Avalon hill diplomacy: player attitudes

Avalon hill diplomacy: Everyone enters into a game in order to have a good time, but some people, when playing, have their good time at another's expense.

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Avalon hill diplomacy: player attitudes

As Russia, you have just conceived the perfect plan. Turkey, after you have wooed him into taking a southern plan of attack, will be left wide open this coming year. Your Black Sea fleet has a free run at Constantinople or Ankara, and with Sweden and Rumania the early lead is yours. Results are back and, in haste, it seems you ordered both your fleet in the Black Sea and your army in Galicia to Rumania.

Frantically, as you begin to mutter a series of profanities about how your incompetent GM must have done something with your correct orders, you search through your outgoing mail box, find the set of orders and realize that it is you, not the GM, who is incompetent.

Don,t tell yourself that this hasn,t happened to you before and, if you,re like many players, you usually spend the next few hours thinking of how you can convince those six other people that you are not a complete buffoon. Now, if you are looking forward to this trying to explain how to try and cover for stupidity, since many attempt to do that quite often, you are out of luck.

However, it seems that the overall attitude of most players is that they take a more personal approach to the game. It seems that while these people are friendly at the beginning, as the game progresses, or digresses in many cases, personal feuds begin to take root. Why has E-mail Diplomacy caused this to develop, or has this developed in Diplomacy naturally due to the result of human interaction and trust, which is integral in a standard game? Research observing novice Diplomacy players over the last three years has shown that, to these players, the game is simply a game, nothing more.

What is surprising in these games is that the players lie to others, attack them, call them everything you would expect guys this age to say and, then in the next game, work with that guy for an allied victory. This is what one would expect in a game that would require a bit of deceiving and trickery in order to win, but in games with more experianced players, the people who play like this seem few and far between.

What has caused the creation of this attitude in online play is not something that one can easily put their finger on. However, what would seem to negate this idea of taking the game personally, relatively anonymous E-mail, has taken on the opposite of the logical effect. One player said, when asked about this subject, was that E-mail addresses allow people to act in ways in which they would not act if speaking with, in this case playing face to face with, the person directly. E-mail allows people to hide behind a mask of anonymity that allows them to act in the way that they appear to us, a way that they would never act when they were looking into the eyes of the person they were speaking with.

Hopefully this will not be viewed as a player standing up on his soapbox and pointing out the flaws in PBEM Diplomacy, but to try and recover what has been lost by the global push for more person to computer interaction and less person to person interaction. By forgetting the roots of the game and digressing into digital Diplomacy, a great part of the game is lost and, unless we can do something, may get long forgotten.'sports

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