Protests in the real world dominated this past weekend’s news, and while I surfed around for an in-game equivalent to cover, I couldn’t find much of one (though I found people selling themed accessories in Second Life!). That said, protests in MMORPGs aren’t unheard of, and I mean actual protests, not memorials and vigils. World of Warcraft players will remember multiple protests throughout that game’s history, mostly against the design of the game, but sometimes against Blizzard’s policies. How about the Million Gnome March, for example, which caused game outages and threats from the studio claiming protests were “griefing”? Or the 2006 protests against Blizzard’s stance on LGBTÂ guilds — which the studio reversed? How about the multiple Occupy SAB protests in Guild Wars 2, which ArenaNet allowed to transpire without much fuss?
I’ve never been to an in-game protest that I recall [Edit: I’m wrong. I have! See comments!], but I did stage my own one-woman protest in Star Wars Galaxies, where following the pronouncement that “no one wanted to play Uncle Owen” because moisture farmers were boring, I promptly rolled a character whose primary role was moisture farming on her permanently installed moisture farm. I made a lot of credits and had a lot of fun selling water on that character, right up until the day the servers were sunsetted. Silly? Maybe, but it gave me some life to prove that the suits were full of shit and didn’t really understand the first thing about their own playerbase.
Have you ever participated in a protest in an MMORPG?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
