Shame where is it playing

NL Central. NL West. West Ham United Wolves. Virginia Tech Washington Wisconsin. Purdue Syracuse Villanova Virginia Wisconsin. Redblacks Stampeders. Featured Teams. Home Odds. Bayern Munich Dortmund. Celtic Rangers. Toggle navigation Subscribe. The secret shame of playing Football Manager. Iain Macintosh Nov 9, It started, as all the best scams and dodges do, on a scarcely perceptible scale.

In , my colleague and I started a network game of Football Manager during our lunch breaks. And if that lunch break started five minutes early, or stretched five minutes long, then so be it. It was only five minutes. But soon it was more than five minutes. Much more. Soon we were firing up the game before the AM became the PM, just to dip in.

We were emboldened because no one could see our screens. We sat on a bank of desks and the only thing behind us was the toilet door. It was a good job working for good people but, for want of a better term, we took the piss. He was a decent man. I still cringe thinking about it today.

Even now, as their popularity soars, they are not generally considered to be cool. Already a subscriber? Because the multi-player game contains the force and influence that groups of people bring to real life, but does so in an imaginative setting that real life too often either lacks or dares not attempt, multi-player gaming can have a social impact on people more powerful than real life can provide.

Thus, the influence of its audience, without anyone physically being in the room with you when you play, can rival or exceed its real life counterpart. If the stadium in which the NFL Pro Bowl was played was filled with pro football players as its only spectators, imagine the psychological impact upon the players on the field. Now imagine that every new football player had to play in front of this audience from the moment they first played football.

Imagine that every beginning football player had to take to this field and play amongst these players. This is multi-player gaming today, which is also why multi-player games are an infinitesimally small segment of the entertainment industry today.

Shame is so powerful an emotion that entire societies have been held together by it. Many still are today, Japan being an excellent example. Echoes of shame's once prime importance in our society exist in a variety of figures of speech "Shameless", " Have you no shame? Japanese warriors, when shamed, would beg not just for death, but for the right to kill themselves in rather horrible ways.

Although people no longer plead for the privilege of killing themselves, and thereby mitigating their shame, every person reading this has wished, at one time or another, that the ground would mercifully swallow us up after we had embarrassed ourselves. No matter the words we choose to describe it, no matter what we actually do in response to it, shame has the power to make us wish we were dead. There is no more powerful emotion. And, until multi-player online games became widely played, this was an emotion computer gaming could not tap.

Furthermore, it is an emotion that most game developers today have no idea they have tapped. Lots of folks in the industry wonder why the market for multi-player games has grown so slowly. Others bemoan the so-called lack of an economic model for them. People dwell on learning curves, barriers to entry, interface design, and compelling content. What they fail to understand is that the principle reason more people aren't playing hosted persistent online games tonight is due to shame - the experience of it, or the fear of it.

I challenge you to name a single massively multi-player online game that does not absolutely require that every new player undergo a period of embarrassment or humiliation. Yes, learning any new game requires that you do badly before you can do better, but multi-player has an audience, which, as noted above, is unique in all of entertainment. Multi-player gaming requires that you not only perform poorly initially, but that you do so in front of other people.

Embarrassment, even on an insignificant level, is completely unheard of in any other entertainment media, all of which are hell bent to make you feel good and good about yourself. Okay, you know that shame is bad, but there are other emotions multi-player gaming can tap into that are quite positive; namely, shame's opposite, glory.

Shame can feed glory - the greater the shame, the greater the feeling of glory. What did Conan say when asked what's good in life? But there are plenty of opportunities for glory, or at least opportunities to reward players and make them feel good about themselves, that don't require the other players be humiliated.

What then is the problem with glory? Ask yourself this question: what is the problem with money? Stressing glory, even when it comes without shaming others, emphasizes achievement over development. Although we may think we're motivated by recognition in multi-player games and, the more competitive people would argue, in most of life's activities , the reason we keep coming back after we know what we're doing is due to our development in the social fabric of the game's community.

The distinction can be confusing, and I will try to clear it up some. I'll start with the most recognized forms of today's true online games, how they handle issues of achievement versus development, and by extension, how gracefully they manage matters of glory and shame.

