Hi again guys! I decided I would pop in my exigesis on my presentation of thesis design (yeh… I kno… writing about speaking about writing… its really wierd) for any further discussion you can bring to me in case I’ve missed anything. Cheers! Chum
Killing the Noob
Presentation Exigesis
“One does not study the labour market because work was holy and ethical; one did it because the conditions of work meant a great deal to a large number of ordinary people.”
– Edward Castronova, 2001
These are some of the first words written in Edward Castronova’s seminal work, Virtual Worlds: a First Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier, possibly, one of the most referenced economic papers of all time, and, yet, it is entirely concerned with a new, often dismissed as child’s play, medium: massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG).
While “games” is a part of their label (Garriott, 1997, ed. Safko and Brake, 2009), the fact is, they now serve as a realm for communication and interaction, exploration of one’s identity, participation in the growth of important cultural artefacts, and the reinvigoration of a culture of collaborative play not seen since the golden age of arcades, for over 100 million people (Castronova, 2005, Steinkuehler, 2006).
Despite the current nascent state of the field of MMORPG research, investigations have been conducted in vastly different, often surprising, fields. They include the cathartic psychological effects of MMORPGs on their users (Turkle, 1995) to the simulation of viral epidemics (Balicer, 2007); from the experimentation of legislation (Bradley and Froomkin, 2004) to leveraging the learning processes within MMORPGs to create environments conducive to more scholastic modes of education (Steinkuehler, 2004, 2008).
Killing the Noob is not a thesis that is examining any of the previously mentioned issues, nor is it examining the multitude of other, popularly referenced topics. Rather, it hopes to uncover the reason why these complex and engaging vehicles for social interaction are so short-lived, stunting their potentially significant and wide reaching cultural impact on our earthly society.
“In a game type that is wildly different to previously well established genres that immerses users based on emergent game play resulting from social interaction rather than graphics, sound or even fundamental mechanics…
Why are people leaving? “
While the overall methodology that will be used to address this question is loosely based on Claude Levi-Strauss’s(1963) model of structuralist anthropology, that is, the comparison of deep structures within different societies, this thesis will employ a wide variety of methods in order to compare the social structure currently existing in MMORPG’s (Bartle, 2004) and how they arose, to the social structure of the theoretically appealing, but practically impossible notion of a meritocracy (Young, 1958).
The first chapter will be an overview of the current literature available on the subjects of MMORPGs and meritocracy, and will be divided into the different streams in which research is currently being undertaken. Through a discourse of its history, the second chapter will provide the reader with an understanding of what an MMORPG is and how they evolved into their current state. Chapter three will study cases of how implementations of meritocracy have been attempted in the real world and their consequences, in order to provide the reader with a greater comprehension of how meritocracy is currently understood and the results of executing that interpretation. Chapter four and five will attempt to link the two fields of study, MMORPGs and meritocracy. This will be accomplished by investigating how an MMORPG embodies possibly the first “true” meritocracy, as was outlined by Young (1958), Eckland (1967), Jensen (1969) and Herrnstein (1973), through its use of avatar statistics as a classification system for playing ability. Using the MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics) model outlined by Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek (2001), the thesis will discuss the consequences of such a design, comparing it to the population trends of current and past MMORPGs. Rather than attempting to postulate a remedy for the situation, due to the complexity of what is essentially engineering societies, Killing the Noob will conclude with areas for further research.
The historical discourse of how meritocracy arose will be divided into two opposing interpretations. Originally defined by the musings of Young (1958) in his seminal work, The Rise of the Meritocracy, its widespread misinterpretation lead to the views of Eckland (1967), Jensen (1969) and Herrnstein (1973), who argued that enforcing a meritocratic structure using general intelligence testing (or g-Factor testing (Spearman, 1923)) as the metric for classification, on systems of education, seeding an eventual structural change in society, would be of benefit for the human species. They saw the social barriers to opportunity rapidly diminishing, and argued that appropriate support should only be given to those groups in society that could best take advantage of it. Herrnstein, in particular, was derided as scientifically racist; when it emerged that during the course of his research he postulated that, in the modern American society, African Americans had an inherent deficiency in mental ability that could not be corrected with any amount of mentoring (Herrnstein and Murray, 1996).
On the other hand, scholars such as Jackson (1964), Jencks (1972) and, later, Gould (ed. Jacoby and Glauberman, 1995) and McNamee and Miller Jr. (2004) argued that despite more traditional barriers to opportunity diminishing, a different set of social barriers arising out of a hyper capitalist society now confronted the less fortunate. They argued that it was these new barriers, rather than inherited mental ability, that retarded the mental growth of those in environments less conducive to learning, and it was in the best interests of the wider society to provide greater support to those in such a situation.
Between the 1960s and late 1990s over one hundred and thirty papers were published on the subject of meritocracy, for the most part, either attacking or defending Herrnstein’s work (Gottfredson, 1994, ed. Jacoby, Glauberman, 1995). During this period of stagnation very little research was done on the possible real world application of meritocracy and its consequences, and the moral and ethical implications of quantifying human ability. Instances of it emerging in the corporate and educational systems, and, most publicly, in Singapore, will be discussed through the use of case studies in chapter three of Killing the Noob.
The second topic to be researched, MMORPGs, will be discussed in chapters two, four and five. Labelled as MUDs at the time (Multi-user Dungeons, homage to DUNGEN, an adaptation of the popular Dungeons and Dragons electronic game, Zork), MMORPGs grew out of the academic fascination with network technologies during the 1970s and 1980s, which had more in common with the creation of ARPANET and, the resultant Internet, than the popularly referenced genesis of gaming, Pong. The first engine that enabled multiple users to interact with and create artefacts for each other, essentially an early “chat room” (room in very literal, though textually narrated, sense), was created by Roy Trubshaw in 1978, but was not utilised to its full extent until Richard A. Bartle became involved in its development in 1980, now widely recognized as the creator of the first MMORPG (Bartle, 2004, Kelly and Rheingold, 1993, Castronova, 2005).
This is, partially, the reason why the current generation of MMORPGs, in a large part, share commonality with social networking websites such as Facebook and Myspace, with multiple users interacting with each other and the generation and exchange of social capital in a public, visually depicted social space. In fact, it could be argued, the emergent social interaction was the core game play within MMORPGs, with the other mechanics, more akin to traditional single player electronic games, such as first person shooters (MMOFPSs such as Tabula Rasa and the recently released MAG (or Massive Action Game)), real time strategies (MMORTSs such as Shattered Galaxy and the recently released End of Nations), and, in this case, role playing games, simply creating an engaging means to direct this emergent social interaction (Turkle, 1995, Yee, 2006).
However, it is this implementation of the mechanics of role playing games that enforces the, not entirely natural for the society of a virtual realm, dynamic of scarcity, where the issue of how to distribute resources can only be determined by an aesthetic of rationalised inequality (Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek, 2001). In order to understand how this results in the aesthetic of rationalised inequality, one needs to understand the closely bound relationship between the hidden mechanics within an electronic role playing game and the genre’s predecessor, the heavily statistics driven, pen and paper game, Dungeons and Dragons, which will be discussed in chapter four of Killing the Noob (Barton, 2007).
Uniting two disparate fields of research, MMORPGs and meritocracy, Killing the Noob hopes to fill a current void in academic literature using a combination of historical discourse, case studies of current instances of real world implementations of meritocracy and MDA design structure of an MMORPG derived from role playing games to investigate the current applications of meritocracy and their consequences, and the implications of quantifying human ability within an environment that has a definitive meritocratic structure, MMORPGs.
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