Monthly Feature:
Treading into the Darkness
October, 2004

Ten years after the advent of the Massively-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) phenomenon, a small group of independent developers quietly prepares what is clearly the darkest, most sinister world yet created.  Developed largely under the radar screen of mainline game sites, reviewers, and players, Sociolotron is an endeavor to provide a robust, adults-only MMORPG, freely providing players the opportunity to engage in the cyber sex, rape, drug use, prostitution, and organized crime impossible in major games.  Slated for release in late 2004, it is currently in closed beta:  a stage ironically open to all interested players over the age of 21, provided one is willing to pay for prerelease play. On its surface, Sociolotron appears to be a natural and highly-anticipated expansion of the MMORPG genre for its maturing demographic.  However, deeper probing of the consensual agreements, the marketing of the adult features, and the attitudes expressed by the game developer and select beta players in a recent interview reveals disturbingly flawed thinking.  In this edition of the Monthly Feature, we visit the depraved world of Sociolotron and pause to consider where the responsibilities for criminal behavior — real or virtual — lie.

The game
Sociolotron is based in post-apocalyptic London, circa 2024.  The end of the modern world came with a biological weapon jointly developed by Ex-Soviet, North Korean, and Arab terrorist cell scientists.  The strain of bacteria released by the terrorist cell was cultivated to digest raw petroleum — once free in the environment, it destroyed oil fields throughout the world.  With the collapse of the underpinnings of the global economy, countries fell to the control of local warlords.

The Sociolotron London is a mixture of contemporary urban society and tribal magic.  "Everything goes, from magic to modern day dance club."¹  Players can campaign for government offices or coordinate organized crime rings in illicit drug sales and prostitution.  Non-Player Character (NPC) police patrol the streets and will occasionally arrest characters if they chance to observe illegal activities such as indecent exposure, rape, assault, robbery, torture, and murder.  If caught, characters are brought to trial by a jury and judge of other real players.  Sentences range from fines to extended jail time.

Character generation is typical.  Players select their characters' body build, skin color, hair, facial features, and degree of attractiveness.  Characters have a base set of abilities:  Strength, Dexterity, Charisma, Constitution, and Intelligence.  These abilities can be affected by events in the game, such as spells and illnesses.  After these abilities, characters also have skills in three categories:  Production Skills (blacksmith, electronics, tailor, chef, carpenter, biochemist, goldsmith, brewer, glassblower), Social Skills (prostitution, dancing, observation, oratory, stealing, resistance, medicine, dominance/submission), Combat Skills (melee, parry, firearms), and Sexual Skills, which include Urges (Sado Urge, Maso Urge, Exhibition Urge, General Sex Urge, Drinking Urge).  Skills can be improved as specific activities are performed and experience is accrued.  There is a rudimentary party system that permits players to form groups to explore and fight NPCs for experience.

Sociolotron uses a reputation system, called "Moral."  Like karma, Moral fluctuates continually with the actions of the player and determines the success of social interactions with other characters and NPCs.  If a character has sexual relations with multiple partners, another character in a public place, or in exchange for money, Moral drops.  Likewise, if a character confines sexual contact to private property, with only one other character, or without physical injury to his or her partner, Moral rises.  Similarly, violence against other characters and stealing will cause Moral to fall.

In addition to abilities and skills, many gameplay features of Sociolotron will be familiar to regular MMORPG players.  Characters can formulate new hallucinogenic drugs by mixing found substances together.  Drug manufacturing is part of the crafting system, which also includes creation of healing salves, clothes, jewelry, and weapons.  Players can purchase homes and lock down items within it.  Every player has a bank room of limited capacity to protect items and currency.  Descriptions of the combat system are vague, but suggest that Sociolotron has included both traditional blades and magical weapons that are recharged with energy clips.

