MMO’S: Variability in Experiance

An MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) is a genre of video game in which the game is played in connection with the internet, allowing a large number of players to move and interact in the same space, the server. Most of these games involve picking a species, sex, and character class, with the choices defining the type of game play experience. For example, a mage would cast spells, while a warrior would fight with a sword. A big part of game play is joining forces with other players in groups called “guilds”, and taking on enemies.
There is very little direction in MMOs, so the guilds usually end up competing with each other, creating a politically slanted experience of two groups of people trying to achieve dominance. In World of Warcraft, for example, the payer picks a faction, Horde or Alliance. Once decided, the player joins with others in the faction to hunt down their rivals. This leads to “ganking”, in which a high-level player finds a lesser opponent and harasses them, killing them over and over again to keep them from achieving their goals. In EVE Online, a game about spaceships, players must accumulate large amounts of in-game wealth to upgrade their spaceship. Many players become banks, taking the money of their faction members and keeping it safe. In the game Terra, within each faction are political ranks, achieved through duels between faction members. The players devised a way to quickly get popular candidates into office: rather than fighting back during the duel, they would simply allow themselves to be killed, causing their political runner to be skyrocketed to office.
MMOs demonstrate variability in experience, because the people in them are so unpredictable. Anything could happen during playtime. Also, with the variety of classes, there are many ways to play, making each play through different. It is perhaps the greatest example of Variability in new media today.