There's an interesting story on Wired about Middle America's latest moral panic: MySpace. Or more specifically how lascivious teens are using the social networking service to hook up and occasionally 'make out' with other users. Worried parents probably won't be best pleased to know that the site's creators are now looking to extend the service onto mobile phone - a move comparable to when drug boffins invented the cheaper, more easily distributed and highly addictive crack derivative of cocaine, thereby increasing their potential audience by millions. To users, MySpace is compelling, social, often goal-driven. So is it an MMORPG?
On the face of it, MySpace has nothing to do with gaming, and yet it shares many characteristics with the MMORPG genre. Users create a character profile, which may or may not share similarities with their real-life identity. They then form clans and engage in quests with likeminded individuals - it's just that here, the quests spill out more readily into the real world. Also, in MySpace the quest can often be to have sex, rather than to capture the magical crystal of Sevratez.
It was clear at mobile phone technology exhibition, 3GSM, that mobile phone companies have noticed the MySpace effect. Social networking apps are moving in alongside multiplayer games to claim a slice of all that delicious data revenue. Elsewhere, Microsoft is pushing the social side of its Xbox Live set-up as much as the straightforward gaming element. And then, of course, in casual gaming sites like AOL, Yahoo, and RealArcade participation is as much about the community as it is about playing chess.
Clearly, the boundaries between what defines a game and what defines a social service are collapsing. Okay, MySpace has no cogent narrative, no specific goal for the user to achieve - both of these are key elements of the 'game' as it is traditionally classified. But then in World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs, many activities are user-defined, often on the fly (this is more like the RPG as it was originally found in the pen and paper version of Dungeons and Dragons - good timing, then, that D&D is finally finding its way into the MMO sector...) - the 'plot' and the 'setting' are often merely venues for the social element - like chatting someone up in a theme bar.
If you check out the latest issue of Vanity Fair and manage to get beyond the arresting cover image, you'll find a great article on how young socialites (including monstrous playboy Jeremy Jackson, the ex-child actor who played Hobie in Baywatch) use MySpace as a pulling challenge. Rules and etiquettes are emerging - the building blocks of gaming. It's like an augmented reality version of Japanese dating sims.
So here's a intriguing consequence: the videogame violence that America has worried about for the last decade may well fade from the right wing agenda thanks to the new threat of social networking. Airy theories about the possible effects of game violence on impressionable minds pale into insignificance when compared to the actual, physical dangers - imagined or otherwise - that MySpace dating could lead to. Dating as gaming? Oh the horror. To the conservative consciousness, sex has always been more terrifying than violence.