The core of the game — and arguably the most innovative and interesting development in gameplay — revolves around sexual contact.  The developers have created an elaborate system that calculates brain chemistry of urges, external stimuli, and stages of physical arousal to simulate an actual biological response.  Each character has highly individualized erogenous zones that can be changed over the life of the character.  Dialog boxes present players a variety of approaches and sexual positions to use with other players.  Sexual contact is also linked to consequences:  characters can contract sexually-transmitted diseases.  Female characters can be impregnated, with pregnancy lasting for 9 months game time.  Upon giving birth, females continue to lactate for 2 years game time — a handicap that depresses abilities for its duration.  Infants are whisked away by the game engine and accelerated to age 21, where they are available as playable heirs at a university.  Heirs become important in consideration of Sociolotron's death system.

When players engage in combat, hit points are deducted with each landed hit until total health reaches 0.  At that point, a character is either knocked-out (KO) or killed.  Kills in Sociolotron are quasi perma-death.  NPCs never kill characters.  If an NPC completely exhausts a character's hit points, that character loses some money in the bank, is re-equipped with standard clothes and weapons, and is transported to a neighbor room.  The character's belongings are placed in a box and dropped where he or she was KOed and can be picked up by anyone.  If another player reduces a character's total health to 0, the victor can choose whether to KO the character or kill it.  Once killed, a character may choose to "Go to Hell."  In Hell, the character is still playable, but cannot return to London.  If the character has any heirs, the player can choose to bequeath all belongings and money to them.  All characters in Sociolotron naturally age and die upon reaching the age of 70.

Despite all of the promises of new adventures in gameplay and content, the game itself is grossly disappointing.  The graphics are terrible.  While images for marketing purposes reveal highly detailed and individualized characters, the actual display is crude.  The interface looks like a bare-bones Visual Basic application from the mid-1990s:  there are no textures or decorative fonts applied to the buttons and frames.  Gameplay is primarily confined to a small window in the main screen and by default employs an oblique angle, reminiscent of The Sims or Diablo — hardly the viewpoint one would want for such a visceral game.  Much of the action is text-based, another letdown when considering the graphic possibilities.  Most features of the game will be unavailable at launch.

However, the most arresting — indeed, alarming — qualities of Sociolotron lie not in game mechanics or quality of graphics, but in the social and philosophical questions it raises.

A question of autonomy, dignity, and control
While Sociolotron may stand to be a watershed game for introducing adult activities into mainstream MMORPGs, its implementation of sexual and violent activities should give players, game developers, and game distributors pause.  Sociolotron is masked in marketing material introductions as an MMORPG that includes options to engage in sexual contact with other characters — "the first good adult game."  A review of its website's "The Idea behind the Game" page, however, quickly shows that Sociolotron is rather designed to be a depraved free-for-all, where all activities — consensual or not — are game.

At first blush, the comments of developer Patric Lagney and Sociolotron beta players in a recent Wired article can be dismissed as appropriate and acceptable under most rights preserved under statutory and federal laws.  Beta player Ginger says, "If you can't handle virtual bad things happening to you in a virtual world, then you really shouldn't be playing…  This place has been created to get away from the mainstream, to give players a dark environment with which to play in.  If they don't want a dark environment where bad things happen, then they should go back to (The Sims Online) or wherever else it was they came from."²  It is the very cusp of Freedom of Speech — to allow others the right to freely express themselves without threat of persecution or censorship while having the freedom to excuse oneself from that expression.  Discomfortingly, though, Sociolotron deprives its players of control once within its world.  While its developers proclaim that freedom to remove oneself from a disagreeable situation or message is what protects their right to develop such a game, they deny the same freedom to players who choose to play.

