For thousands of years, humans have been interacting in groups – forming communities who band together in a face to face context – in order to maximize the survival chances of the collective community against the formidable forces of mother nature.
Humans have learned to develop agriculture in order to produce food for the group; humans have learned to specialize in particular provision of a service and or the creation of a product that would benefit all the members of the community. The people within those communities that developed over the centuries have formed relationships where bonds became closer between people. Families were formed out of the basis of those bonds. But it has all happened since the dawn of humanity’s history in the communication style of the face-to-face variety.
Enter the modern age – communication 21st century style: social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and different online communities such as Delphi. Everyone is interacting – though not in the traditional old way of standing right in front of the other person. These days, there is a lot of interaction is done between long lost school friends, and aunts and uncles and cousins across the other side of the world because of these new technologies – which is great – but!
The existence of such virtual support groups as WoW-Widows, where folks claim that they lack any sort of interaction from their partners who play World of Warcraft and other Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGS)– lays foundation to the idea that MMORPGS, and virtual interaction through sites such as My Space, Twitter and Facebook have had some sort of negative affect on at least some part of the human race.
Groups still form in online communities – for example – there is in World of Warcraft - bands of individuals forming together in guilds, whereby they perform various tasks together such as participate in raids, and rewards are distributed amongst the members of the guild. There is privilege to be had, and promotion within groups – such as being appointed as a guild commander, and being asked to run raids. Privileges such as these include being able to access extra goodies from the guild bank – so it pays to be able to interact well online, and rally together the guild members into a team that is successful.
Communicating and relating online isn’t always so straightforward however – and certainly has its challenges to overcome. Take for example the scenario whereby a player who is hearing impaired joins a guild (World of Warcraft for example). He (or she) may have developed an excellent avatar, with impressive statistics and abilities. The player will be accepted into a guild, but upon his (or her) performance during a raid whereby all the other players use a program such as Ventrilo to communicate to each other verbally to play out their various roles and raid strategies in real time – the player with the hearing impairment gets cast aside because the other players have to type to communicate with him, and you can’t play intensively and type a message at the same time. So communication with that player during the raid is effectively cut off. During the next guild leaders meeting, they may discuss at length having to remove that player from the guild due to his (or her) poor performance during a raid.
So because of a lack of an adaptive communication device, other players who are not willing to cut the player with the hearing impairment some slack and assist him (or her) to maximize enjoyment of the game, and a general attitude of win at all cost – a player is thrown out of a guild in an inherently discriminatory and not particularly nice way.
In this way, the MMORPG has pushed the divide between a person with an impairment and people without an impairment that affects their communication even further apart. This is one of the unfortunate ways that has been an effect of how people relate to each other now while participating in a MMORPG.
What about the families whose members are not eating together anymore, because either Dad or Mum say its raid time, and then dinner gets placed down on the computer desk, and the rest of the family goes and sits down on their own, contemplating what is happening to the family dynamic.
There is also the consideration of the new 21st century version of harassment: cyber bullying. There are policies and procedures being developed in schools, and teachers are going to professional development seminars to learn how to manage the new ways that children are being targeted as victims of bullying.
In the case of a child named Caleb – he at one time was an avid fan and player of the game World of Warcraft. His father keeps trying to convince him to come and play with him, but Caleb refuses. Why does Caleb keep refusing? He refuses because he was repeatedly targeted by a group of players who kept killing his online avatar and “tea-bagging” him (a rather crude virtual way of causing offence whereby the avatar squats over the body of the slaughtered victim). Now he just doesn’t want to play, and his account is left in limbo.
The WoW-widows online support group offers a community of support for people whose partners they consider “addicted” to playing a MMORPG, and they believe that the addiction has had a negative affect on the way that the person and his or her partner now relate.
There have been stories passed around the virtual world of the case where some parents had forgotten to feed their baby and it passed away, because they had been playing a MMORPG for several days straight without a break. There are also the tales of people who don’t bother to get up to go the men’s but use an assistive device to relieve themselves such as an old PET bottle.
Certainly these are extreme examples, but there may be some degree of truth in the fact that for some people, playing a MMORPG has had a negative affect on his or her relationships with friends, family or partners. The MMORPG does tend to be structured in a way that there are always more goals to achieve, more game expansions coming out, higher levels to reach, and more rewards for the keen player.
The extremely keen player who has gone beyond the realm of keen and into addict can be somewhat of a blurry one. Certainly playing a MMORPG in and of itself is not a cause for concern, but if a person is spending all his or her time in a virtual environment, without the interaction of real fellow human beings, he or she may experience some negative consequences as a result of that.
The negative consequences experiences are all as individual as the player and his or her relationships with others are. Some players may be so highly addicted that no longer do they associated or relate to anyone outside of the virtual world, and lose touch with the development of their face to face social skills.
Partners who were formally happy to be with that player may get irate when wishing to spend time with the player, and the player consistently says that they can’t because it is raid night, or “just wait five more minutes because I am in a dungeon,” but that five minutes never comes. Eventually the partner may walk out on that person, or find some other partner to relate to.
Human beings have for so long been relational creatures; for a person to digress from that and isolate oneself into a virtual community with no contact with the outside may have some particularly negative effects. A lack of human touch and contact may leave one unknowingly aware of the negative affects on his or her health – take for example the premature babies, who only thrive and recover when they are held and touched. Gentle touch is reassuring to a person, and helps build immunity and the production of hormones that lead to positive emotion (for example oxytocin – a hormone which encourages bonding between couples or a mother and her newborn)
Humans by nature need to have face-to-face contact with each other and physical contact. Without either of these happening somewhere, sometime all over the world, the human race would die out for lack of people procreating.
So with that consideration – a player of a MMORPG needs to consider that he or she will at some stage need some human contact; or that his or her partner and children and friends will want to associate and have face to face contact with him or her. MMORPGS are certainly a fun and exciting pastime for a great number of people – but when one plays in a MMORPG, and knowing when one needs to log off and sign out of their account, and go relate face to face with their partner, friends and relatives is all in a matter of perspective and balance. Keep the perspective and balance healthy – enjoy interacting in a virtual context, but continue to relate the old fashioned way – face-to-face.
