Interactivity in MMOs

Interactivity is my single biggest complaint about the entire theory of MMOs. Games have a hard enough time making themselves a legitimate art without every hormone-crazed 12-year-old on the planet testing out newly-discovered profanities. While I believe wholeheartedly in freedom of speech, I also reserve the right to consider the speaker an absolute moron. That is why we have implicit rules, cultural norms, and unwritten taboos in the real world to govern how we behave. In this paper I will react to the questions posed in the assignment, namely, how MMOs differ from Times Square and how Lynn Hershman is…wrong.

Having been to Times Square (like, oh, maybe half a dozen other people in history), I can tell you that it is a mixed experience. On the one hand, I find it deeply calming. The sea of people seems something of a return to the primordial ooze, only in large scale. On the other hand, it’s dirty and loud and there are people with funny accents yelling at you because you just called the primordial ooze calming, what’s wrong with you? But it all seems to me to be an ordered chaos; everything that happens is simply a reaction to the things around it, causing new reactions in perfect Newtonian style.

The difference between this and an MMO is that an MMO world won’t collapse if people fail to adhere to what is expected of them. Therefore everyone gets to be the initiator. All action, no reaction, no consequences. The reactions, of course, are expected to come from the system, but the sheer number of people in an MMO all but completely mutes these effects. Nothing can truly change in an MMO, nothing can progress, and that is at the core of an MMO’s failure to be truly interactive.

As to Lynn Hershaman’s article, I consider it something of a tangent, but an interesting one nonetheless. I find her view of interactive systems flawed. To me, an interactive system is one that is meant to reflect real life in some significant way. Talking to a human being will always be the purest form of interactivity there is. To her, it seems that interactive systems are disconnected from the world at large, and contained within themselves. She views them as passive, things to be watched. I would call that a reactive system, since the reactions never affect the viewer in any way other than aesthetically. To the contrary, I believe an interactive system must respond in a way that evokes change in the user. Under this definition, single-player video games are more interactive than either Hershmann’s art or an MMO. The player acts, the system reacts, which evokes a change in the player’s action.

Interactivity is a difficult thing to achieve, and even harder to balance. Life is interactive by default because of, as I mentioned before, simple Newtonian physics. Art imitates life, and has been interactive since the first audience participation in Greek tragedies (again, Hershman shows us that not all art is interactive, but can be). Therefore I believe that games can also be truly interactive, in ways that are ever-expanding. I simply do not believe that MMOs have achieved this yet. Until we can find a way to structure MMO societies, with consequences that affect the user, not just the character, then MMOs will never truly be interactive.