What struck me was one of the highest rated comments on the Slashdot post:

by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 06, @02:55AM
In other news, I just killed Revolver Ocelot in MGS. It was a really tough fight but I managed to pull it out. Can I get my own Slashdot article too?

It’s … really dumb, obviously, but beyond that it shows  a staggering misunderstanding of what online gaming *is*.

Comparing even the most casual of interactions in an MMO to completing something in a single-player game digs right into the heart of the online disconnection a lot of players have nowadays. It’s possible that guy was just being a dick and saying MMOs aren’t that interesting, but I think it’s more likely he buys into the same logic that’s created the incredibly foul Halo 3 multiplayer experience. A significant portion of younger players, I think, just don’t care that there are real people on the other end of the line. They type things, they say things, and to them the voices and text responses are just as much a part of the game as the orcs and weapons. Like we’re NPCs put there for his amusement.

I’m cranky on this, I know, but John Gabriel’s mighty theorum is powerful stuff. Meanwhile, the connection, the sense of not being alone, the community are all greatly serving those of us who see the little text popping up in the lower left-hand corner as more than just background noise.

If Fun is generated by learning new skills, and you’ve been playing games for decades, it’s fair to consider the effect. You can look at these things in terms of a calcified critical perspective, and it makes for incredible rhetoric. The medium has changed substantially on their watch, though – irrevocably so. New people are making, playing, and thinking about games. It takes time to calibrate your instruments.

Sayeth Lum:

Belgiumgate is kind of silly, and not just because I like typing the word “Belgium”. If you think a blog author is going to be bought off by a comped account worth a bit more than what I paid for a bowl of pho this afternoon… that must be damned good pho. And it wasn’t. I’d want AT least some Pad Kee Maw before I give up all my principles.

Sayeth Cameron:

There are two ways to get subscriptions to online games: 1) Get a job and pay a bit of money each month, or 2) Write about online games for long enough and get involved enough with the community (by reading, writing, responding, and attending industry events) that companies will (occasionally) grant you one. Tobold doesn’t get some kind of special status because they like him better than anyone else. He’s proven his dedication to writing about this stuff and developed a substantial following due to his frequent, thorough, and insightful posts.

‘Nuff said.

Update: The Freeman gets it right. Again.

In any case, the bottom line is that having ‘rights’ is more trouble than its worth. I want to make it super clear here that my opinion here isn’t ’siding with the devs’ – it’s a purely selfish notion. Games with ‘rights’ aren’t games anymore. They’re extensions of reality and by definition no longer exist purely for fun. With ‘rights’ comes a legion of unwanted components like tax laws, intellectual property rights, etc, etc, etc … all BS categorically not having anything to do with gaming or fun. I don’t want to have to submit a W2 everytime I join a new gameworld, and then think about my virtual income come tax time.

The biggest thing here is that once users start ‘owning’ their property, publishers and developers are just going to abandon the marketplace. The reason? If I ‘own’ the information in a company’s database, are they ever allowed to turn that off? After all, it is my property and if I don’t want to give it up I shouldn’t have to. So every moment of downtime and the possibility of going out of business/closing out the service becomes moot – that’s ‘my’ stuff in there and they can’t take it away from me!

Dr. Bartle made a fantastic analogy at the event, and it’s one I’m going to use pretty much all the time now. World of Warcraft is a game, full stop. In objective reality, despite the huge number of differences, it is effectively as much a world with ‘rights’ as an instance of the board game Monopoly. Asking for ‘rights’ to the data on Blizzard’s servers is like complaining when a person’s fictitious property empire collapses into nothingness at the end of a Monopoly game. There’s no there there, and so pining after some misplaced sense of identity or ownership is a fool’s errand.

These gameworlds are fantastic, special places. As long as you pay your bill (or whatever) publishers have every reason to make sure you have access to your characters and data. But don’t think of it as “owning virtual property”. That’s a fallacy. Think of it more like “renting a game save”. You’re paying these companies for the right to keep going from where you stopped.

Trust me, if some well-meaning judge ever does get us into the situation where my helm or axe is ‘property’, with all that implies … we’re in serious trouble.

The problem with banning is that it feeds into the ego of the troll. See, trolls live and die by the amount of attention they garner. They’re attention whores, basically, though most of them are a different breed than the Guild drama queen or the popular kids in school. On the Bartle grid, they get their jollies on the ‘Killer’ part of the map; they play the game (in forums and on websites) mostly as PvP. So, as they see it, getting banned is a good thing. It’s a further ‘injustice’ they can shout to the rooftops, evidence they can hold out that the Man has him beaten down.

I’ve compared trolls in the past to the rampaging advertisements from that classic Simpsons Halloween episode. The only way to truly kill a troll is to stop paying attention to it. Give other readers the tools to block them out, marginalize them, and forget about them. Banning just creates overhead for staff and feeds into the troll’s cycle of pain.

Obviously I probably fall into the category of someone not smart enough to moderate a forum, but that’s just my two cents.