There can be a big difference between the idealised appearance of MMO worlds (magical forests and whimsical Baroque cities) and the frankly uncivilised behaviour of many avatars lurking about within them.
Perhaps its just an accurate portrayal of human history?
Adam Hildreth’s article Moderation by Machine in Edge makes some interesting points on this subject:
" ...MMOGs create more kinds of issues than blogs, Twitter or Facebook. ... it’s the gap between the collective ‘rules’ and human behaviour present in an MMOG that is the cause of so much pain and frustration for game companies.”
Hildreth is president of Crisp Thinking, which develops “behavioural analysis technology, internet safety, management and control” software for MMOs.
They sell technology based on natural language processing and machine learning aimed at spying on avatar interractions.
Hildreth’s article is, in part, a plug for his services:
“Even when you’ve cracked the conversational data, you’re still left with Real Money Traders ... spamming, gold farming, kill stealing and theft. Griefing, spam, power levelling, blocking, camping, botting, and most insidious - and dangerous of all - the growth of cyber-bullying, grooming and online predation.”
So much for Middle Earth.
In a familiar line, Hildreth is all about increased monitoring (using AI) to police the encroaching chaos of humanity. At the same time there is a despairing sense of doom in his article so common to law enforcement officials everywhere. What can you do? There’s just too much weird stuff going on out there for things to ever be truly safe.
As a player of MMOs (and a fan of fantasy books), I have to agree on one thing - once you pack a magical kingdom full of “normal” people, there’s precious little “fear not fair Elf I shall assist Thee” going on.
Maybe it's the gap between artifice and common human madness. It's the risk you take including the public in the painting - of having the art gallery and the art merged into one - the “peanut-crunching crowd” (as Sylvia Plath described them) stomping about inside Da Vinci’s Last Supper, ruining the effect.
And then there’s the issue of privacy. People tend to see their avatar as a freedom-loving and devilish version of themselves. Yet how free is your adventuring hero going to be in this growing paradigm of surveillance?
See you next time!
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