Welcome to 'Blogged Out', the news report that looks at the world of developer blogging and the conversations being had with the community at large. This week we ask: but what is war, anyway?

Mutual Ganking Pact

One of my favourite (and most dispersed) online conversations has to be to the ongoing discussions about the status of PvP in MMOs, which regularly take place across the blogosphere*. Recently there was another outbreak of such musings on Terranova, when Nate Combs decided to have another run at the topic in a piece entitled ‘The Fallacy of War’.

“I'll suggest that 'war' is a lousy way to think of what goes on in mainstream MMORPG PvP. Yes some players wish it were different, and yes perhaps some developers are happy to go along with this paltry fiction, thinking it color on the backdrop. However, it seems to me that this sort of nonsense does a disservice - both to those in real war and to those on the exterior trying to figure out what the heck is going on in these virtual spaces, even the ganking ones. I'll claim that what is going on is more like 'sport' and ill-mannered PvP is just bad sportsmanship - filled with raw unfairness and even obnoxious play, but 'war' it is not...”

Combs goes on to argue that we should think of PvP has analogous to sports, and the participants as aspiring to something akin to the ‘honourable warrior’ hierarchies of ancient cultures. Could systems of honour and sportsmanship provide a way for thinking about what goes on the conflicts of MMOs?

The Spoils Of War?

Perhaps, but as astute Terra Nova readers note in the comments following Combs' article, the only reason mainstream MMOs are analogous to sports in any way is because the death means little to the dead. There are no resources to fight over, and even in Dark Age of Camelot or RF Online, where territorial PvP is the norm, the battles just go round in circles, without ever genuinely harming the interests of the combatants.

The one model where this isn’t true is Eve Online, where its resource-rich environments, complex infrastructure and player-driven economy means that there is real and lasting impact to PvP conflict. Alliances and corporations really can be broken, bankrupted and scattered. Sure, they can always pull themselves back from the brink, but it isn’t like being ghosted and running back to your corpse for the cost of a few copper pieces. This stuff hurts.

Cuddly Toy!

Eve’s wars might be a far cry from those faced by the real world, but it’s hard to see them as analogous to sport. With guerrilla war, economic war, mercenary war, and vast week-long territorial tussles being the weekly menu for most Eve pilots, there’s plenty of reasons why gamers should prefer to retreat to PvP games where they risk less. After all, would a level 60 WoW-player really want to risk the destruction of his rare item in combat? That is what Eve players risk every day.

*Pity it’s blogosphere and not blogoscape. I mean, ‘sphere’ has connotations of geometry and symmetry, when to me the blogging community seems more like complex terrain – information as landscapes. The great river of BoingBoing and all its tributaries. The Gamasutra info-market on the edge of game town… I’m just rambling, aren’t I? Okay, then.

[Jim Rossignol is a freelance journalist based in the UK – his game journalism has appeared in PC Gamer UK, Edge and The London Times.]