Changing the Rules (Assignment 1)
As I wasn’t able to play the board games in class, I’ll rely on my recollection of previous board game experiences in relating how their social dynamics compare to the mediated online experience of LambdaMOO.
An interesting characteristic of good board games are their mutability as a result of their rules really being defined by a shared agreement between the players. LambdaMOO, although constructed entirely on computer networks, shows evidence of being able to serve the same functions but with persistent effects.
I really, really liked Monopoly. It was a good summer camp pastime-sort-of-thing, able to be played whenever access to flashier things like SNESes and Pentium IIs was limited. And whenever I played with people, I always pushed for changing the rules and creating variants. There are house rules many people play with, such as collecting tax money when landing on Free Parking, but we would always do crazier things, such as immunity deals (when you would agree that another player would be able to land on your property a certain number of times without penalty in exchange for a property or something equivalent), hostile takeovers (to keep people in the game, when they’re bankrupted, they don’t lose everything but instead start “working” for the player that beat them), and the like. More extravagant plans of mine, such as simulating models of terrorism and city government within the framework of the game, never came to fruition, but they were interesting to talk about. And arguing for the various variants' viability and application always made for great meta-game discussion.
On the other hand, similar things never happened with Scrabble, which was also played on occasion? Why? Certainly one could create a version where one could only use words found in the concordance of the King James Bible, but that didn’t happen. Why bother – it’s a word game. Monopoly, though, encourages interaction, auctioneering, and trading, so it’s easier to make much more interesting things happen when players agree to create another game concept and apply it, because the effects are multiplicative over all players. Furthermore, it’s a simulation of an aspect of the real world, and thus you can personally invest more into the game (as much as one can invest into a board game). Scrabble’s abstract board lends itself more to relying on internal knowledge and mathematical concepts, which are more difficult to engage in a social manner.
From the readings and seeing what the world of LambdaMOO allows, it seems to be a world that is constructed by the users and is innately changeable, thus being more “Monopoly-like” in its orientation, further encouraging interaction between players – I saw a Rube Goldberg machine that indicated it was constructed by multiple people. The Dibbell article also shows that because the LambdaMOO construct is modeled after a world, it allows more personal investment into the project – the cyber-rape being more like “I was left utterly penniless by the evil landlord” rather than “Jane got a triple word score and used the letter Q twice”. While the world was mostly deserted when I explored it, the capabilities it possessed would seem to offer greater possibilities of a richer social dynamic were it host to a larger population. The fact that these effects are more or less permanent and visible to everyone, rather than disappearing after the game is over, creates an exponential return on the effects of each change and each possibility of change.
The more we’re able to accept a game as having actual ramifications on the players, even if those ramifications are totally artificial, and the more those ramifications are able to be modified by the actions of the players with the world and with each other, the more one can become immersed in the game and therefore have a more engaging experience. A game without a social aspect directly embedded in the game can only go so far.