MMORPG for Understanding and Improving Global Ethics: A Personality Typing Approach

AUTHOR
Jocelyne Kiss, Sidi O. Soueina, Behrouz Far

ABSTRACT

The Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) allows the formation and development of concomitant virtual communities through special types of discussions, where actions can have various real life effects. In this kind of games players prefer disguising theirs identities and they are able to carry out actions of different complexities seeking to achieve different goals and embodying a personification within a given virtual community. In this line of work, our interest lies beyond the effects of “catharsis” and “distance”, which are designed to theatrically represent the world within the game environment as we show that the MMORPG are not solely intended to produce procedural effects. In fact, MMORPG is engendering a growing interest to address the social and ethical problems and further the management of the non-quantitative components of the game – as many are starting to tackle the implementation of relevant interfaces on the web. Such examples include for instance introducing a panel of different types of e-democracy Kraland, which proposes a ludo-educational mode in the creation of virtual governments, or even of others more famous plays, such as Word off warcraft, or more lucrative ones as Project Entropia. These plays have player, groups and conversation management goals, all of which are inherently founded in social life. This role is normally assigned to the regulator of the play, where it gives them the responsibility of censuring certain behaviours and restoring the rules of consensual common: an rather ill-definition of what is called cyber-ethic.

Thus, the concept of cyber-ethic, rests on a fragile balance between the freedom left for each player to use the interface and the respect of the statutory values which in our view should not only be limited to the virtual communities there in, but rather go beyond that to include the human values. Although the complexity of the data to be treated in these cases as well as the number of games allowed with a single RPG all make a computational solution more difficult, one of the current objectives of these game engines still remains the automation of such monitoring tasks. Furthermore, the knowledge of the personality of the player and the possibility of being able to predict some of these actions constitute considerable information in the value of the game nonetheless – this is why the interest of the manufacturers of these engines is gearing towards more complex informational contents such as eyes-movement, for the sake of behaviour classification.

We propose to explore the advantages of these standard unquestionable systems of recognition of personality. Through an experimental example of MMORPG, we implemented play that relies on a framework do discover players personality and allowing to test various social and personal conditions. Our work is driven by the fact that interest in Personality Traits Recognition has grown in the past few years for several reasons, of which we mention, the need for human emotions’ recognition and representation.

In this work we will discuss the foundation of a reliable methodology, based on the Theory of the Enneagram, whereby the relationship between the central motivator called “ego-self” as the primary originator intentions and the Human Actions can be defined. We argue that the use of classical personality recognition tests is not reliable simply because they explicitly invoke the Motivator by directly asking questions. Based on a previous definition of personality as being the set of basic fears and basic desires, we are introducing a model of an experimental MMORPG game whereby user’s selections embed patterns of actions that hint to personality traits. Our interest further lies in educational impact within these virtual communities to potentiality recognize certain features of personality and the behaviour of the players. We will discuss the advantages of game moderation and game control as well. While presenting the concrete prospects that our interface offers, we will propose a discussion around the cyber-ethic concept within these virtual communities emanating from these plays.