(AWOWOTSCOA)
I posted the following in a game forum in which the game required a high degree of coordination among players to accomplish the goal. There was no official mechanism for coordinating the various necessary actions and the coordination required quickly became a workload equivalent to operating a small business. The only method of conducting this coordination was via forum posts.
Although players might only play 10 minutes to an hour each (or more), the operations of the game were 24/7/365. What resulted was a continuous evolution of self proclaimed leaders declaring an organization, recruiting hundreds of anonymous members, establishing divisions of labor, a hierarchy, and, invariably, descending into chaos within a month or so (mostly due to self generated in-fighting).
Having been part of several of these “clans,” I began to notice the early symptoms of the impending self-destruction group dynamic: when seemingly every member of the clan began demanding recognition, rank or title, there was nigh over a week left before the only forum posts remaining contained words like “jerk” and “stupid”, rendering communication impossible.
Please note that I did NOT include the reference list in my original post!
The following is the letter I posted into the forum pages of one of those groups – “The PC Immortals”. I only hope the letter speaks for itself…
Archive for the Category ◊ Gaming ◊
Just between you and me (I don’t want this to go public) – If you had a web-cam set up in my house, you would know that when I’m not eating or sleeping, and I’m not at my computer, I’m probably in front of my Playstation – and between 3 and 8 PM, I’m probably there with my seven-year-old son.
As it happens, we were playing a racing game called Gran Turismo and I had just won a race using my son’s favorite car, called a "Tickford." Now, I sometimes keep a car for sentimental reasons, such as, I always wanted to have that car in real life, but for the most part – in game – I select my favorites based on how well they will compete in races. He, on the other hand, selects his favorites based on how cool they are, i.e., "that green one has a cool orange stripe!"
The prize for this particular victory was a car we absolutely needed to compete in a model-specific race; and a promising one, if tuned correctly. But – you guessed it: he didn’t like the car’s appearance. After some convincing, he decided to try the car out on a test track…