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Monday, June 28, 2004

Game includes virtual rape

There is nothing to stop a child from visiting the new adult-only, online role-playing game Sociolotron but this on its entry page: "By entering the site you declare that: 1) You are 21 years of age or older; 2) It is legal for you to read about interactive erotic role playing involving erotic text and erotic images; 3) You are not offended by reading about a highly politically incorrect form of roleplaying; and 4) ...you have read and understood the Legal Terms and Conditions and you agree to all of these terms and that all statements made in the terms about visitors of our site and customers of the Sociolotron game are true for you." Then they click on "The above is true for me. Let me in" and they're there, joining others living out their "darkest fetish fantasies" or joining a cult, the source of whose "magic rituals" is "among the darkest and most depraved secrets of the world."

Players of EverQuest, Ultima Online, etc. may be tempted to move on to Sociolotron because, according to Wired News, it has monster battles and other fantasy fare like that of many multiplayer games, in addition to sexual fantasy. The game begs big questions, such as whether this type of role-playing legitimizes rape in impressionable minds, along the lines of pedophiles' practice of exposing children to images of other children's abuse as a way, experts say, of persuading them that this behavior is "normal." In its article on Sociolotron, "Pursuing the Libido's Dark Side," Wired News paraphrases one source as saying that "people shouldn't be afraid that the game's players will step away from their computers filled with violent lust.... In fact ... the fact that rape and other so-called bad acts are possible in a game like Sociolotron can actually be a valuable social experiment." Parents also might want to know that the game includes chat - "private between the people in the room, but everybody has a log of this text," the game's publishers explain.

posted by Anne at 6:33 PM

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't assume you have played the game yourself? In that case you would know that there is A) an age verification process to actually play the game, either by credit card or by presenting a document like a drivers license and B) there is no roleplay whatsoever of underaged characters. Players who are reported to refere to an underaged characters are banned permanently, together with their IP and computer signature.

Like so many other "writers" you have probably just scanned the website and bit into the keywords "rape" "fetish" and "sex"

9:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Even if it were that easy for children to access it, though as has been stated, it isn't, who's to blame?

The internet has a large ammount of adult material. Any parent should use a net nanny AND observe children on the internet. It's like giving kids access to cable TV, all they have to do is flick to porn or violent movies or whatever.

Don't want young kids looking it up.. fine, I agree, but don't expect me to blame the website, when the parent is lacking

12:14 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm not going to bash you for obviously not having researched this game enough to know of the age verification process (which really is rather hard to miss if you read further then the introductory page), however I will give you some insight - as a (adult) player of the game - in the influences on a gaming society of a game that includes mechanics for visious acts such as rape and theft.

I have played several of the more 'innocent' online role-playing games myself (i.e. those that only involve the mass slaughter of rather innocent creatures with a plethora of weaponry), and the thing that starts to stand out after playing these for a while is the huge, really huge amount of intentional griefing going on in them. Players cheat, steal, grief, harras (both sexually as well as aggressively) and even hack eachothers account on a regular basis. And in general, the companies behind these games will do nothing to very little against these acts. Even the ones that do stand little chance of preventing it since in most games it is trivially easy to open a new account, start a new character or just surf to ebay and buy someone else's. Being a adult myself I am not that impressionable by these acts, but I've seen things happen in perfectly innocent games played by thousands of children that would make the average child cry in grief. Not much fun I can tell you.

Sociolotron is rather different. By enabling players to perform grievous acts, and thus specifically allowing these acts to happen within the rules of the game as the exploiting company set them, it places the burden of policing these issues not on the game's maintainer (who generally has no interest in banning or punishing people since it will mean one subscriber less), but on the game's community, i.e. the players themselves. In sociolotron this is implemented as a fully fledged justice system with elected officials such as prosecuters, judges and jury, and a real jail.

The result, in my opinion, works rather well. Yes, there are griefers in sociolotron, those who indulge in theft and rape. But you have to realize that when such a incident happens, it usually causes a large outcry in the community of players, very much like such an act would cause in a small real life community. Everyone that has the skills to investigate crimes can and will do so. People that know the victim personally will band up to hunt down the criminal once identified. Assuming enough proof (due to the game mechanics it is always possible to get solid proof, there are no unsolved cases except for those that are left unsolved intentionally) the perpetrator will spend quite some time in jail. That is real game time that was payed for, and even though you can just log in and sit in jail, or even try to escape, it is not something most people will experience as a fun time.

