Unity

The marketing announcement regarding Statesman's death brought me out of the desert long enough to skim my rss reader and do a light scan of the City of Heroes forum once again.

(For the record, the narrative idea of Statesman dying is something I consider both fitting and intereting, in story and conflict terms this disrupts status quo and leaves a power vacuum for more story progress. From an unable to dissociate the name with the person who adopted it as his Marty Sue, good effing riddance and about damned time. The actual implementation of the story arc, whether it's done properly or not, merits a big "meh" of disinterest from me - I'll see it if I ever return as a subscriber, and no big loss if I don't.)

More importantly, there was something I picked up from the glance over the forums that led to another of those late-night revelations.

Boards.cityofheroes.com has been reflecting a great sense of DISUNITY and has been doing this for some time. Smiley Girl doesn't help, of course. One gets the feeling that there are these vast separate camps of people, all playing different games, none interested in understanding or helping each other. It's just a lot of name-calling and dismissal of each other's viewpoint, overt or otherwise.

It didn't use to be that way. I remember when there were fun long threads about scary PUGs, joke threads about gone to the Americans and kill skulz, how you should never call a defender a healer and so on. The key point is, there was a shared culture, of how some things are done or not done here. If you argued that a defender was a healer, a 75% majority or more would shush you, with varying degrees of intensity.

This is not to say that the shared view was good, or even correct, but that there was a shared view to begin with. "This is how we are in this game. Learn to be like us," went the subtext.

Nowadays, there is no shared "we." It's one "I" speaking for an imagined we, and then another "I" going hell no, I disagree, speak for your own effing self, there is no "we."

This creates an underlying stress and disturbance every time I read the CoH boards. An undercurrent of tension that puts me off from both the forums and the game.

In contrast, I have that sense of unity in ATITD. (Not Eve, I'm sure, so it's not a sandbox thing, just a design or community thing.)

This is curious, because I am quite aware there are many different kinds of people who play ATITD, not all of whom get along, many having different viewpoints and motivations from each other.

But since the overall goal of the game requires cooperation within this one social network, you'll find a strong incentive to live and let live. Sure, you can get conflict when two headstrong stubborn players decide they'll butt heads together, but for the most part, many residents seem to have figured out many of the social strategies from seeing them happen once too often.

Achievers rush to compete and complete. Those that find such things less important shrug and let them win, doing stuff at a pace that makes sense to them. The achievers don't find time to laugh, scorn or wave their elitism in the others' faces, because they are too busy chasing the next Test or tech, and often working extra for the public good. This turns over-achievement into a socially positive goal. (Which leads to people pulling shit crazy stunts like 48 hour stints without sleep, but I guess that is part of the design.)

Perhaps it is also the small scale nature of the server. Or the one shared global chat channel. Egypt feels united, even more so than RoD with level 50 avatar chat.

Folks are willing to help newcomers and each other. People are also generally more mellow. The incentives to cooperate and work for the public good are very strong. Especially when you can shine as an individual while in the public spotlight.

The GMs are players. Often old timer players, who play a lot more actively than RoD imms. They are discouraged from stealing the personal limelight, so they do Tests and gain levels a little more slowly than the fast players. Some spend their time being "centers" where they actually head a guild dedicated to helping newbies, public facilities, and generally making the game more accessible to less experienced players.

Less extroverted characters find ample amusement in various minigames and there are always some hermits, who do their own thing by themselves, harming no one.

But everyone is part of this shared community of understanding, that these are the ATITD cultural rules and norms, that is polite, this is rude, etc, etc.

Unity. And it makes being in the game, or rsther, the world, so much more... relaxing and peaceful.