Task 16. The Culture of Backstabbers

I think that I am mainly a part of the MMORPG gaming culture. This can take a lot of your time, to a point where I have met people that only stop for 5 hours sleep then log back in again, to just casual play where you pop online for an hour once every so often. However the level of depth to the gaming world I believe is directly affected to the amount of time you play, the longer you play the more real it feels. I also to a lesser extent play FPS online these are more my casual area of gaming where ill pop on shoot about and then log off.

I think the problem with the gaming culture is that for a new player it can be a very scary experience. You will usually start off by meeting someone who thinks they know it all and will use all the slang to throw you off plus along with having a very short temper you begin to think, why am I subjecting myself to this when all I want to do is have a laugh. That’s where the problem lies, people are too obsessed with ranking and stats that they forget they are just meant to be playing a game and unless you commit your life 24/7 to a game you will never attain high enough stats to reach that hallowed leader board thus making it all futile anyway.

However despite my grim outlook you can get lucky if you search hard enough. I’ve met a lot of people on MMORPGs some just normal guys that live in different countries who just wanna play a game and have a laugh. Then there were others who were playing 24/7 and slowly becoming paranoid and some that were just plain idiots. Thing is with the gaming culture its much like real life in terms of variety of people, its just that high score offer that tips some over to becoming cheaters, backstabbers and general annoyances and due to no consequences they’ll always pick that easy route. That’s where games have got to change and have bigger punishments for cheating and not even allow cheats or exploits in the first place, and it can be done Guild Wars started off with lots of bots and trading exploits but it soon tracked down all the bot users and shut off their accounts, readjusted the economy so that the bot users didn’t effect item prices and then used weekly updates to fix any new exploits in the game, most of which to do with skill combinations that made users next to invulnerable. I think this is the answer to the backstab gaming culture, constant adjustment and improvement as you can always rely on humans to find a bug that can be exploited in some way.