The Power of The Tacit or Culture vs. Brute Force

Ah James, I could not disagree with you more. How's that for an opening. Now let's see if I can begin to articulate my point. The game can't make the community communicate to the community. It can create the need for that to happen. If the game devs start to make structures and tools for that, you will find yourself chafing under the cultural decisions they have made. I would argue there is already a pretty good sized helping of P2P support available ingame. Later in this post I have some suggestions for more, but even then I see it as within group tools not tools for P2P.

I am, for the past three decades, more of an ethnographer than a lab scientist. This means I look at things a lot, and a long time, before I decide what they mean. One thing I watch closely is the quest log. Aside from raiding, and even in raiding to the extent raiding has a goal, the game is mostly about accomplishing difficult tasks that have considerably more than one way to get done. Sometimes, often, the manner of problem solving reflects your game cultural knowledge, e.g., about NPCs, about your class, about your level. Sometimes it is a matter of reading comprehension. We can all point to myriad Thottbot entries in which one writer chides another with something like, "Yo, @$$hole, read the quest. It tells you where to look" or some variation of that. Since the last patch, last big one, I've noticed a subtle change in the quest log. Quests that used to carry the label, ELITE, now carry the label, GROUP. It may be green or yellow or orange or red, but it's clearly been built to be solved by more than one body on the job. Maybe it calls for a puller or a healer or whatever.

So if you don't or can't or wont' get thee to a guild, or you're in a guild that doesn't help, you've got the LFG panel and general callouts in chat for PUGs. There are ways here to communicate with others. How many times have you been ping'd by someone you don't know who asks if you could help them do something. Now that I know the game, and now that my toons are either alts or top level, I'm more inclined to help people. When I was grinding for reals, I tended to eschew stranger invites, seeing them as detours rather than realizing them as possible future and even current help for me. But then...I never really like yelled "single" on the ski lift lines either. I'm not comfy with partnering up wth strangers. Hence my choice to go with a guild.

Anyhow, that's meant as an example of how the culture does, indeed, have "community" tools. Your take on my aggro example offers me a great chance to explain what I don't want, adn to underline the difference between emergent organic culture and something like school culture.

Aggro rings. Oh yeah. That's what I want. Like I'm not n00b enuff I gotta have a sign that's 20 feet in diameter and bright red. Like a hoolah hoop of n00bitude. That's got great appeal. Could you move please, I gotta swing my big fat red ring ass around the corner without pulling that goblin. Yeah.

When the culture is heavy handed like that it sin't a culture as much as a catechism. It's all reification and no participation. It tells me my aggro is this. It doesn't let me experitment and figure out workarounds. It can preclude conversations about the meaning of aggro that might otherwise take place as part of someone's explanation to me, for instance about the USES of aggro. It becomes more of the game controls to learn. How do I toggle that agg ring again? Can I change the color?

Some of the UI addons have made it into the game in the last patch, like the ability to open all bags at once. These are interface conveniences not comm help. The auctioneer stuff, well, that supports a game other than the one Blizzard made. I don't think they intended people to be logging in in the morning to check the morning line on mithril in order to buy and resell. I think it's cool and I bet they think it's cool, but it's not where their energy is focused. It is notable that they are so open in their game architecture as to allow for and even support compatible UI addons. I think it is interesting to note that Second Life has decided to follow the same route in their announcement this week that they're going open architecture.

It's a tough line to walk, that reification / participation line, and if you start trying to MAKE people communication or shove them in that direction you end up having to make decisions about how you're going to structure that communication, i.e,. you design HOW they're going to communicate. Look at the "free" guilduniverse supports. OMG are those a pain in the arse or what. So ancient in their design. So linear and taxonomic. It's like they were built for chess by email or something. Yet, communities or guilds do need spaces. I would prefer they were ingame, mostly because I don't check them out otherwise. They are one step too many outside my consciousness. When I'm in WoW, I'm IN WoW. And when I'm not, I'm not. (And as we all know, we've yet to see a decent threaded discussion display/app. anywhere.).

I don't like VOIP in the game because, for me, it ruins the "magic circle" as Castranova or someone has called it. The game is orcs and horses and swords...now we're gonna use modern tech? what's next, product placement? I've been on raids w/o Vent access and the raid message across the middle of the screen works just fine. I don't need to hear some madman screaming "and when I say slow I mean fucking slow..." I like the separate text/chat channels. When we were raiding MC the warlocks could and did maintain their own chat on soulstones, etc on the warlock channel. That's just fine for me. It lets me engage functionally with my peeps and affords some privacy or clubiness to our conversation. It keeps it off the main line so the raid leaders can scream commands there. LOL.

It would be nice for a guild to have a pop up, shared, calendar, in game. I imagine some moldy old tome that sits on my toolbar and picks up guild event notices. That could be cool. It would be nice if guilds over size X could claim a meeting space in-game, you know, regulars at The Slaughtered Lamb. That could be done much like an instance in that every group has its own space even though it is the same room/space. Maybe a guild that raids well could start to acquire, as a guild, a library of dungeon maps as a reward drop at the end of a successful guild group run. Even cooler if these were "empty" books or at least able to carry some notation by GMs or some guild designated scribe.

Now having said all that, whatever it means, let me add that both Clivenar/Yojimbo/Ødin and I are supremely disappointed by the decision to group servers for BGs. We really, really, really dug fighting the same pre-mades regularly. We couldn't communicate with 'em except to drop trou or shout unintelligible insults or do the chicken dance, but we loved fighting NancyCallahan and DBCooper and jackShepard, and beginning to earn their respect. It was actually a big part of the fun in playing. Now we can still look for them and their comments in the WoW server forums, but since we rarely have the luck to play against each other, our comments are not directed to each other. We're no longer relevant to each other's game play.

That's had the biggest impact on communication and it wasn't a comm. tool it was a cultural shift in what it meant to play BGs. That and the new rep/honor system are killing BGs as a sport. Now it's about the rewards; now it's become like the old S&H Green Stamps or the Blue Chip stamps your mom used to collect to cash in for goodies. (So now all the hunters have the icy polearm from AV. What's the f'n point?)

Culture is a delicate thing. We see around us on a daily basis the results of trying to engineer it, to brute force it into a particular way of engaging people. (Maybe someday we'll get a president with an ethnographic or anthro background who understands that foreign policy work is culture work.)

I think the way a game dev should work is build the game and watch, very closely, what the locals do. When they make tools from the sticks on the ground, understand what they are tyring to accomplish and think very, very, very, carefully about whether or not, and how, to integrate that functionality within a more formal ingame structure.

This may not have been an integrated essay; I was writing off the top of my head while waiting for Blizz to solve the problem that is keeping me out of hte game atm. LOL.