Tribes
My tribe came from
struggling labor
Depression South
Eastern Illinois
Just before the
southern hills start
To roll toward the
coal country
--Ed Dorn
In
2018, after finishing my graduate degree a year before, I found myself with
needing more than my job to occupy my time.
And like I had many years before, found myself drawn back into playing World
of Warcraft (WOW). In the time since I’d left the game in 2011, a lot
had changed. While still at the level I
was when I left, they’d added three expansions, and were working on releasing
another one that was released six months later.
While my wife’s attitude toward my sitting and playing a video game as
opposed to doing something creative was still there, I jumped back in and moved
through the expansions to get to where the heart of the gameplay really
was: the highest levels. Some of my feelings about the actual gameplay
were basically the same: drawn from the
gambling industry, WOW has incentives for people to log in regularly and wile
away hours in their virtual world. In
WOW, players band together with others to solve the more complex problems, and a
solo player can spend days exploring this very detailed virtual world that
draws heavily on the fantasy, horror, speculative, and science fiction, and as
you play you are rewarded to make your gameplay a bit easier on subsequent
plays. Through regular gameplay, you’d
see the formation of loose communities that, at times, lead to real world
friendship. Yet, now, we had the
addition of services like Twitch and Discord that created a whole layer of
additional communities that may not actually be in the game world at all but
can watch someone else play it (Twitch) or talk to someone while they play it
(Discord)[1]. In addition, YouTube has jumped in by
creating yet another outlet where people can go to learn, discuss, watch, etc.
about what is happening in the game world.
We now had a much
expanded simulacra of a world that only exists virtually, and people are free to
comment, suggest on its creation in real time.
And they do. Blizzard is
bombarded on their own forums
with “suggestions” on ways they can improve, critiques on the direction the
game is going, and the toxicity of social media is spreading into various
pockets, where game developers are bombarded outside of their role while at
work. People seem to be acting out their
own tribal impulses in a virtual world and the shared interest in that world
isn’t enough to keep the larger tribal instincts from infecting this world
too.
Now
it’s important to note that I am parsing and defining tribe and community as
words that are similar but have specific differences. According to the Encyclopedia
Brittanica, “Tribe… [is] a notional form of human social organization based
on a set of smaller groups (known as bands), having temporary or permanent
political integration, and defined by traditions of common descent, language,
culture, and ideology.” Whereas, Community
is similar but adds the wrinkle of being “quasi-voluntary” because the members
often share the same geography or interests (but not always). So, while I think WOW had many elements you
find in a community in 2011, I now think that that community has fractured into
tribes. There are specific tribes that
seem to be erupting in this virtual space, and this fracturing is being
exacerbated by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites that
seem to be sorting us and leading to conflict, really toxic conflict.
For
example, “Austin” is a popular streamer (someone who streams their gameplay on
Twitch), who sometimes uploads content to YouTube as well.
London is a
popular YouTube personality, who streams on Twitch as well.
I think it’s fair
to say that Austin has a larger following on Twitch while London has a larger
following on YouTube.
So basically we’re
dealing with different platforms but both personalities are playing WOW, and
creating content around WOW.
Someone was
watching London on Twitch and edited a section of the stream out and sent it to
Austin.
Austin, whose
content on YouTube is quite often just edited versions of what he does on
Twitch, watched this edited version of London’s stream while he was streaming
on Twitch.[2]
In the edited
video, London accused Austin of “punching down” when he critiqued Lore (WOW’s
Community Manager) and sent toxic trolls to fill up Lore’s personal social
media.
From there things
just seemed to go off the rails: Austin’s
fans started hitting up London’s social media presence.
As could be
predicted, there were some trolls who took the opportunity to threaten London,
his wife, etc.
Other YouTube
personalities weighed in on the controversy via Twitter.
In fact one person
suggested that London was faking people threatening him to increase his
viewership, which, in turn, meant making more money.
It boiled over for
a couple of days and then, at least, three different YouTube personalities took
up the controversy.
Many of them took
issue with London’s insistence that as content creators they are also
responsible for the behavior of their fans.
Austin, and a fair
number of YouTube personalities, dispute that and think they are ultimately not
responsible for the behavior of their fans.
Interesting. But the root of the conflict sort of
ballooned, in my opinion, because it is all happening in a virtual space, and
in that space the conflict pushed people into tribes. In a Tribe, one can’t tolerate any criticism
of the leader and the positions that the leader takes. It’s about loyalty to the leader and
destruction of other tribes. Now Tribe Austin
wants nothing more than to kill London’s stream and lurks on his Twitch channel
hoping he’ll violate the terms of service and get demonetized as a result (a
gamer’s version of “cancel culture”), let alone the stress of having people
threatening you online. The new conflict
that seems to be brewing is to what degree are content creators responsible for
the actions (virtual actions) of their fans?
Of
course, these tactics are nothing new.
In fact, the NYTimes has a series out now on the 5 year anniversary of “Gamergate.” And while they recognize that it “…emerged
during the internet’s shift from a largely anonymous or pseudonymous culture to
one centered around personality-driven influencers” and acknowledge that a whole
new vocabulary was created: Trolls,
SJWs, Cancel Culture, PC Master Race, Doxxing, Tweetstorm, etc. as a
result. The tactics that only existed in
dark corners of the internet have now become standard operating procedure. Having any sort of discussion with people on
the internet runs the risk of becoming just a bunch of ad hominem attacks or
refutations of historical definitions to fit a tribal narrative. For example, when I pointed out in comments
to an online article that historically fascism has been identified as “right
wing” I ended up getting a long response about how it really is “left wing”
because the Nazi party demanded fealty from German businesses. Never mind that my contention really was that
fascist is “right wing” because it argues for a “return” to “Traditional”’ society
(which doesn’t include the other-namely Jews) while “left wing” isn’t about a “return”
to Tradition but actually argues that Tradition (namely religion) is
detrimental to human well-being.
Instead, he cherry picked my definition and tried to redefine the terms
because he didn’t like his “tribe” being aligned with fascists.
As
we spend more time in virtual spaces, arguments over individuality, personal
responsibility, and the power of discourse continue to shape perceptions and we
find ourselves responding to what is happening virtually and seeing it in the
evening news, linked and discussed on Facebook, Twitter, and splashed across
the last vestiges of print journalism. In
2015, I wrote a paper for graduate school that examined how virtual communities
functioned (or didn’t) as communities. I
concluded that “…despite the work of some science fiction authors to convince
us otherwise, we still live with people who may not think like we do. We have to get along.” Yet, since then we’ve watched these sort of
monolithic communities (people who play videogames) fracture around personality,
discard the things that brought them together in favor of supporting their
chosen leader or spokesman. And when
nuance is injected it seems to matter little as people sort of further entrench
themselves in their beliefs because they’ve become skeptical of
everything. It all means we aren’t
getting along any better than before and it seems to be getting worse.
[1]
Yes, the more advanced players were capable of communicating in game in 2011,
and Blizzard had added a lot of that functionality into the game since, it
wasn’t nearly as sophisticated then as it is now.
[2] Yes,
it was a YouTube video of a guy streaming his gameplay at the same time as he
watched someone else’s gameplay, another version of Baudrillard’s “Simulacra.”
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