Anarchy on-line
(Visited 6793 times) Game talk
Aug 232007
No, not the game. The article on CNN, for which I was interviewed, and which is mostly about griefing, but somehow ends up at the avatar rights issue. 🙂
“In computer science there’s this term — an N² problem,” explains Koster. “This is where, as you add more things to a system, each new thing interacts with all the existing things so that problems scale exponentially rather than lineally. Human behavior is a kind of N² problem.”
10 Responses to “Anarchy on-line”
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sigh…
A bit of a pet peeve of mine is people misusing the term “exponential”. Sure, in common usage it’s grown to be (incorrectly) equated with “quadratic” or “polynomial”. But you, you’re SMRT! You’re being precise, and well-spoken, and… oh well. Never mind me and my ill-fated crusade. Technically, there is exponentiation going on, but referring to a function as “exponential” implies that the argument is in the exponent, such as in “2^N”, not “N^2”.
That’s what I get for being a computer scientist / mathematician.
Heh. Well, technically, it’s more like N^N*griefFactor. But I wasn’t going to try explaining that over the phone…
That’s what I try to explain to people when I talk about branding, only in terms so simple that I get confused. ;p
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“If you are going to be technical about it [griefing] should be defined as harassment that one couldn’t do in real life,”
I don’t understand this. I always called it griefing any time a player receives satisfaction from denying another player from enjoying the game experience.
The “griefer attack” mentioned in the first section of the article could actually happen during a newscast.
I’m a friend of…Kristen’s. I have an ATARI.
My children suffer through Nintendo Mario Brothers.
I write books. 😉
thanks for sharing your wife with us…
and also for making great games.
Morgan
I think it is very true that a huge part of the problem is that people forget that the avatar, handle, or forum post they are flaming is a real person. They lose that human connection making it ok to trash the other person.
The Avatar Bill of rights is a very interesting idea. Although I don’t think it would work very well across the entire internet I could see something like that coming about in a game. Harrass enough players and the players of that server can decide you should not be playing in the world.
I think you sort of hit on it in the article, what’s really needed is a combination of a set of expectations (Avatar Bill of Rights) and a common set of tools that online communities can use. Right now, the tools are going to be different whichever community you go to – there’s not an accepted standard, and nothing that can be easily transported from one community to another.
@ Adele
I wonder if it’s the opposite of what you describe. I think maybe the griefers know full well that the person they are “attacking” is a real person. I think what the griefers forget is that they are, themselves, real people with basic obligations to conducting themselves appropriately in (a) society.
Click my name for their themesong 😛
The O(N²) problems assume that N goes towards infinity, and it’s about computational complexity in terms of space and time, not anything else. Bad analogy.
(All problems involving real human beings would be O(1)).