Sunday, April 8, 2007

Bonus Mission #2: Life, second or otherwise, is not a game.

I’ve been playing games ever since my cousin bought a Sega Genesis waaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1990, and ever since then my entire family has been corrupted. From challenging each other to Road Rash to hogging the controller on endless rounds of Sonic the Hedgehog, that Sega Genesis probably did more for family bonding than anything our parents ever tried. Now that we’ve all grown up (a little), all of us have since moved on to systems of our own, and video games have been a staple at family gatherings since forever.

So being a gamer from the tender age of 7, I was rather skeptical of Second Life (SL) when the topic was first broached in class. I mean, the screenshots and all didn’t look half bad, but seriously, the first thing that shot through my mind was “Well… It’s kinda like a chatroom in 3D, isn’t it?” And besides, there were other, more epic games to play like Final Fantasy 12 and God of War 2.

And actually, my initial reaction wasn’t too far off. Why is SL not a game? For the simple reason that you can’t win. You might be able to obtain some special stuff and recognition from your peers in SL, but you can’t really, actually win, solve, or complete SL in the way you might win, solve or complete, say, Counter-Strike or God of War 2.

As Elizabeth Lawley said in “World of Warcraft: Is it a Game?”: "In WOW, I can cross things off a list—I've finished a quest, I've reached a new level." (Levy, 2006) It is this sense of achievement, this sense of accomplishment, that defines a game. A game has clearly defined goals and structures (Game, n.d.), be it to save the princess (Super Mario), win the Master League (Winning Eleven) or destroy the gods of Olympus (God of War 2). Games, by their very nature, are designed with some kind of goal in mind: a villain to slay, a trophy to be won, vengeance to be pursued.

And yet, SL lacks all of these. Granted that for a majority of the people kicking around, acquiring a new house or a new piece of land is a major accomplishment, and it’s something that’s easy to do. But it doesn’t serve any actual purpose other than looking cool. It doesn’t add stat bonuses, nor does it allow the player any special abilities. It’s there for the sole purpose of street cred, that nebulous currency of peer recognition. In short, you could actually get through SL wearing and having nothing besides what you’re issued when you first create your avatar.

In actual fact, SL is more like the next step on the online community/chat evolutionary ladder. After all, SL is like a cross between a chatroom and an online forum rendered in 3D. Here instead of tricking out your signature and your picture, you select clothing, cars etc to your taste, with only your imagination as the limit. Another fun thing to note is that French Sociologist noted in his book, Games and Men, that a game must be non-productive (Game, n.d.). Yet another statement that proves SL can’t be a game, because you can make some serious moolah out of it. Just look at Anshe Chung.

SL can be a lot of things, and I’m sure that somewhere, somehow, someone is using it to conduct roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons. However, this still doesn’t make SL a game, since in and of itself SL is just a tool that facilitates communication. Similarly, just because there are strip joints doesn’t make it a porn site. So once again, humans have acquired yet another tool that can be anything its creators want it to be, morally unsavoury or not.


___________________________________________________________


References:

Levy, Stephen (2006). World of Warcraft: Is It A Game? Retrieved 23:20, April 6th, 2007, from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14757769/site/newsweek/page/3/

Game, n.d. In Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:20, April 6th, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game

No comments: