Multicultural Test Run

In Omerta, a mafia style international text-based MMORPG, players have been deciding to not let Turkish players join their in-game "families". This is according to Melinda Jacobs' article "Multiculturalism and Cultural Issues in Online Gaming Communities".

Jacobs' article looks at why many players don't want Turkish players in their in-game "families". She says that through surveys, players said that many of the Turkish players (though not all) didn't follow the rules laid out by the individual in-game "families" and often acted on their own, causing problems for the other players. Therefore, players stopped inviting Turkish players into their "families" because of the potential risk.

The author broke down what exactly made this discrimination against Turkish players. She looked at if this was racism or nationalism against the Turkish players, but ruled these out because the refusal of inviting Turkish players was based on their actions/potential actions rather than their race or nationality. She decided that this was culturalism, which she defines as "discrimination against the actions/nature of a person which are influenced and created by a culture's ethnocentric approach, traditional mindset, and beliefs in a specific culture/nationality." (Jacobs)

The Turkish people are a very proud people according to Jacobs, and this is part of what causes the problems in-game with the other players (along with the fact that their English skills are not very good according to one of the players surveyed). Jacobs says that the Turkish players will take something said the wrong way and act out in order to defend their pride. Defending their pride is a part of their culture, so in an online setting where acts to save that pride are not particularly smiled upon, problems occur.

The author concludes that the closest analogy of how this problem would best be worked out is this: Europeans when they visit America must abide by the rules about alcohol such as the drinking age even though in most of Europe the drinking age is between 16 and 18. In the same way, in the online game setting, players must abide by the rules of the people in charge, even if those rules are culturally different from their own.

Jacobs finishes the article off by saying that these international games online are like test runs for the ever increasing multicultural and global world we live in and that it is important to see these problems and learn to fix them now so that we can avoid conflict in the future.