Hello, Wreck List. Since some commenters on my last diary complained about not receiving fair warning about a Warcraft post that they didn't want to read, I'm going to start putting up the Wreck List ad in my introductions.
Wreck List is the Daily Kos World of Warcraft guild. We are Horde-side on the Garrosh server. To join, roll up a character on Garrosh and when you log in type
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In today's diary I'll be expanding on my earlier theme: antisocial players are more detrimental to group survival than unskilled players. And hopefully, I'll be able to tie that into Ayn Rand worshippers and teabaggers. Hope you'll stick around even if you're not a gamer.
Continues below.
At the end of my last diary I posted a link to a post by Gevlon, of the "Greedy Goblin" blog. Here's an earlier post by Gevlon Here's an earlier post by Gevlon in which he explained how he planned to start browbeating his team as soon as he entered a random dungeon.
In case you don't want to read the posts, let me sum it up. Gevlon is an Ayn Rand fan, a libertarian who assumes by default that most players in World of Warcraft are "Morons & Slackers." He uses this term so often that he's got an abbreviation for it, and it took me a while to track down what in the world he meant by constant invocation of the term "M&S." (Hey buddy, leave your sexual kinks out of this!)
(Note added in response to the comments section: I'm going to be referring to libertarians a lot in this article. Recognizing that "libertarian" is a pretty broad term which encompasses a lot of competing philosophies, maybe I should specify. What I meant was specifically the objectivist, anarcho-capitalist, fiscally right wing libertarian. Please assume that I mean this variety and not "liberal libertarians" who might frequent this site; I know a few of them and they're great folks.)
So you join a group, and the first thing you are hit with is one player saying: "I will post damage results on the first boss showing who is pulling his weight and who is slacking. I will suggest to kick the lowest DPS unless he is above the tank. If you refuse to kick him, I will go AFK and just /follow the healer. If he can slack, I can too."
So right away, from the moment you enter the dungeon, you know that you are dealing with a person who is mentally preparing himself to hate you. And he wants to make sure you know about it, and are afraid of incurring his wrath. You tell me whether that is likely to improve the gameplay of others more often than it makes them worse at the game.
The problem is that in my estimation, receiving a stern warning for mistakes that haven't even been made yet consistently causes worse gamplay. Telling your teammates to expect failure can actually set them up for failure as a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is a very real psychological component to gaming, and it's easy to get into an unpleasant feedback loop that psychologists refer to as learned helplessness. Competitive gamers know about this dynamic and try to exploit it:
A low self-esteem can be debilitating. Some players get thrown off by a past loss or other bad event in real life. They then take a losing attitude into the game, even in cases where they objectively have an advantage in the match.
But here's a guy who's supposed be your friend. You're supposed to be working together to complete the dungeon, and he's acting like a adversary.
What happens in this case: the hostile player makes you nervous, which makes you play worse. Perhaps you do the wrong thing because you're too timid about doing what you know is right, fearing that the wrong move will get you in trouble. You fall behind on DPS, or worse, the group wipes. The hostile player berates you for causing the failure. He reinforces the perception that you are a moron and/or a slacker. And because you feel stupid, this amplifies the problem already occurring, and the group falls apart.
I know this because I've both experienced and witnessed it in many random dungeons. A team that starts with a positive attitude usually overcomes early setbacks easily. Saying "Look how close we came to beating that raid boss!" bucks up the spirits of the team members even after a wipe, and encourages them to keep improving. On the other hand, a team that gets in a bad mood is headed for a downward spiral. And what Gevlon does is basically shove the team into a negative frame of mind immediately upon entering the group.
Why the hell would anyone think this is helpful?
Playing not to win
A guy like Gevlon, I think, views his fellow players not as other human beings with their own opinions and motivations, but as resources. They're NPCs (non-player characters). They are a component of the game, and many of them are broken. Like other gaming resources, he assumes that there is some kind of as-yet-undiscovered algorithm which will quickly filter out the broken pieces or whip them into shape. And he's mad at Blizzard for sticking him with these inferior players; as he says:
Blizzard seemed to produce the impossible with the LFD tool: a place where boosting completely useless morons is a norm and productive. The attempts to kick even utterly underperforming players is often frustrated by failure, and saying "he must go or I won't tank/heal anymore" can easily result to your kicking.
Rather than trying to figure out what the motivation behind this design decision might be -- I would say it's to provide a friendly gaming atmosphere in which players are encouraged to work together and help each other improve -- he insists on fighting against it, because he wants to be the only guy in the group whose opinion matters.
Permit me to be blunt for a minute:
Psychopathy is a personality disorder whose hallmark is a lack of empathy. ... Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse". "What is missing, in other words, are the very qualities that allow a human being to live in social harmony."
What's really astonishing is that he retains this attitude even though it is obviously counter-productive. In the example he cited in the post, he didn't achieve his objective. The other players said they didn't want to deal with his drama and asked him to cut it out and be a team player. He didn't, and they kicked him out. Now he's berating the other players for being Morons & Slackers, not recognizing that they behaved rationally.
As far as I can see, most groups have a solid chance of finishing a dungeon they signed up for in a reasonable amount of time. If you find yourself stuck with an under performing teammate, he said it himself -- he's not all that worried that they won't win the game. He's worried that they will complete the game, and the "slacker" will be rewarded. He's worried, in effect, that a rising tide will lift all boats, and the weaker player will not be sufficiently punished by his own standards.
And come on, that's crazy. It is the belief that, as Gore Vidal put it: "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
Friends don't let friends game as a libertarian
But I think this actually provides an awful lot of disturbing insight into the mind of libertarians and objectivists. In reading Atlas Shrugged, one of the strongest themes that came across was that apart from the heroic supermen and superwomen, Ayn Rand had a deep and obvious contempt for most people in the world. She viewed them as Morons & Slackers.
To someone like me, the world of Atlas is deeply foreign, because I think that most people have some core of humanity that makes them worth knowing. They deserve to have fun. They have the capacity to get better. I mean, honestly, Gevlon thinks that people are "slacking" because they have an incentive to slack: somehow it makes people happier to finish a dungeon without doing the "work" of playing the game than it would to finish the dungeon as the most valuable contributor.
And that makes no sense to me. That's not World of Warcraft; that's Progress Quest. Reaching new content without doing anything is not a game and it's not fun. I assume it is like that for other players and not just me, so I assume that the players I play with are not just trying to screw me over for the sake of being able to do nothing.
Instead, I think that most players I encounter would genuinely like to be good at the game. The way they become better is with guidance, encouragement, and support, freely offered.
In the real world, we've all heard the classic characterization of conservatives as "screw you, I've got mine." This is that attitude writ large in gaming. By contrast, liberals think that society as a whole, and the individuals within it, are better off generally and on an individual basis, if people are willing to adopt an attitude of understanding others, offering a hand up to someone who is stumbling, getting at the root cause of social problems and solving them.
Because most people aren't "Morons & Slackers"; they're people who are trying to have fun. The fact that Gevlon's approach results in more failed dungeons, more angry players, and less enjoyment of the game -- those ought to serve as wake up calls. But they don't. Because when the only tool you have is Atlas Shrugged, every problem looks like a second-hander.