The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [80]
The members of the game generation surveyed indicated that gamers need relationships with people more often. Beck and Wade found that roughly half of gamers played games for the social experience. Playing MUDs connects the player to strangers, competing with them or collaborating with them while advancing one’s own social status.
The lack of nonverbal cues about physical appearance, authority, status, and turn-taking also allows users to participate more equally in MUDs than in many face-to-face interactions. These cues are flexible, as there is no consistent visual appearance to which a user is bound. Participants use words alone to reconstruct contexts in their own image, adding imagined actions and metadescriptions to the running dialogue, typographically set apart from words meant as straight dialogue. They also add modifiers to the strict definition of words, indicating intention, mood, or other contextual cues that would normally be lacking (Froomkin 1995). Different MUDs allow different levels of self-description. Some MUDs are locked in to a particular kind of appearance based on the character’s race or class, while others are completely fluid and can even be changed on the fly.
Some investigators (Rice and Love 1987; Walther 1992) have hypothesized that text-based communication technologies attenuate social context cues even more than paper communication. Uncertainty reduction needs combined with accessibility and a selective channel for expression allow the user to choose his self-representation and relational behavior. In this mode, the user may plan, contemplate, and edit his comments much more than in spontaneous face-toface interactions. Users can use disinhibitive behavior to express political views without fear of retaliation, engage in whistle-blowing while remaining undetected, and seek advice about embarrassing personal problems with the knowledge that their true identity is kept secret (Froomkin 1995). Over time, as a user’s knowledge of the medium increases, her ability to create desired impressions should increase.
The absence of social context cues could result in more disinhibitive behavior and polarization of attitudes, creating more negative perceptions of group members. Because others exist only within the context of the computer medium, a user can leave the MUD and the entire virtual society ceases to influence that user (Brook and Boal 1995).
Lack of cues can also cause informational disinhibition. Anonymity can help people overcome social inhibitions, encourage communication across social or psychological boundaries, and deregulate group behavior (Kiesler and Sproull 1992). In MUDs, such de-individuation involves a decrease in selfawareness and a corresponding loss of identity. This occurs when group salience is high, because the prototypical image or ideal of the group is not contaminated by viewing the other players, who, by their mere appearance may be perceived as deviating from group norms in some way (Spears, Lea, and Lee 1990). As Barton explains in Dungeons & Desktops (2008:41), “players might also be folks too shy to participate in face-to-face sessions.”
The absence of these social context cues makes it difficult for people to perceive and adapt to social roles and situational norms because static cues are derived from artifacts that delineate levels of power and authority (Kiesler and Sproull 1992). Because MUDs lack normal social context cues, authoritarian and dominance positions are shifted to other artifacts like levels and equipment.
Ultimately, my thesis proved that anonymity increased inflammatory disinhibition, but not informational disinhibition.