In the massively multi-player realm, this sort of game is best represented by the multi-player air combat simulation. This can also apply to some degree to the first person shooter, but I will restrict my comments to the air combat sim, as it has a long, established history. These games demand skills rare in human beings, skills that you're expected to master to become a force in the community.

Earning respect here is not like religion, as devotion alone won't get you there. If you can't think in terms of three-dimensional geometry, and interpolate multiple vectors in your head, then you'll never achieve star status here. It doesn't matter how many hours you play. There is no cumulative character scheme.

You cannot earn extra hit points for your fighter aircraft. Put another way, achievement and development are very closely coupled. Glory and shame here are unambiguous. The two major examples of this genre broadcast notice of your demise, when you perish, to everyone in the game world at that time.

One goes so far as to broadcast the game names of both the victor and the vanquished. Not surprisingly, both games have an unspoken ethic that approves of, encourages in fact, attacks with words as well as war planes. Finally, both player communities prefer to resolve major disputes through duels. If they could issue dueling challenges by slapping each other with gloves, they would.

Yes, most of the players of these games are men. That said, both have developed communities that have, over time, matured to include members that aren't hot shot fighter pilots. This is, in part, due to the spiritual influence of the underlying subject matter of these games; that is, aviation in an important and actual war that is still in living memory. In part this is due to the sheer age of the genre.

Its first example, Air Warrior , is 12 years old. The point is that the ultimate depth and eventual development of elders, as opposed to just killers, in these communities was not a direct product of the design of these games originally.

Multiplayer air combat sims like Air Warrior heavily emphasize glory and shame through achievement Is this genre successful? Few genres in computer gaming have been as enduring; indeed, in computer years, the genre dates back to the Pleistocene epoch. Is it a worthy model of multi-player game design? Yes, if you'd prefer a small, dedicated customer base. Ninety percent of the people who try these games don't hang around.

Quite simply the glory and shame levels are so high, in particular the shame level for new players, that there will only be a mass market for this sort of game when society as a whole gives over to the worship of sadomasochism. Best represented by the fantasy role-playing adventure genre, in these games you can get there through devotion alone. Nobody, regardless of native skill, intellect, reasoning ability, or reflexes can be anything more than meat in these games until they've put in time acquiring attributes an qualities bestowed by the game itself.

Being smart can help you become a force to be reckoned with faster, but you have to pay your dues. Although at first these may seem like purely achievement-oriented games, probably because you usually spend your first few hundred hours acquiring skills and game stuffs. They do evolve, however, into development games.

Players either acquire so much stuff that it loses its meaning and utility, or they carve out a niche for themselves, deciding, in effect, to leave the rat race behind them. In either case, players will eventually develop beyond, or in spite of, the reliance of these games on game-created goodies to drive their game mechanics.

Although most examples of the genre are established in early medieval settings, online FRP design is dominated not by the pre-Christian mythology of swords and sorcery, but by pure, raw, unseasoned capitalism. You are who you are because of what you've got, what you've acquired, what you can afford to buy. Multiplayer role playing games like Ultima Online focus on development But, like the occasional over-wealthy soul, player communities move from achievement to development when they learn there's more to life than money, and you're not something special because you have more of it.

Just like the meritocracy-based game, cumulative character games over the years develop rich and warm societies that value their members and bring out the best in them. And just like the meritocracy game, they do so for reasons that seldom have anything at all to do with the intended design of their creators. To-date the only cumulative character online game that was ever designed, from the very first, to create a mature, multi-tiered society where money didn't matter was the original Multiplayer Battle Tech which is, alas, no more.

Achievement Vs. The time has come to dispense with abstract and semi-concrete examples. What, once and for all, is the difference between achievement and development in multi-player game design, and what does any of this have to do with glory and shame? Achievement is all about meeting the challenges posed by game design. Development is your growth in the society of the game world. Achievement, in a competitive environment where hundreds or thousands are striving for a sharply defined set of goals, is glory for the winners, shame for the losers and also-rans.

Development comes not from your ability to achieve game goals, but rather from the ability of the game, intended or not, to reveal who you are.