Originally Posted by MCYRook
Well for it being "a very basic social engineering principle", it didn't make all too much sense to me in that other thread, and it still doesn't now.
First off, why is trash talk a bad thing per se? Especially in a game genre that breathes competitiveness?
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This is an article I have posted before in another thread as well.
Here is an interview with the author of that article where he expands a little on what he means. Select quote below:
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Originally Posted by Bill Fulton interview
By way of example, WoW has a wealth of excellent social design – -and I personally believe their social design is more responsible for far more of their enviable success than most people realize. Consider just two critical social design choices they made:
- You can’t talk with players of the enemy faction. This is huge. Blizzard made the decision to remove the ability to ‘be social’ with the enemy because the rare upside of opponents who admire each other wasn’t worth the onslaught of ugliness of less sportsman-like behavior it would have unleashed. Just imagine how ugly life would be in WoW if you had to listen to a player of the enemy faction chat annoying things at you while you’re grinding Murlocs.
- You can’t tangibly harm players of your own faction. You can’t steal from or damage players in your own faction. The only harm you can do is indirect–most you can really do is be a jerk in a party, or sneak past someone and engage an enemy they’ve been working towards. Think of how you’d never feel safe in WoW, never able to relax, if people in your own factions could harm you. The only place you’d be safe is in an instance (by yourself or with trusted players) or while flying between flight points.
With this these two design decisions, they eliminated an enormous amount of the bad conflict in the game – -both inter- and intra-faction social annoyances that could have made WoW just horrible to endure. |
These concepts are not new. Social engineering in games is very very important, yet it is also overlooked way too often.
But according to you trash talk is not a bad thing. It builds up rivalries and is in the spirit of the game. Really?
Here is another article. Read it and try to tell me how positive the gaming experience was for this author, then try to justify to me why this sort of thing is in any way acceptable behaviour. Quote below:
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Originally Posted by Patricia Hernadez
Trash talk makes it obvious that the implicit understanding of the language of dominion isn’t just sexualised. It’s gendered. That power struggle is culturally understood to be a man versus woman thing, even though rape doesn’t just happen to women. Most of the slurs of choice point toward the same thing. Someone is a bitch, they’re a ****** — feminine — and if you beat someone, then you raped them. The imagery there for most of us will be the same: a man physically assaulting a woman, not the other way around.
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And Figment. When you say:
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Originally Posted by Figment
If you can only conceive talking to enemy players as a format for trashtalk, you're a sad, sad being.
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What you are doing is saying - it is ok that some people be made to suffer because good can come from having bad social design in games, and besides you can just ignore anything that bothers you anyway. I guess in your world it is ok to run around the streets shouting racial slurs at random people, because those sensitive pansies could just ignore it and it sure is better than banning talking isnt it?
I say to you that there is no excuse for bad game design.
edit: fixed link to first article
2012-07-05, 06:23 AM
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