The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [111]
When I retaliated, a guard immediately appeared and cast a fireball, blowing my character to bits. In other words, it was okay to attempt thievery but not to attack a player who had successfully attempted thievery. Yes, technically this meant that a thief could thieve with impunity so long as he wasn’t caught.
It begged the question: why have pickpockets in the game at all? What was the purpose? It was fundamentally an anti-player function and, given the griefing theory, one performed by the strong who preyed on the weak. In other words, newbies were usually the victims.
This quandry was further exemplified by a legendary moment in Ultima Online’s history; the death of Lord British. It was during a beta test that Lord British, holding forth to his followers, was assassinated. The assassin didn’t know if he could kill British or not, but he gave it a go. Tellingly, he did it by picking the pockets of someone else and using a spell from a scroll he found. After successfully killing British, he fled (Howard 2009).
The assassin, Rainz, was banished from the beta test. The official response from the Ultima Online team was that Rainz was “exploiting flaws” in the system to go on a “huge killing spree.” Going on a killing spree, the author reiterates, “is fine, but doing it when no one that you are attacking has a chance to defend themselves because of your advantage is not fine.”
This incident summed up Ultima Online’s problem. At one point I and my party were killed by more powerful characters, who slaughtered poor Talien over and over. There was no recourse. There was no way to beat them. It was irrelevant to me as a player whether or not they were more powerful because of a bug or because they had legitimately earned that power. Ultima Online, in its efforts to create a fully interactive experience, didn’t take into account my theory of anonymity and disinhibition.
I played Asheron’s Call for a similar three-month trial period. I wandered the huge terrain for hours. Bored and unable to find other intelligent life, I set my character on autopilot and promptly switched to another screen. Only I forgot my character was still jogging in that direction, hours after I had gone to lunch and returned.
At that point, my character was halfway across a desert. A dragonfly was pursuing him, so I ran for my character’s life, ducking into what looked like an abandoned house. What ensued was a game of cat and mouse as I tested the AI of the dragonfly, hiding around the upstairs and downstairs, circling back around the steps to stab it in the back. I survived, but barely. I then couldn’t find my way back and promptly gave up on the game when my trial ended.
Roles
The barrier to entry for online graphical games is quite high. In comparison to say, becoming a registered user of the New York Times, players have to pay monthly fees, download special software, or learn a new interface (Castronova 2005:45). One RetroMUD player shared her experience in transitioning from MUDs to World of Warcraft (WoW):
In a game like WoW, the interface is much more intuitive, seeing as there is no need to be extremely specific with the game when you tell it what you want to do. I was absolutely stunned by the visual effects of WoW when I first began playing. However, I actually enjoy RetroMUDs interface just as much if not more. This is because a text based interface does not make the proper course of action as immediately obvious as a graphical one. The objects in WoW that can be interacted with either glitter