The introduction of the game notes that in preceding MMORPGs, "griefers could easily ruin [other's] gaming experience…  More than that there were no means to deal effectively with grief players who just want to ruin the gaming experience of other players."  The developers claim "we did our best to provide all the means you need to deal with grief players.  You can see to it, that a character goes to jail! [sic]"³  Interestingly, though, a review of the game mechanics reveals no true penalties for going to jail.  There is no loss of experience, and sample screenshots of the prison show naked, shackled women in the cells.  Furthermore, the entire structure of Sociolotron is designed to support grief playing:  there are no flags for rendering your character available for violent activity, since everyone is fair game; anyone can be raped at any time, since there are no sanctuaries or safe states; your attacker decides whether to fully kill your character or simply KO it, in both cases stealing your possessions.  Unlike in real life, nowhere is safe in Sociolotron.  This is not an entirely acceptable situation, because many players may be participating in Sociolotron to engage in consensual sex, explore the pregnancy and heir features, see how the player-controlled court system works, or participate in an MMORPG that blends fantasy and science fiction into a socially-relaxed version of The Sims.  Within Sociolotron, "adult" activities are synonymous with criminal behaviors and a gross lack of control over the welfare of one's own character:  a development decision that will ostracize the larger, more moderate percentage of the MMORPG demographic.

But the disturbing questions surrounding Sociolotron are beyond issues of player control.  Ren Reynolds, writer for the blog Terra Nova and a reviewer of Sociolotron, noted that violent acts such as rape in an MMORPG "can actually be a valuable social experiment."⁴  That a development firm or a game reviewer may take such a view to justify any activities in a game is especially alarming.  Social and psychological experiments conducted by sociologists and psychologists must be thoroughly reviewed and approved by institutional review boards before any subjects are recruited.  Full consent statements must be provided that outline all risks and rights of the subject.  Most importantly, true social experiments include a debriefing at the end to answer all questions and provide counseling.  The possible activities in Sociolotron have been observed and supported in the literature to cause long-lasting trauma when inflicted in real life.  It seems grossly irresponsible of developers to create a medium in which traumatic activities are encouraged between players without first studying the possibility of ill effects.  While players are obviously insulated against actual physical harm themselves, the question of whether trauma through a character is possible becomes critical when one considers the unique nature of MMORPG characters.

This is particularly potent through the words of beta player Phoenix:  "We get very emotional about what happens to our characters, as we do put a lot of work into them…  But we also need to remember (that) when we signed up for the game that we were all warned about what can and will happen in the game.  And we have to figure out how our characters will deal with the 'emotional damage.'"⁵  Unlike in many console games or first-person shooters (FPSs), players create sophisticated, complicated characters in MMORPGs.  These characters grow and change over time and with experience, and since the outward appearance, all actions, and all dialog are directed by the players, those characters are therefore an extension of the player himself.  Every player possesses a different degree of attachment to his character.  The Daedalus Project — a longitudinal study on players of MMORPGs — has examined the relationship between players and their characters, particularly that accomplishments in MMORPGs can be a rewarding, immediate substitute for the lengthier goal-achievement process in real life.  There is always a danger that some players inordinately attached to their characters will suffer greater trauma than others.  In a game genre in which players have died out of neglect of their own health in preference of maintaining a virtual character, it is not possible to ignore player psyches.  Furthermore, while there is a temptation to dismiss sensitivities under the adage "if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen," corporations in 21st century Western culture are not absolved of responsibility over consumers.  In the extremely litigious United States, it is the height of corporate irresponsibility to place all burdens on the public — the developers are creating a liability nightmare for themselves.

The most sinister issues lurking within Sociolotron lie with the nonconsensual, violent sex.  Broadly speaking, there are generally three rape situations:  date rape in which a partner pressures an unwilling partner with whom he has a relationship to engage in sexual relations for his personal pleasure; rape in which the male attacker is acting on hatred and rage against women and forces an unwilling partner into sexual relations in an act of power; rape in which the male attacker suffers from sociopathy or psychopathy, is incapable of regarding other people as unique, thinking, feeling individuals, and forces an unwilling partner into sexual relations that ultimately lead to torture and/or death.⁶  The individuals playing Sociolotron will not be involved in dating or friendship relationships with any of the pixilated characters, thus eliminating the possibility of any rape activities being performed in a date rape situation.  That leaves the rape activities being performed out of hatred, anger, or disregard of women.  Indeed, beta player Lord Foucault notes that his character "does it for a few reasons...  He does it for power, and it is motivated by opportunity."⁷

