Groups of Players as Groups of People

If someone makes a statement with which you disagree, you might want to take issue with them. There are social norms that dictate how far you can go with your riposte—verbal abuse

warrants in the first instance only a verbal defense, for example. Although this can get out of hand, on the whole it works. If an individual says something, then other people can challenge them about it.

What if it’s not the individual who makes the statement but an organization of which the individual is a member? If a political party issues a general pronouncement, then that announcement is on behalf of the party’s members. If you disagreed, you could reasonably expect to bring it up with any members of that party you knew, to take them to task. Sure, they might not agree either, but what to do about it then becomes their problem.

It gets fuzzier for groups that people are members of non-voluntarily. If two countries are at war, should they round up each other’s nationals and intern them? It happened in the 1940s. The innocent suffer, but the argument is that far fewer innocents suffer overall than would if enemy agents were free to wage a campaign of sabotage behind the lines.

Terrorism is another area where this logic can be applied. If you know that all terrorists are members of a particular religious group, can you intern members of that group that haven’t committed any crime but that are acting like they might were they given the chance? Membership of a religion is voluntary—plenty of people convert to other religions—so why not? This happened in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

I’m sure you can see the slippery slope here. By taking a series of seemingly short but justifiable steps, pretty soon you reach the stage where individuals are frightened to get on a bus because of the color of their skin or the way they dress. In virtual worlds, the effects of stereotyping are not quite so worrying, but nevertheless there are a number of areas where people accept the status quo without perhaps considering what that means.