Post 7
‘Social gaming: playing the crowd’
I thought the existence of the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) really fascinating. It is an elected council of players of the Massively Multi-Player Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) EVE. Members are supposed to represent the views of the rest of the players to CCP (the Icelandic company which owns and manages EVE). I was reading through the readings and it clicked that I’d heard it all before. This is because I am majoring in advertising; the Australian advertising industry is self-regulated and so it has a vaguely similar ‘council’.
This ‘council’ is the ‘Advertising Standards Board’ (ASB), and I almost wonder why CCP hasn’t seemed to research existing boards like this before establishing theirs. Members of the ASB represent their own personal viewpoint. They are not expected to ‘speak on behalf of’ any particular group. So, the way in which the Advertising Standards BUREAU (the regulatory agency which the board is a part of) ensures the board is representative of the larger Australia is by selecting members from ‘a broad range of age groups and backgrounds’ and having it be ‘gender-balanced’ (ASB,2017).
The CCP could argue that the CSM being elected makes it more demographic, but I don’t agree. The ‘EVE community’ website – an official website – says that ‘As a CSM delegate you always represent yourself and your own views.’ (CCP, 2017). They are not expected to ‘speak on behalf of’ the EVE ‘playerbase’ and neither are they strategically selected to ensure that they do. Members of the CSM are asked to ‘keep ongoing discussion with CCP private’. The information I read on the official website does not fit with what I read on ‘Backstage Lore Wiki’ – an unofficial website. Backstage Lore Wiki says the CSM is meant to ‘represent the views of the players to CCP’ (Backstage Lore Wiki, 2014). I think this unclarity and the fact that information seems to only flow upwards demonstrates arrogance among some members of the gaming community.
Something else I found fascinating were the unofficial websites and forums themselves. This is because lots of the forums had strict ‘rules and guidelines’, which were enforced by moderators. I asked myself, if the gamers were able to adhere to some sort of standard here, why couldn’t they manage it in the game? But the ‘Lawless Frontier of Deep Space’ reading sort of answered me. It explains that ‘online game players negotiate a series of frames as they play. They can move from their primary frame of embodied person, to the role of player, to the role of character inside the game in quite a seamless fashion.’ (De Zwart and Humphreys, 2014).
So, the player act as ‘players of EVE’ in the forums; but more often as ‘embodied persons’ in the game. I think the three roles need different rules and regulations, and that different rules for different circumstances are what MMORPGs need to offer their players. The reading explains that already:
‘Game rules created by developers in the establishment of an online digital game space intersect and overlap with rules created socially by players, with cultural norms emerging from within the game space and from the contexts of play, with legal rules developed by lawyers managing the interests of publishers and with laws and values originating in the real world contexts of players in whichever legal jurisdiction they are located.’ (De Zwart and Humphreys, 2014).
Sources:
Backstage Lore Wiki, 2014, Council of Stellar Management, Backstage Lore Wiki, viewed 10/5/17, < http://wiki.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?title=Council_of_Stellar_Management>.
CCP, 2017, The Council of Stellar Management, EVE community, viewed 10/5/17, < https://community.eveonline.com/community/csm/>.
De Zwart, M & Humphreys, S, 2014, ‘The Lawless Frontier of Deep Space: Code as Law in EVE Online’, Cultural Studies Review, Volume 20, p. 77-99.