MMORPG

Even some years after the event, this feat pulled off still amazes me:

Thanks to a brutal betrayal of trust by an Eve player, the Something Awful superpower has used the game's strange organisational mechanisms to take their arch-rival's name away from them. Band Of Brothers (BoB), once the most feared of alliances, is now gone for good. The Goon victory wasn't a great battle, nor a tremendous war brought to an end. Instead it was an inspired defector that led to the dissolution of one of Eve's most significant brands. It was a classic instance of underhand warfare tactics from the real world: sabotage by a traitor, trashing vital infrastructure, and leaving the gates of the fortress unlocked.

So what does it all mean? And how did it all come to pass? What it means is that upwards of several million man hours of work have been instantly obliterated, and a relatively peaceful region of Eve Online has been plunged into fresh war. The equivalent real-world costs are almost incalculable, given the sheer number of factors involved, and the thousands of people who have contributed to BoB. But it's safe to say that we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in virtual investment put at risk.

Offworld had the story. It's a bit of the future very densely packed there.

In a study done on player interactions within World of Warcraft, a graphics-based online multiplayer game, the results found that “solable” classes, in other words classes that required the least social interactions, were the most popular classes of characters chosen, and the overall research concluded that players within the World of Warcraft community preferred to play the game “‘alone together’ — surrounded by others, but not necessarily actively interacting with them” (Ducheneaut et al. 2006, p. 415).¹

This style of play is pretty much my own – I find it interesting to have other players around myself, as they act in surprising and independent ways compared to NPCs, but I won't interact with them much.

The fact that other people play the same way as I do as well as the fact that more and more PCs and consoles are always online makes me wonder whether that could be harnessed for new ways of interaction. Other players could be around in the game world, their avatars probably transformed in some way, to add an element of chance and randomness into the game. A horror game comes to mind, in which the positions and (re-)actions of other players are presented as ghosts for a single player.