Power Play in a Virtual Reality

Online multiplayer games, particularly role-playing games such as Evony, have their own strict hierarchy. This I quickly discovered when first beginning the game. Social status is earned by gaining ‘prestige’ and therefore increasing your ranking amongst your peers. Prestige is just a number, the larger the number, the higher the ranking and therefore the more respect obtained from the other players. Prestige is gained by building and upgrading your city, building troops, completing quests and defeating other players in battle. However prestige does not necessarily put you on the top of the social ladder.

(Screen shot: www.evony.com)

Within the game players form ‘alliances’. The aim of the game, essentially, is to get your alliance to the number one position on the server. To do this, the alliance must have the highest prestige combined with the greatest amount of cities and the greatest amount of victories. Those alliances with the highest ranking therefore have the social ‘right’ to rule over the rest of the server, bully other players and claim ownership of any area they fancy. Other alliances tend to tip-toe around players of the top alliances to ensure that their own members are kept out of the line of fire.

Alliances themselves also operate under a strict hierarchy. The ‘Host’ is the leader of the alliance and is responsible for his or her member’s safety and the overall decisions made for the alliance. Next is the Vice-host, the Presbyters and finally the Officers and then the members, each with lessening power down the ladder.

Perhaps some of the most powerful players in the game are the ‘Coiners’, or players who choose to increase their power by spending real-life money on the game, giving them unique advantages over the other players.  

Along with the hierarchal system comes hatred, jealousy and spite and, such as the prison experiment discussed in week two’s lecture, players fall into their roles whole-heartedly. ‘Spies’ are established, ‘assassination’ plans discussed and group gang-ups on stronger players higher in social standing are carried out to overthrow leadership. What’s interesting is behaviour of the players. Such as the Stanford prison experiment, players seem to completely take on their roles within the alliance and within the game. Their lives become farming for food, building troops and rallying their alliance members.

Perhaps what’s most concerning about the MMORPG is the amount of power the game itself and the administrators have over the players. In order to keep your city alive, you must have enough food to feed them. However the more troops you have, the more food you need and eventually it gets to the point where food is constantly disappearing and the player has to continuously send out what’s called ‘farming waves’ to keep their troops alive. Additionally, if a player is offline, they can’t defend their city and their alliance in the event of an attack. Essentially this means that a player can’t be away from their city for a long period of time for fear of their troops and their cities dying or being attacked. The player is then drawn to play the game more and more, to the point where for some their lives on Evony are more real than their lives outside of the computer screen. This of course, is done deliberately and is consistently modified by the administrators to ensure that they increase the amount of players and the money-flow into the game. Here, one person describes how he became a victim to the virtual world: 
http://rr-bb.com/showthread.php?127326-The-dangers-of-mmorpg-s

In her book ‘Life on the Screen’, Sherry Turkle describes the internet as much like a Panopticon, a circular prison designed so that prisoners could be observed at all times, sometimes without knowing they were being watched. In many cases, the virtual reality and the power held by the administrators over the players of the game is much like Turkle described. In this particular case, the players are the prisoners and the administrators play the role of the guards. At all times your account is being monitored, what you say in the chat window is being monitored and how active you are on the game is being assessed. The administrators control the game and therefore they control the player. They can give and take away perks; they can break down alliances, remove your account, alert you outside of the game when your account is under attack or dying and hence force you to return. I found it almost scary to observe just how much power is exerted over the players of the game without their realisation.

References:

‘Lookingup7’ (2010, February 15^th) The Dangers of MMORPG’s (Newsgroup message) Retrieved from: http://rr-bb.com/showthread.php?127326-The-dangers-of-mmorpg-s

Oliver P. (2010). Foucault - The Key Ideas: Foucault and the Panopticon. Retrieved from:  http://www.teachyourself.co.uk/subjects/Philosophy-Politics-and-Religion/Foucault-and-the-Panopticon.aspx