Online Game Event Sparks Player Riot 758
Grimwell Online is carrying a story entitled When does an Online Game go too far?. It details a post to a news group about a world event in the newly released A Tale in the Desert 2. The online game, which simulates an ancient Egyptian culture, was full of angry players after a developer-run event used openly discriminatory language against the female gender. Details on the event can be found at the ATITD2 Wiki, and commentary can be found on TerraNova.
Speaking as a player... (Score:5, Informative)
Essentially what happened was this guy was a trader, and his presence in an area was announced over the global channel. Thus, people came and lined up in the dozens/hundredish to see him.
Eventually one of the women stepped up to her place in line, the guy asked her 'Who is your master, woman?', and from there the righteous indignation began.
Players littered the area by dropping piles of sand and mud, filled the NPC's inventory (thus preventing him from moving) by giving him tons of sand, lit bonfires, spammed the chat channel constantly, etc. Eventually the NPC was forced to withdraw.
The ultimate motivation, as it has been said, was to pose a moral challenge to the players of the game. Do they trade with the nasty sexist NPC, or do they spurn him and his rare and exotic goods?
Personally I found the whole reaction to the event beyond pathetic. People rioted and basically trashed the area around the trader, but after that they went and bitched and moaned for 20ish pages on the message boards about how the developers were at fault, how they were so offended, how they were cancelling their accounts, blah blah blah. Pitiful.
Re:Ancient Egypt? (Score:4, Informative)
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Evan
Re:Not if you pay money and cant play (Score:4, Informative)
They were trading for general everyday (in-game) commodities. The whole point of the merchant event was mostly role-playing as well.
Re:Perfectly acceptable given circumstances (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For the sake of argument... (Score:3, Informative)
You're missing an important point...the person wrote a story about her character being raped. Basically it was "look, I'm a Dark Elf, I'm evil, this is the background of my character that explains why." The character was underage; don't remember if the player was or not.
It was written and posted in some sort of fan board, not in the game (I don't recall if the board was in any way associated with Sony).
So the issue there was what a player has the right to write about one's own character, out of the game. A very different case from what a character, PC or NPC, is allowed to inflict on other PC's in game.
Re:Perfectly acceptable given circumstances (Score:1, Informative)
Die you ignorant dumb fuck.
Re:A good experience (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.womenintheancientworld.com/women_in_
Re:Ancient Egypt? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not Historically Accurate (Score:5, Informative)
Check your facts, cowardly anonymous (Score:5, Informative)
That is debated among historians. While Egypt did have female rulers, it does not appear that women were equal among the working masses
What isn't debated among historians is that women in many other parts of the world in that day and age were not treated at all equally, and indeed were treated as property/slaves/etc by many cultures.
Had you RTFAed, you would have noticed that the character being played was not from Egypt, he was from a distant land. Historically, the odds that said culture would be sexist as hell (to put it mildly) were quite high.
As others noted, the players took modern day equal rights for granted. Something they really shouldn't be doing, in reality today with Bush et. al. bent on rolling women's rights back to pre-1960s status, and certainly not in a role playing game set in ancient Egypt.
Riotinig (in game or otherwise) is so asinine
Re:A good experience (Score:2, Informative)
Your inability to see a difference between Darth Vader and Hitler or a slave trader is particularly offensive, I might add.
Re:Whaaaaa! (Score:0, Informative)
What is it with Slashdot? You are way off the mark, do you just have to sound right to get modded up? Anyway, if you want to know the truth about Ancient Egypt; In Egypt, women were much more free than their counterparts in other lands... though they were not equal with men, both men and women in Egypt accepted that everyone had their roles in ma'at (the natural order of the universe)... and that the roles of men and women were different.
In Egyptian art, the Egyptian stereotype of a woman was that of wife and mother, the husband being the head of the household. She worked indoors (mostly), Women were seen to be slim and beautiful, even though a fat stomach in men equated with wealth and power (the rich could afford to eat more than the poor!) Noble women did not work in these paintings, but women are seen to be dancers, musicians, acrobats, sacred 'prostitutes', maids, kitchen staff, field workers and much, much more.
They weren't "slaves". This is some man projecting his fantasies of enslaved women onto the game. And it's incredibly insulting.
You are right! Many of them were considered sacred prostitutes or maids! That is A LOT DIFFERENT than slavery! This is just another example of women getting their panties in a bunch because they don't like the truth about what happened to them so they are trying to rewrite history.
Speaking as a player... (Score:2, Informative)
I wasn't actually there because I don't bother to go to any of the 'stand in line, get stupid rare crap' events. However, I heard of what happened there and have... witnessed... a 'riot' before.
I would suspect that many of the participants weren't really outraged over the sexist trader, but in the mood to just trash stuff on principle. Since the game lacks a way to deal with pent up aggression, and people were feeling pissy over the slow development of the game as compared to the last version, they took it out on the trader.
Many folks who decided to 'quit' afterward weren't quitting because of the sexist guy himself, but were already disgruntled over how the game was progressing. The trader was simply the spark that lit the brushfire.
Re:Whaaaaa! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Whaaaaa! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.thekeep.org/~kunoichi/kunoichi/theme
If you were going to be honest in your plagiarism, you would have gotten to:
"but women are seen to be dancers, musicians, acrobats, sacred 'prostitutes', maids, kitchen staff, field workers and much, much more."
You should have plagiarized "Women's Education and Career" and "Women and the Law". Of course, your choice of plagiarism source doesn't go into the legal aspects, which I focused on, which were *very* progressive toward women (as I mentioned, even guaranteeing equal pay for equal work; they could also offer testimony for trials, start legal proceedings, determine inheritance for her children, etc).
Here's the summary of the article that you plagiarized:
"Egyptian women had a free life, compared to her contemporaries in other lands. She wasn't a feminist, but she could have power and position if she was in the right class. She could hold down a job, or be a mother if she chose. She could live by herself or with her family. She could buy and sell to her hearts content. She could follow the latest fashions or learn to write if she had the chance. She loved and laughed and ate and drunk. She partied and got sick. She helped her husband, she ran her household. She lived a similar life to that of her mother and grandmother in accordance with ma'at. She was an ancient Egyptian woman with hopes and dreams of her own... not too much different we woman of today. "
Seriously - how dishonest can you get? No surprise that you posted as AC.
Re:Whaaaaa! (Score:2, Informative)
a reference to the first player getting Jedi in SWG... on msnbc?!?!?!
Re:He was SUPPOSED to be nasty (Score:3, Informative)
It's hebrew for mesenger. Also commonly used for "angels".