Kap’s Log: Chatting in General

It’s time for another installment of Kap’s Log, a weekly column, by contributor Nic Stransky - “Kap”. Each week Nic will present a topic ranging from recent events to other topics related to the MMOG industry. This week the column is about general chat in MMOGs.

Any time people are handed a communication tool it is impossible to foresee exactly how they will use it. Pagers and beepers were designed for receiving phone numbers, but were also often used by kids to send brief cryptic number sequences that could be translated by their friends into meaningful messages. By looking at the numerals differently, and viewing ‘3′ as ‘E’ — ‘1′ as ‘l’ (lower-case ‘L’), consumers conceived text messaging before corporations and marketing agencies had coined the phrase. In fact, when it was added as a feature on cell phones, many in the West were slow to accept the idea of typing messages on a device that was designed for voice communication. The chat channels in our favorite MMO are no different. While their original purvey may have been simply connecting players across the game world, people are challenging the intended limits and once again re-inventing a medium to fit their needs.

While the normal chat rooms found all over the internet and chat channels in an MMO game have their similarities — they are literally in different worlds. In a virtual online world the primary distinction is that we are not truly anonymous. Good deeds we do in a dungeon will be remembered by a few, but our words can be captured and posted on a forum for all to see. Our words are forever attached to our character’s name, and we cannot escape their repercussions. One of the most important distinctions is that what we say in an MMO can actually affect us personally. Our character may only be a polygonal avatar with a thought bubble above its head, but when reputation matters as it does in a persistent world, we risk losing opportunities for fun and costing ourselves sales and experience if we do not choose our words carefully.

Slips of the tongue are not only personally embarrassing, but will almost always reflect poorly on someone else. Ranting about our class getting balanced in the latest patch or blurting a secret that was better kept to private tells is not going to win us any friends or customers. Friends will not appreciate being associated with an ass. And simply put, words matter more than epic loot; guilds will not think twice about kicking a player for something they said, regardless of the investment that has been made in them.

The content of our speech in MMOs is also vastly dissimilar from that in traditional chat rooms. As game worlds add economies and micro-economies with thousands of transactions per hour, it is inevitable that people will list their wares wherever they think they can reach the consumer. Wherever most of the player base hangs out ultimately becomes that place where trades and groups are advertised. This can alter a channel not originally designated for pandering into a raging river of “WTS” and “LFM” messages — flooding our witticisms and punchlines away off screen. Some will complain about the influx of what they consider spam, but their rant is of little import to the twenty group leaders looking for a healer. Whatever their original intended use may have been, these channels are a medium for disseminating information, and no one is in charge of that information but the people.

Game hosts absolutely set restrictions on certain types of speech, and most players do not oppose this. But when they create an algorithm that filters trade items, looking-for-group requests, or even just profane words, for every programmer they hire there are ten working around the clock for free attempting to circumvent their labors. This resistance to limitation is healthy, and is possibly the only example of true democracy ever experienced. Computers do not make up the internet any more than Al Gore created it. We the people decide what the internet is. We are molding it by sheer force of numbers every day in new ways, and it is this mob mentality that makes internet chat truly free, and will help us create ways of communicating that we cannot yet imagine.

- Nic Stransky - “Kap”