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You’ve Got a Friend In… My Avatar
By Corvus | April 17, 2006
The topic of this month’s Round Table is friendship in games. Last month, when the topic was the sense of home in games, many entries indicated that is was the people, whether they be digital characters in a single player game, or other players in a MMOG. This interested me, as my sense of home tends to come from within myself and I thought a little exploration of my own game based interactions with community would be worth exploring.
As I’ve mentioned before, the first online game which really captured my attention in any significant fashion was Heretic II. After playing through the single player game, I took advantage of my new DSL line and jumped into the multi-player fray. Online I was Praetor Judis, named after a prominent character from the Drachurae Cycle. I maintained the personae of a ‘visitor’ or ‘gray alien’ during my interactions with the community and made cracks about the MotherShip and how odd “you humans” were. I even had an alt, Traz (another Drachurae Cycle character). I played her character as if I was also a woman and I got to learn first hand how poorly women could be treated by the male dominated gaming world. The whole things was, in short, a role playing experience.
But… because I played for a long time, and because I was not half bad at it, and because I designed some odd maps (link), and because I wasn’t a complete jerk, and because the H2 message boards were a ‘many times a day’ way point in my browsing habit, I started getting to know people, to form friendships of a sort. Of course, ultimately I was role playing. I wasn’t exactly me. I didn’t share many details from my personal life and I didn’t often comment on other posts detailing other people’s personal issues. I didn’t know (and to this day still don’t know) most of these people’s real names, nor did they know mine. This was fine with me. The anonymity it provided was useful to me.
I think by using this approach, I inadvertently hurt some people. At one point I was growing tired of some of the trolls on the message board. The community included an individual or two who liked to bait and then group attack other members of the community and it seemed like once a week the boards erupting into a full scale, drawn out, flame war. Then, when Corvus got a job which required travel… Praetor Judis, or PJ as the community referred to him, just disappeared. There were a couple of projects in the works that I was involved in and due to a combination of guilt and apathy, I just let them drop without warning or notice. Not a decision I’m terribly proud of today, but there you are.
You see, on some level, most of these people didn’t seem terribly real to me. I liked them well enough. I was happy to interact with them on a daily basis… but I have enough problems in my ‘real’ life forming friendships and making social connections (I am, by nature, very internally isolated). These screen presences didn’t feel solid to me. After all, weren’t they all just role playing too?
I tried to go back to the H2 community once the travel for work was over. But it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t as obsessed with the game itself and there were many new “faces” and some of the old faces weren’t talking to me anymore. So, I wandered away…
Things have changed since then. I was involved in another online community and formed some ties that I actually consider friendships of a sort, albeit distant ones. But there are people from that community I’d like to meet in person, should the opportunity present itself. Some of them live in Europe, others in the south, or on the west coast. Someday, perhaps, I’ll have an opportunity to run into them. Call them by their real names, not by their internet handles.
While playing WoW, I tried to balance between strictly in game, character based, friendships and connections that seemed a little deeper. I briefly ran a guild… well, ran is an over statement. I formed a guild and hosted forums for it. I took an interest in the players behind the characters… as much as they cared to reveal anyway. It didn’t end up lasting very long, and when I re-joined the WoW world earlier this year, most of them were gone. I honestly don’t think that WoW is the greatest environment for fostering friendships that run deeper than raids and dungeon runs. Of course, I was never hard core enough to join any of the larger guilds, so perhaps I’m wrong.
Then there’s this blog, I feel a sense of community around the blogs I read and exchange ideas with. A sense of friendship with you, who visit frequently and also like to think seriously about fun and games. Makes sense I’d feel friendship towards you, no? It’s also made easier by the fact that while I may tailor which portions of myself I choose to reveal on MBB, I’m not playing an entirely different character than myself.
Slowly, I’m learning to adapt to this new frontier of friendship, to tear down the perceptual barriers I have in place. I’m in touch again with a few members of the old H2 crowd. One less than I’d like to be, as one of the most open, generous, and even noble, members of the community passed away a little over a year ago. If I got the chance to meet them in person now, I’d jump at it. I know them to be good people and we have at least one things in common, games. And there are friendships built on far less.
April 17th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
Nice post! I had pretty much the same experience with WoW as you had with Heretic II – there was a big community, and then one day it just didn’t matter much anymore. But then I’m notoriously bad at phone conversations and pretty much anything else where I can’t see a person’s body language. The day they let you convey meaningful non-verbal cues with your avatar will be a great day for online friendships.
April 19th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
The same sort of Forum Fallout happened with me. It wasn’t a game forum, per se. Just one that took a game theme and became a hangout and place to relax. It was fun. I knew lots of people. I was widely known. I even became a moderator for a short time. Life was good. But it faded, and real life got busy, so I had to drop the habit. I’ve never managed to go back. Not really. I poke my head in every few months (or years), or my wife does. People say “Hi”. Old school forum dwellers recognize me. But it’s just not the same.
I did manange to form some weak real life connections with people. But mostly it was what we said online that mattered. If I had the time, and the desire… I might go back. I’d certainly meet up with a few of them in a heartbeat (given the chance). Those were good times.
April 19th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
The network effect of the internet and interfaces like blog clustering are wonderful things, to be sure.
I wish we could design an internet interface platform that organized like minded people to construct a grand sprawling artifice of threads containing links to rapid prototypes and playable manifestos. I bet we can, we just need more organization with designers at large in order to give that kind of community momentum.