Games ranging from tag, checkers, and chess to EverQuest^®, Lineage^® II, and World of Warcraft™ all incorporate killing another player — either symbolically ("knight takes pawn") or through more realistic representation (brutally killing another character in a graphically rich video game).  Games from the dawn of society generally revolve around conquest and warfare, and from time immemorial, there is an honor associated with death on a battlefield.  That honor comes from the ability to die with dignity — to be part of an equal, fair fight, to have fought one's best, and to have died for a cause, even if only defending oneself.  Rape is something entirely different.  Rape leaves the victim far worse than dead — in addition to being physically wounded, the victim is critically demoralized, traumatized, and psychologically damaged.  Julian Dibbell, writer of the Village Voice article "A Rape in Cyberspace," notes that "in-world rapes rise above other crimes, even though each is no more than a reconfiguring of 1s and 0s.  I think sexual crimes are interesting,' he said, 'because unlike killing or (other) physical violence, there is a real psychological element of degradation and humiliation.'"⁸

Is this the type of evolved MMORPG world that awaits players in the future?  Sociolotron developers were quick to describe in their game notes that heirs are accelerated to age 21 in order to prevent players from using minors in sexual situations.  Furthermore, they explicitly state that child pornography is not permitted, the system cannot be used to plot criminal behavior, players may not be threatened beyond the gaming world, players may not initiate a real relationship through the game, and although racial, sexual and religious discrimination are part of the game world, they are not acceptable Out of Character.  Yet what is in place to police these policies?  If the developers have specifically designed a world in which characters can exploit each other and rape out of hatred, rage, or disregard for one another, if they have clearly stated "We wanted to create a world which is as real as possible in many details of our daily life, yet foreign enough to be somewhat exotic and recognizable as a fantasy.  We wanted the player to be able to do things that are also possible in real life, although he would probably never want to do them in reality, because they are evil and would probably cause punishment," where will it end?⁹  Child pornography has always been regarded as one of the most evil of social tastes.  If considering forced, unconsensual sex, violence, and degradation of the victim, how far is child pornography from rape?  And what hell lurks on the horizon if such developers may one day defend features involving minors by argument that their system is only a fictional world to live out evils not permitted in real life, that these are only fictious characters, that if an individual chooses to enter the world, he does so by his own risk?  The psychological literature is filled with studies of habitualization to repeated exposures of stimuli.  Do any developers consider the risk that including violent or purient sexual content will encourage and perseverate fetishism in some?  Or is this once again a responsibility soley shouldered by the users?

Part of living in organized society is being vigilant for the wellfare of one another.  Societies succeed while there is order and excel when constituent individuals are protected and safe.  Most importantly, though, society matures when individuals take the time to question whether the capability to execute an action automatically gives the right to execute that action as well.  Whatever each player's individual and private morality dictates, Sociolotron promises to only propagate these issues and questions.

The world is a dangerous place, and in some ways, it is unfortunate that the same dangers we face on darkened streets and alleys may one day haunt our MMORPGs.  For now, the only solace is that by refusing to enter the world of Sociolotron, one will at least temporarily be guaranteed a modicum of safety in the virtual MMORPG world.

Flippandra is a Senior Web Content Developer/Designer with a small pharmaceutical company in the Northeast.  She holds a BA and MA in psychology and has served as a research assistant with The Counseling Center of Yale University.

She is also a survivor of sexual assault.

Notes:
1, 3, 9. Sociolotron website. Available at http://www.sociolotron.com. Accessed on 10/14/2004.
2,4,5,7,8. "Pursuing the Libido's Dark Side." Daniel Terdiman. Available at http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,63997,00.html. Accessed on 10/14/2004.
6. Notes from Clinical Methods:  Personality Assessment lecture. Al Wakin, PhD. Southern Connecticut State University. 1997.

All images are the sole property and copyright by Sociolotron.