Opposed to this are the griefers in the 'innocent' games. Do they physically (but virtually) rape eachother? Well, most games simply don't have the visuals to express sex acts obviously, but you would be amazed what a hormone driven 15 year old mind can come up with. In one of the games I used to play you could regularly see characters 'humping' eachother, which basically meant a certain social move would be repeated several times in quick succession, which made it look like the two characters were doing something better kept indoors. Then of course there's the chat system built into every game, which is constantly working to pass on all sorts of abuse - again sexually as well as aggressively - to others, and in a lot of cases the recievers will feel as bad about it as the victim of a virtual rape in Sociolotron. But there's nothing at all they can do about it except endure it.

This effect of a game society policing itself, which IMO seems to work a lot better then having some outside authority take care of it, is just one of the reasons that Sociolotron actually encourages people to behave themselves decently. Another is the very limited number of characters you can make, combined with the fact that the characters can actually die for real. When you have spent countless hours developing a character that can be killed, nullifying most of the efforts you put into it, you'll think twice before you draw the negative attentions of an angry mob. There's also the fact that if you do get banned (as someone mentioned before any reference to child abuse is a directly bannable offence), besides losing your account as in other games, you will also lose the possibility to connect on any other accounts from the same IP address, as well as the ability to open a new account on the same CC number.

In short, of all the online rollplaying games I have played, Sociolotron is actually the only one that encourages you to behave like a decent human being. The fact that you can choose not to do so - and be punished for it - within the rules and mechanics of the game is IMO exactly what causes this effect. And to me it looks like the concept works, because the amount of griefing I see going on in Sociolotron and the numbers of players complaining about the acts of others is far far lower then in any other online game or even chatbox I have ever visited.

7:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You're going to really hate my responses. I'm not going to bash you, but I am going to state some very basic facts about computer games of which your posts do not reflect any knowledge.

"Could you email me (or post here, if you prefer to stay anonymous) some examples - say, the 3 or 4 *worst* examples - of games in which people get harassed and griefed the most, games you really wouldn't recommend to young teenagers?"

Harrassing and griefing is the norm in most MMORPG games. There are no easy pat answers. There is no list of titles you can warn parents about. MMORPGs involve the continual interaction of human beings over the internet, and social interaction is a key part of MMORPGs. We're not talking about TV shows. You might as well be asking "which cities are best for me to drop my kids off at unattended for a day?" Here is one example of a MMORPG wherein grief is commonplace: www.thesimsonline.com
Click that link and look at it. How dangerous does it look to you?
Examples of grief: obtaining another players personal information and giving it out to other players. Hacking another players computer. Sexually harrassing another player. The list goes on.

1. In what types of games does griefing happen most?

Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games- MMORPGs. Why? See above. As previously stated by another poster game staff cannot possibly monitor everything that goes on, just as you can't possibly actually research everything you link here. One point about Sociolotron that is vastly different from other MMORPGs: the In Game Staff are volunteers who are not payed for their services. The developer actually talks to players on the message boards and continually modifies and updates the game based on their suggestions. In large corporate-run games the developers never come into contact with players and the "gamemasters" live in Asia, work 20 hours a day, and speak poor English.

2. "Why is Sociolotron different - what about it allows for this sense of community in which people take care of each other and hold each other accountable (surely not just because characters can perform egregious acts - they can do that in GTA too)?

I'm not seeing a connection between Grand Theft Auto and Sociolotron. Sociolotron is a MMORPG. A MMORPG is a game where each character in the game is controlled by a human being, and there are thousands of characters in a vast virtual world. Grand Theft Auto is a game where the player steals cars and runs around shooting other characters that are controlled by a computer chip. In order to have a "community" you would need other human players.

3. What would gamemakers need to do to make that kind of community happen in games like Halo or GTA?

GTA & Halo are single-player fighting games. You can play a few other players in a multi-player mode, like 15 tops if I'm not mistaken. In games like Sociolotron you can be playing with 200 other players at any given time, and as MMORPGs go Socio is a midget. There is one MMORPG with over 4 million players (and yes their Gamemasters live in Asia and work 20 hours a day too LOL).

10:08 AM  
Blogger Anne said...

Thanks for the answers, Anonymous. It's obvious you're not bashing. I realize that technically there's a clear difference between the GTA games and MMORPGs, but I think that gaming in general is moving in the direction of MMORPGs, and - with Xbox Live and other connecting technologies - all those console games, including the GTAs, are getting to be almost a MMORPG-like as those originally designed to be. Anyway, thanks, things are becoming clearer.

10:23 AM  

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