game play options are taken out or made wildly unrealistic to try to remove the griefing. And in the end, you have a shell of a social environment. Nothing more than a message board on artistic steroids, the goal, whether people recognize it or not, has been to create exactly that with multiplayer game rooms added for fun.

The end result is kindergarten. Direction and control, and if someone doesn’t cooperate, give them a time out. If kindergarten is the result, MMOs are doing players a huge disservice. And if you look around, you can see that players are noticing. Most of them can’t put their finger on it, but likewise most of them are unhappy. Look at all the gamers who are looking for the “next best thing”. The “next gen” of MMOs. Look at all of them who leave WoW for new games, and then go back when they find in that new game “more of the same”. Yet, the promise of massive social interaction is so strong (it’s in our deepest nature), that most still look, still play the best available option to them.

No, these are not “just games”. Something that Dave Myers missed, it seems to me.

“And a game advertised as “Teen” or “Mature” needs to be a safe and appropriate place for children because…?”

Because the mandate to create responsibly does not end with the ESRB rating.

I’m not talking about censorship of art I am talking about enforcing the very rules for behavior these games already have. I’m talking about having some real human mod\gm\referee investigate complaints about perpetual griefers and hand out severe punishments. I’m talking about MMO companies sharing a ‘banned customer’ list such that being a known douchebag might not just get you in trouble in the current game you are playing but in all of them.

Currently MMO companies turn a blind eye to practically everything but blatant sexual harassment or racism. Now the arguement here is likely to be that a rule wasn’t broken.. that this was legal play. But that’s a crock of shit and we all know it. As I said before griefing is not a minor offense in real life. I gave the example of cutting someone off in traffic and then laughing at them so they know you did it on purpose. Do that everyday even to different people and you likely will be involved in legal action, could be the victim of violence, lose your job, or even your life. My point is griefing doesn’t fly in rl.. it isn’t tolerated.. ever.

The lessons our games should be teaching with respect to competition is fair play and sportsmanship. Not how to be a trash talking asshole hiding behind internet anonymity. Sadly we’ve allowed too much trash talking to pervade all of sports. What at one time was limited to showmanship and hype (e.g. pro wrestling or boxing pre-match) is now everywhere.

In some sense I think this person is an idiot for going public. Did they not take those death threats seriously? Do they not understand the level of hatred griefing evokes? I used the cutting off in traffic analogy because I think the road rage response is analogous.. it isn’t rational. I don’t doubt for a second there are people who wanted to cause him actual harm.

What is also interesting is that “dmyers” may or may not be a regular reader of this site, if you consider that he posted here before.

See: http://brokentoys.org/2008/06/23/well-thats-certainly-one-solution/

(I should remember; my wall of text on that page, partly in response to his post, was my first comment here. A year ago already.)

…the games you folks create are not moderated, safe, or even appropriate places for children…

And a game advertised as “Teen” or “Mature” needs to be a safe and appropriate place for children because…?