Kill Ten Rats

…the Ultimatum Game has been tried in a variety of different cultures, and it turns out that selfishness and market forces are indeed correlated. The surprise is that they are correlated in the opposite way you might expect. Markets support generous interactions with strangers rather than undermining them. What this means is that the less integrated market transactions are in a given society, the less generous its members will be to one another in anonymous interactions.

Far from being incompatible with communal sharing, exposure to market logic actually increases our willingness to transact generously with strangers, in part because that’s how markets work. When I am selling something, the economic nature of the transaction actually erodes my interest in how (or whether) I know the buyer. The market acquaints people with the utility of making transactions with people you don’t know and with the idea, however implicit, that those transactions are an appropriate way of interacting with strangers.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

PvE MMOs, like markets, teach us to value strangers. Even if you think they are tremendous idiots, they are potentially of value to you. They stock the auction house and buy your stuff. They fill out your groups and rarely do so badly that they cause a wipe. You may have had quite a few random dungeon groups where you won without speaking to some of your teammates. It is hard to prey upon strangers, easy to coordinate with them, hard to suffer much at their hands, and very easy to squelch them if they are problematic. Putting your virtual life in strangers’ hands is just something you do on a daily basis. Jerks are notable rather than the assumed default. The closest we get to “nature, red in tooth and claw” is when many people want to click on the same thing at once.

Plato’s Republic is introduced as an argument against the view that justice is helping your friends and hurting your enemies. Markets (and MMOs) have done more for that view than philosopher-kings ever have, promoting a cosmopolitan perspective that strangers are more likely to be potential partners than threats. Once you are used to the view that you trade value for value, and there is no transaction to be had unless you both value trading/working together over what you can do separately, every transaction is a likely mutually beneficial one (otherwise you would not do it). There are MMOs where you kill anyone who is not obviously part of your alliance, but most of us are self-conditioning to view strangers as neutral-at-worst rather than neutral-at-best.

: Zubon

This “go public to find people who think like you” strategy has created an unprecedented increase in the amount of material that is available to the public but not intended for the public — its creators are looking not to reach some generic audience but rather to communicate with their soul mates, often within a sense of shared cultural norms that differ from those of the outside world.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

WoW-blogging is very popular. Our biggest hits lately come from Guild Wars 2 news and exclusives. Meta-MMO blogging has a much smaller target audience of interested parties. Anyone can read it, just like anyone can read your Twilight/Haruhi Suzumiya crossover fanfics, but that is just a device to find the receptive population.

: Zubon

People who care passionately about something that seems unimportant to the rest of us are easy to mock. The satirical publication The Onion sometimes runs pieces by a nerdy know-it-all named Larry Groznic, who defends sacred works of geek culture. The headlines alone read like a compendium of obsessions: “When You Are Ready To Have a Serious Conversation About Green Lantern, You Have My E-Mail Address“; “I Appreciate The Muppets On A Much Deeper Level Than You“; “Now More Than Ever, Humanity Needs My Back to the Future Fan Fiction.” Part of the joke is that the internal concerns of any particular community appear picayune to the outside eye; but to be a member of a community of shared interests is to care, deeply and in detail, about things the general public doesn’t spend much time thinking about. If you want to see this effect in action sans Larry Groznic, go to a newsstand and buy a magazine on a subject you care nothing about. If you read Vogue, get Guns and Ammo; if you read Golf Digest, pick up Tiger Beat; and as you read, imagine what someone who liked that magazine would think about your interests.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

: Zubon

The feeling that I did this myself and it’s good, often beats the feeling that Professionals did this for me and it’s perfect.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

I think we tolerate far more flaws in the MMO genre not just because making massively multiplayer games is especially hard but also because we feel a sense of collaborative development. Players feel like they are contributing something to the game in a way that is not possible in “one and done” games. There is iterative development. There are forums with developers there. There is player-created content. The community participates in testing. It is our game, not their game.

On the other hand, the vast majority of the playerbase is not engaged in the forums, and the biggest game in the Western market has the smallest player input relative to “Professionals did this for me.”

[Update: Alternately, someone has probably worked out the mathematically optimal build for your class. How often do you work through the options on your own, even knowing the math has already been done? How often do you see that theory-crafted build and tweak it, making it your own even though it is most likely slightly worse than the guide-perfect build?]

: Zubon