Investments

We regularly discuss how essential a player's emotional investment is for the game. We've talked about the need for more player input, the troubles that players have when they are griefed, and how difficult it is for players when they get banned or kicked from a world. We've talked about how traumatizing in-game experiences can be for players, and how players are able to build deep and lasting relationships with other players through virtual worlds. But I don't get it.

I realize that I've had very little experience in virtual worlds and spend much less time participating in them than the average user, but I'm just not understanding why in-game occurrances are so emotionally devastating to players. I've been approaching this discussion from a very logical point of view. There are risks and there are rewards in all aspects of life, and devoting time or money to virtual worlds is no different. Especially when someone else makes the game.

I noticed that my attitude about this was a bit different from others when we discussed the sexual assault that took place in LambdaMoo. Though I have no doubt that this was a traumatizing experience for the players involved, I really took issue with people comparing it to real world rape. Whether the intent was to compare it to real world rape or not, use of the term rape automatically compares it to real world rape. But in my mind, it's sexual assault. It was a written sexual attack. That makes it sexual assault. And in the real world we differentiate between sexual assault and rape. Why? Because no matter how horrifying sexual assault is, it's unfair to people who have actually been raped to say that typed words have the same impact as physical contact. But our class seemed to think that the emotional investment in virtual worlds makes it rape.

Maybe if I was more invested in a virtual world I would get it. Maybe if I liked LOTRO or Second Life or spent more time in Club Penguin, I would understand the emotional importance of what happens in virtual worlds. But for now I will continue to distinguish between the real world and virtual worlds. The emotional connections that happen in virtual worlds may be real, but the action isn't and the character isn't. And things that happen to me will always be more real than things that happen to my avatar. That's just how it is.