More on Twixt
Jul. 7th, 2009 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kilroyFrom his own paper:
"However, as an experiment investigating the degree to which social orders are capable of revealing and unraveling broader system rules, online games such as CoH/V indicate that socially oriented group play, as a whole, is much more repressive and much less capable of exploring system potentials than individual and idiosyncratic play."
There's a lot of serious language about the treatment he received, and I don't wish to belittle his experiences. But what I'm getting from his conclusion is "Groups tend to have rules and enforce behaviors that don't necessarily follow an external logic. Playing in a community means having less freedom than playing alone, since you have to follow these social rules to participate."
To which my only response is... well, yeah. Any six-year-old could tell you that. If you don't play nice the other kids won't want to play with you and might get mean.
He's right that unexamined and static norms undermine creativity, flexibility, and variety. He's also right that communities tend to react defensively to norm-violators as opposed to evaluating them objectively. I still entirely fail to see how either of these things is news.
"However, as an experiment investigating the degree to which social orders are capable of revealing and unraveling broader system rules, online games such as CoH/V indicate that socially oriented group play, as a whole, is much more repressive and much less capable of exploring system potentials than individual and idiosyncratic play."
There's a lot of serious language about the treatment he received, and I don't wish to belittle his experiences. But what I'm getting from his conclusion is "Groups tend to have rules and enforce behaviors that don't necessarily follow an external logic. Playing in a community means having less freedom than playing alone, since you have to follow these social rules to participate."
To which my only response is... well, yeah. Any six-year-old could tell you that. If you don't play nice the other kids won't want to play with you and might get mean.
He's right that unexamined and static norms undermine creativity, flexibility, and variety. He's also right that communities tend to react defensively to norm-violators as opposed to evaluating them objectively. I still entirely fail to see how either of these things is news.