The Gaming Iconoclast: Taking Sides

"Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?"

"Oh, I'm not any kind of witch at all!"

-- The Wizard of Oz

What about you? Bastion of righteousness or purveyor of deceit? Some folks, to be certain, put a lot of thought into this, balancing role-play, game and class mechanics, racial traits, and a whole constellation of other factors. Some merely find one race or other more interesting or entertaining to look at. Others go where their friends in the game already happen to be. But, initially, when a game is launched, those first adopters will break a certain way demographically. Nick Yee's excellent research on the subject at The Daedalus Project has been touched on here before, and using that as a starting point, we here at TGI have done some statistics-infused navel gazing.

One of my long-time gaming buddies and I caught up a couple of weeks ago, and he was astonished that I still play World of Warcraft. I'm the impatient hot-head of the group, usually the first one to unload the choicest four-letter words or suggest that the drinks, service, and (ahem) "prospects" at another bar might be superior to our current location. Anarchy Online got stale for all of us at about the same time, and I was the one musing loudly where we ought to go next. But, here I was, two years after my buddies had retired for one reason or another, still playing as enthusiastically as ever. Heck, maybe more enthusiastically than I did back then. We'd all created Alliance characters, but thinking back to those days, I began to wonder at the mindset and mentality that goes into choosing sides when we're given the option. I'm with the Horde now for the simple reason that almost all my gaming friends were there, and it was "change sides or miss everybody."

A few games, such Lord of the Rings Online, don't allow this at all, but when the choice is there, what do we do? As a gaming populace, we collectively play the "good guys" by an overwhelming margin. And we're not at all subtle about it, either -- most population census figures, whether within a single game, or broken out across non-specific samples, show approximately a three-to-two split, if not two-to-one outright.

There is some very interesting commentary along these lines at Daedalus (during a discussion of PvP prowess): Entry factors are about how different people choose to belong to different groups or factions in a game where this choice is offered. In WoW, one primary decision is in choosing between Alliance and Horde. The significance of entry factors is that they may create sustained personality or behavioral differences between the two groups.... A related explanation was that Alliance attracts disproportionately younger ... players. Many of the arguments for why new players would be attracted to Alliance were repeated here.

However, it almost seems too facile to say that it's simply a desire to be the good guy would account for this. We may or may not want to portray ourselves in the game world as being "better" or "nicer" than we actually are. That said, there is a perfectly good counter-argument to be made here -- the desire to be freed from the restrictions of polite society and give in to baser urges in an environment where doing so isn't merely permitted, but encouraged and rewarded. Maybe that's more nuanced than a lot of folks want to be when it comes time to lay waste to some digital minions (sorry, Dungeon Keeper). In games without frontiers official sides, players can instead self-factionalize, as they have in EVE. This is obviously a much murkier, far less black-and-white universe.

So, if we decide that it's not our innate do-gooder-ism, what else might it be? Is it all aesthetics? I'm not merely speaking here of the look of our individual avatars, though that's certainly one aspect of it. My guildmates have listened (or at least given the polite appearance of listening) to my long-winded lamentations that the Horde was shunned not for their ill deeds, treachery, and general lack of hygiene, but because they were utterly without any sense of coherent urban planning. Maybe the Alliance outnumbers them because they don't die of consumption or pneumonia from sleeping under leaky hide tarps strung over major thoroughfares or prosecuting their daily business in a glorified septic tank. Maybe I'm just a linear ninny. There have been stronger epithets hurled in this direction.

When you first wandered into your virtual world of choice, what informed your decision to take sides? After all, regardless of the universe they inhabit, our characters are all heroes... at least to the NPCs.

Rafe Brox spends an inordinate amount of time annoying people who think they know more than he does. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Marble. If you, too, would like to tell Rafe exactly how wrong he is doing it, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.