There are basically a few pre-set conversation patterns I employ when interacting with locals of various age groups – knowing how to control a conversation allows one to easily fool locals into thinking that you’re a hyperfluent genius. For example, young Chinese men enjoy talking about video games (I’d wager that something like 70% of college students are wholly employed as Gold Farmers). While these conversations provide an opportunity to reminisce about the glory days, they also reinforce my oath never to dabble in goal-directed-behavior-usurping digital crack. Then at dinner one night a Chinese friend indicated that he had been playing ‘DotA’ until 5am, when asked why he looked so strung out. Upon hearing the sacred phrase (‘Doh-tuh‘) a Swede came running over (from quite a distance) and revealed that he also was addicted. I thereupon broke into a fit of childish glee.

DotA is a fan-made modification for the Warcraft III engine, and is pretty much the only thing that’s come out (maybe aside from Portal / AE) in the last decade that’s worth playing. Very astounding that it has such international appeal – the Swede referred me to this trashy Europop song, (the depiction of bored girls is spot on – I’ve ruined at least two relationships through overplaying). A quick consult of Google Trends reveals that English – despite being language of origin, is not even in the top ten list languages used to search (dominated instead by Tagalog, Indonesian, Thai and Chinese). Whether or not this provides the opportunity to bring people closer together is debatable – for example, it’s unclear how to translate ‘omg noob stfu kthx’ into Chinese. Probably best that no one does.

MMORPGs (World of Warcraft and Eve Online in particular) have become hot topics in social sciences – primarily because you could conceivably run interesting social experiments without nasty hazards associated with actually harming people (like seeing if player-to-player insurance mechanisms develop when you threaten to blow up everyone’s space ships with an anthro-economic supernova). While interesting, these experiments still take place within a setting dictated by the creators, with extensive limits placed on the types of interactions that can conceivably occur. For example, numerous economists plotz upon learning that WoW features a marketplace where players can trade (oooh… aaah) – that’s because the programmers put it there, Sherlock. There’s nothing “spontaneous” about it.

On the other hand, fan developed games like DotA can tell researchers a lot more about the development of self-governance, at least as it relates to the democratizing potential of technology. For example, the creation of enforced ban lists for cheating, behavior rankings, informal rules for conduct during games have all been critical to the lasting appeal of DotA – for a long time there have been competing ban lists and rankings that hosts can use to discriminate against various types of players. Fascinating! 

The whole project works and stays interesting because of a cadre of dedicated player-developers; and the constant feedback provided by an obsessive community of fanboys. There has to be potential for commercialization (charging for professional player / team matching services?) It’s amazing that Blizzard hasn’t formalized DotA – to some extent perhaps they are content to let it run as an extremely popular experiment that their own developers can build off of in the future.