Confessions from the Top

Despite my attempts to avoid it, my mind continually returns to this blog post. Why, I don’t know, but something about it really resonates with my experiences as a gamer.

I find it really hard when people make commentary about the gaming community and gamers when they have not experienced the community themselves, or have not bought into the idea of being a gamer. Commentary tends to come off as derisive or insulting at worst, and inept or incomplete at best.

Part of this might have to do with the idea that being a gamer, or being an integral part of a gaming community, is a serious time investment. A bottomless time investment one might say. Bottomless in that you can continue to invest more and more time into a game or a gaming community and, if it’s a good game, the game will continue to defeat your efforts to limit it, to end it, to defeat it.

In order to truly make commentary about gamers and the gaming community, I find that you have to be burned out. By that I mean that the best commentary I’ve read has come from gamers that have bought in fully to the game, the idea, and the community and walked away only after they’ve become the best and found it wanting. Not wanting in the sense that there experiences have been meaningless or worthless (to be sure, some of my most intense memories involve Starcraft tournaments), but wanting insofar as there is no end to the amount of involvement one can have in the game.

In analogue life, there is usually a limit to how much time you can put into any organization dictated by the willingness of those participating in the organization with you. For example, I could put 60 hours a week into the dance team here, but if other people aren’t willing to put in a proportionate amount of time or dedication, then my efforts to make the team worth are largely superfluous. Try as I might, I can’t create a team of my own accord. I can provide the framework, but beyond that I can’t force people to participate.

The MMOG world changes this in that a leadership role can be responsible for hundreds to thousands of players, online in parts 24/7 and all hungry for progress and any means possible to get a foot up on the competition. Where a company CEO responsible for similar numbers of people has defined responsibilities to prevent him or her from getting burned out or overwhelmed, no such roles exist in online communities where fiscal responsibility has not forced evolution. Leaders can put in an infinite amount of hours because there is no support framework controlled by fiscal responsibility, and it is routine to see good leaders get burned out.

This is not to say that the top players are good leaders – in fact, top players can be very egocentric and ignore others (which is how they get to the top). It is not surprising, therefore, that top players tend to be around much longer and produce much less commentary than community leaders who get burnt out and leave quietly.