On Foxconn and MMORPG's
Jul. 11th, 2010 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyraxis"Send us teachers."
Peter Thompson, 6th grader, in defense of Earth to the alien galactic council
Bruce Coville, My Teacher Flunked the Planet
At GDC this past spring, one of the packed-till-bursting presentations as the crowning mark on the last day of the conference was by Ernest Adams, the founder of IGDA and a game industry visionary. Single-Player, Multiplayer, MMOG: Design Psychologies for Different Social Contexts, or, It's Not About You.
He gives a description of the burgeoning market of F2P (free-to-play) online games in China, and the business models they operate under in order to turn a profit. Gone is any ideal of fairness or game balance or tailoring the experience to invoke rich emotional empathy in the player. It's down to Raph Koster's laws. One, violence is inevitable (regardless of game mechanics). Two, hate is good (conflict drives social bonds). Three, no matter how good the admin, everyone will hate him (because he has power and they cannot know him). Four, it's a service, a world, a community - not a game.
"God forbid," Ernest Adams says in response, at minute 41:46, "the game world is a reflection of the real world! Who the hell wants a game world with all the misery and oppression of the real world? Why don't we just throw in cancer and Alzheimer's while we're at it? They're not fair!"
It was meant to shock Westerners - why would people who lived by mob laws under a totalitarian government possibly want to escape to a fantasy world of... more cutthroat feudal mafia politics?
The answer - to learn.
China is going through a complex evolution. The southern coast has become a land of massive factories employing hundreds of thousands of poor rural folk at barely living wages to mass-produce cheap goods to rich nations all over the globe.
This year, in a space of about 5 months, there were 11 reported suicide attempts, 9 successful, of workers at the 300,000-employee Foxconn factory complex in Shenzhen, China [Shenzhen Post, May 27, 2010].
Yahoo Finance reports that the era of cheap made-in-China goods is ending. [Elaine Kurtenbach, July 8, 2010]. Forced by worker strikes, companies are pulling up roots and moving to more fertile pastures in even poorer nations.
Foxconn claims to have brought prosperity to a destitute region. Apple's iPhones and iPads are manufactured at Foxconn, and Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, defends the factory by naming their on-site movie theater, their pool, and the fact that Chinese workers come dreaming of a better life. [Jonathan Robins, Sky News Online, June 2, 2010] But in order to truly understand prosperity, the people needed more than corporate CEO's sweeping in to maximize their own profits.
You gotta learn somewhere.
This brain's autistic wiring is not going away anytime soon. If this life left behind its young host and turned over its everyday life and major decisions to a group of virtual reality game characters, what of it?
There was a very simple message presented to the host when she was little, as one of many many little Western girls from middle-class suburbia. It goes like this:
"You have no idea what real pain is. If you truly had a difficult life, you would bloody well know it."
It resulted in this impossibility:
"I have no trauma."
"I am afraid all the time."
Many years later, acting alone, she made it to a therapist's office and found out that many of the reasons she was afraid were called autism. But that left no solutions and little understanding, in a world where people still fear for their livelihoods if they dare mention autism at work, let alone ask for individually tailored disability services. The brain changes are complex enough and little enough understood, they differ significantly enough from person to person, that average Joe and Jane are not willing to do their homework to meet each individual where they stand.
Fantasy is a solution more honorable than yet another day of underground struggle and inability to function as a non-dissociated person.
Watch Ernest Adams' presentation from 41:46 onwards. It's worth it. If anyone can't, I'll write a transcription.
And that, my friends, is why we are multiple.
- Lin, Raba Ua
In the name of the House of Ua.
Peter Thompson, 6th grader, in defense of Earth to the alien galactic council
Bruce Coville, My Teacher Flunked the Planet
At GDC this past spring, one of the packed-till-bursting presentations as the crowning mark on the last day of the conference was by Ernest Adams, the founder of IGDA and a game industry visionary. Single-Player, Multiplayer, MMOG: Design Psychologies for Different Social Contexts, or, It's Not About You.
He gives a description of the burgeoning market of F2P (free-to-play) online games in China, and the business models they operate under in order to turn a profit. Gone is any ideal of fairness or game balance or tailoring the experience to invoke rich emotional empathy in the player. It's down to Raph Koster's laws. One, violence is inevitable (regardless of game mechanics). Two, hate is good (conflict drives social bonds). Three, no matter how good the admin, everyone will hate him (because he has power and they cannot know him). Four, it's a service, a world, a community - not a game.
"God forbid," Ernest Adams says in response, at minute 41:46, "the game world is a reflection of the real world! Who the hell wants a game world with all the misery and oppression of the real world? Why don't we just throw in cancer and Alzheimer's while we're at it? They're not fair!"
It was meant to shock Westerners - why would people who lived by mob laws under a totalitarian government possibly want to escape to a fantasy world of... more cutthroat feudal mafia politics?
The answer - to learn.
China is going through a complex evolution. The southern coast has become a land of massive factories employing hundreds of thousands of poor rural folk at barely living wages to mass-produce cheap goods to rich nations all over the globe.
This year, in a space of about 5 months, there were 11 reported suicide attempts, 9 successful, of workers at the 300,000-employee Foxconn factory complex in Shenzhen, China [Shenzhen Post, May 27, 2010].
Yahoo Finance reports that the era of cheap made-in-China goods is ending. [Elaine Kurtenbach, July 8, 2010]. Forced by worker strikes, companies are pulling up roots and moving to more fertile pastures in even poorer nations.
Foxconn claims to have brought prosperity to a destitute region. Apple's iPhones and iPads are manufactured at Foxconn, and Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, defends the factory by naming their on-site movie theater, their pool, and the fact that Chinese workers come dreaming of a better life. [Jonathan Robins, Sky News Online, June 2, 2010] But in order to truly understand prosperity, the people needed more than corporate CEO's sweeping in to maximize their own profits.
You gotta learn somewhere.
This brain's autistic wiring is not going away anytime soon. If this life left behind its young host and turned over its everyday life and major decisions to a group of virtual reality game characters, what of it?
There was a very simple message presented to the host when she was little, as one of many many little Western girls from middle-class suburbia. It goes like this:
"You have no idea what real pain is. If you truly had a difficult life, you would bloody well know it."
It resulted in this impossibility:
"I have no trauma."
"I am afraid all the time."
Many years later, acting alone, she made it to a therapist's office and found out that many of the reasons she was afraid were called autism. But that left no solutions and little understanding, in a world where people still fear for their livelihoods if they dare mention autism at work, let alone ask for individually tailored disability services. The brain changes are complex enough and little enough understood, they differ significantly enough from person to person, that average Joe and Jane are not willing to do their homework to meet each individual where they stand.
Fantasy is a solution more honorable than yet another day of underground struggle and inability to function as a non-dissociated person.
Watch Ernest Adams' presentation from 41:46 onwards. It's worth it. If anyone can't, I'll write a transcription.
And that, my friends, is why we are multiple.
- Lin, Raba Ua
In the name of the House of Ua.
