Abstract:

After creating an account and viewing the opening CG clips, a player's first interaction with an MMO game is usually the character creation screen. Without experiencing the subtle and complex mechanics of the game, the user's choices are influenced by visual information. Since they only have brief summaries of the game-play dynamics, players rely on style and fantasy-gaming conventions as they decide on the appearance, class, and race of their first character. Race has become a particularly important element of character creation, as many games distribute races into opposing factions. Massively multiplayer-online games have inherited the conventions of monstrous races from fantasy novels, movies and P&P settings. The term “indigimon” refers to digital indigenous monsters: the representation of an indigenous cultural-cline as a variation of the colonizer-human form, a “humanoid,” in digital games. Some of the most exaggerated indigimons come from the MMORPG, World of Warcraft, which features native North American 'tauren' and South American trolls. It is also a convention in current MMO games to divide races into factions. World of Warcraft has the “Horde” and “Alliance” factions, Dark and Light's races are divided into Dark and Light factions, while RF Online presents players with the choice of Accretia, Cora, and Bellato. This is similar to the choices that players have always had in fantasy gaming from Dungeons & Dragons to Knights of the Old Republic. In the MMO environment, however, unrestricted choice in character creation presents a threat to the game's balance. In a traditional game with teams, a set of rules exists limiting the amount of players per team. In some MMO games, however, it is up to the players to distribute themselves into balanced factions. When World of Warcraft's “Honor System” launched, players experienced the inevitable “zerging” of Tarren Mill and Crossroads. Alliance players, who far outnumbered Horde players, relentlessly raided these Horde towns, killing players, quest givers and other NPCs. To address faction imbalances, designers would have to place limits on the types of characters that players could create, therefore balancing the population of any given server. Alternatively, the races and their organization into factions would have to be designed to distribute player preferences more evenly. The IndigiMMOn project is being developed to research the demographics of racial passing in MMO games. After collecting demographic information, the project will use a mock character creation system, and track the preferences of different player groups. By determining which group of players prefer lithe elves, scrappy undead, hulking orcs and squat gnomes, we can identify problematic faction composition before the game's launch.

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