A Unique Medium

The power of this audience, as well as the reason it's unique, comes from the most important difference between multiplayer games and all other forms of entertainment: The audience is the medium. This is because the audience in multiplayer games is unlike an audience in any other form of entertainment: Participant and audience are one. As a player, you are, at once, participant and spectator, beholder and creator of the game environment. In this there are no analogies , nothing to compare, other than that experience that people who do not understand claim the online gamer is lacking: a life.

In short, fully realized, online gaming is a narrative told by the audience. Because the multiplayer game contains the force and influence that groups of people bring to real life, but does so in an imaginative setting that real life too often either lacks or dares not attempt, multiplayer gaming can have a social impact on people more powerful than real life can provide. Thus, the influence of the online game audience, without anyone physically being in the room with you when you play, can rival or exceed its real-life counterpart . While there are plenty of games that have no audiences, have no audience/player/entertainer boundaries, none has the ability to so consume and involve its participants , as everyone who has been involved with this medium for many years has seen, often much to their amazement.

But the medium is primitive. Unlike any other product offered for sale, MMP games are not welcoming ”often quite the opposite . They require action and learning on your part before anyone will pay attention to you, and rarely is it obvious what a new player is supposed to do next . Thus, the first experience most new online gamers experience is humiliation and shame.