A Unique Audience

Today's online gamers have fought past common misconceptions. Many of you may question just how real or powerful the audience influence is in multiplayer online gaming. Most online games today have no persistence or scale to them at all ”they are but a series of evanescent encounters among total strangers on a variety of hosts scattered across the world, from which no record is written. Although the power of audience influence is present in these games, and many of the principles I will discuss apply to them, the focus of this paper is on what people refer to today as, for the lack of a better word, massively multiplayer (MMP) games . It is this segment of the online multiplayer medium that has the potential to attract a broad enough cross-section of people in the future to make it a major entertainment medium one day.

Certainly, many of you are thinking, however, that even the large-scale, PW multiplayer games don't have an audience influence over players that comes remotely close to the effect of real-life, face-to-face people in the same room with you. People don't actually see one another. People don't actually know one another. Most don't live anywhere near one another. What force can any audience in the virtual world of cyberspace truly exert on people?