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A Unique Audience Many of you may question just how real or powerful the audience influence can be in multi-player online gaming. Most online games today have no persistence or scale to them at all - they are but a series of evanescent encounters amongst total strangers on a variety of hosts scattered across the world, for hich no record is written. Although the power of audience influence is present in these games, and many of the principles I will discuss apply to them, the focus of this talk is on what people refer to today as, for lack of a better word, massively multi-player games. It is this segment of the online multi-player medium that has the potential to attract a broad enough cross section of people in the future to make it one day a major entertainment medium. Certainly many of you are thinking, however, that even the large scale, persistent world multi-player games can't wield audience influence over players that can rival the effect of living, breathing people in the same room with you. People don't actually see one another, don't actually know one another, most don't even live anywhere near one another. What power can any audience in the virtual world of cyberspace truly exert over anyone? The power of this audience, as well as the reason it's unique, stems from the most important difference between multi-player games and all other forms of entertainment; namely, the audience is the medium. This is because the audience in multi-player games is unlike any audience in any other form of entertainment, as participant and audience are one. As a player, you are at once participant and spectator, beholder and creator of the game environment. In this there are no analogies, nothing comparable to this environment, other than the experience that people unfamiliar with gaming claim the online gamer is lacking: life. 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. While there are plenty of games that have no audience, or have no audience/player/entertainer boundaries, none has the ability to so consume and involve its participants like online gaming, as everyone who has been involved with the medium at any length can attest. 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. ___________________________________________________ |
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