“We’re all playing a role playing game, that’s what social media is” · 5:54am Jun 22nd, 2017
I was listening to the Note to Self podcast and they had the head creator of Black Mirror on to do an interview, and he said the most extraordinary thing about social media that I have to share.
(And so you know, when I say "social media," I include FimFiction in that as well)
We did a show counting down the most influential video games of all time. They weren’t in order of quality, they were in order of influence. And we put Twitter at #1. And people got really annoyed: “Twitter isn’t a game!”
Well it is actually. It’s a massively multiplayer online role playing game in which you play a character based on yourself—but who isn’t yourself—in order to gather followers and points and influence. That’s what it is. We’re all playing a role playing game, that’s what social media is. And that’s fine. It’s also an amazing communications tool, don’t get me wrong. But that’s what it is.
And that’s where dissociative mental disorders come in. If it was pitched to you as: “Do you want to play this social game?” […] It must work in the same way—when you get a load of retweets, followers, you get a notification—that’s the same endorphin rush you get as Mario collects a coin and it plays that sound effect and it just does something nice to your brain.
Several things clicked for me listening to this. The "selves" we use on social media really are radically different from the "self" we are in real life. And the way that social media works encourages this walling off of our personalities to show only the best, or in some cases only our worst.
It really is like playing an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). We all play the part we want to play, and pretend who we would like to be.
I think everyone encounters their first MMO a little differently, but I always liked the term "getting inoculated" to describe that first experience. I mean—MMO's are fun! They're great! There's something incredibly enticing about a game that will literally never end that you can just keep playing forever with friends. But at a certain point, perhaps a year or two in, the game starts to wane. At this point, the MMO player may continue forever, or swear off the entire genre of MMO's altogether. Because sticking with one MMO means practically devoting your life to it. It's their one fandom. Their one thing. They have to swear off, or else they're gonna be stuck there, missing out on every other fandom, nerdy hobby, and everything else there is to see outside the game.
So comes the term: "getting inoculated" to MMO's. Get an initial dose of it once, recognize it as awesome, but also recognize there's more to life than this one game.
Now, turn this around to Social Media. No one really noticed they signed up for an MMORPG when they signed up for Fimfiction, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Youtube and <insert your favorite site here>. But these services do the same thing for our brains as an MMO does. We get random loot from drops in MMO's, while in FiMfiction we get notifications of random story favorites. We talk to random people in MMO's, and we comment on things on Facebook. From a biological perspective, these reward/responses are doing very similar things for our brains.
But there is no "inoculation" phase for social media like MMORPG's. Because social media isn't a full-time attention grabber like an MMO. It's a microattention grabber. Two minutes here to check Facebook. Three minutes there to check Twitter. Ten minutes to catch up on the Tumblr feed. And a 15 second visit to Fimfiction every hour or so, just to check for new notifications. (Please tell me I'm not the only one guilty of this—I don't post often enough to warrant this kind of checking, anyway—I probably have a problem)
These interactions are quick, but they do add up over time and rob us of a lot of attention. We lose that ability to focus on one thing for a long period of time in order to get that random hit of a notification. And since EVERYONE uses them, there are very few people that have had that same inoculation experience using social media as they may have had playing an MMO.
Well anyway, I'm not trying to get anyone to quit social media. But I am grateful to understand why I dislike some social media so much. For example, Facebook is an MMO that everyone is on: parents, current and future bosses, and a plethora of other people to be disappointed in me. Pretending to be perfect is not a role I like playing.
But reversely, this is also a good reason why I like Fimfiction so much. It's one of the few places in my life I feel like I can genuinely be me. And being me with few reservations is a much funner role to play. Fimfiction is an MMO I'm genuinely happy to be a part of.
I'm not a character.
Trixie is simply Trixie.
I LIVE FOR THE FIMFICTION BELL
Makes me glad I don't have a Twitter. I already regret the two or so years I spent playing Maple Story. >:|
Good insight. fimfiction gameifies writing, which is probably why I'd rather write for fimfiction than for publication.
Ooh, nicely played.
Any new chapters?...
[10 minutes later]
How about now?!
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ME TOO! Ring bell! Ring!
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Hey man, at least you got MMO inoculated on MapleStory. Everybody's gotta have at least one MMO they try.
I mean, I spent all of middle school playing ToonTown online. I don't regret it, because middle school was a nightmare. But I'm also glad I know not to touch MMO's any more.
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I think this is actually an occupational hazard of using FiMfiction. The site is too good. It gives far more of a rush for writing/publishing than any other place I know of. Traditional publishing is just slow and not as much fun by comparison.
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I didn't realize readers could feel this as well!
I guess if you read enough unfinished fanfic, then yeah! That would happen.
Oh my word the unfinished fanfic is the bane of every reader's existence.
Although I feel like we've been down this road before regarding MMOs and social media...or was that someone else's blog I read? I read blog post archives so it may have been someone else's ancient history that I was combing through.
I dodged maple story and all that (runescape, etc.), mostly because I didn't understand the point of a game with no challenge and no goals. Cue DayZ mod (on ArmA 2), where I've probably killed a grand total of 2 players, died probably over 100 times, and have yet to see the game at a framerate above 30 when I play.
It's terrible. Of course, FiMfiction is in a lot of ways worse than FF.net because of the greater amount of reader interaction, meaning that you can feel simultaneously closer and yet more frustrated with writers and other users. The amount of distraction served up is so much greater for a given story, even if only for the addition of the ever-useful comments which of course make the whole experience even more transactional in the sense that authors now possess tools for a proper response. Did he respond to my comment yet? Have other people said the same thing? What does this mean? What speculation do these people have about the story?
I can't be the only one who actually read the story reviews on Fanfiction.net, right?
Thankfully I don't have Facebook or twitter or any proper "social media" but I did find it interesting to view it as a small-scale MMORPG. The version of ourselves we put online is the concentration of everything which we perceive ourselves to be and yet, at the same time I feel it reveals some of our greatest flaws and shortcomings to those paying attention. Some of that is, of course, predicated on what we reveal to others, the seriousness of our posts, if you will. Trolls or people who never engage with anything other than story comments are playing a different game, and of course reveal less, but I imagine, they also get less out of the experience, for whatever that may be worth (or for whatever soul-suckingness they might be dodging?). But for the rest of us, I feel like the comments, the stories, they are windows into our feelings about things. Even in fanfiction, the famous write what you know statement is still in full force.
How much of ourselves, our idealized selves, have we left behind on social media? How much of this will never be revealed to people we know in real life, and to what extent do we grow as people if the only version of ourselves we consistently acknowledge to others is the one whose faults are routinely ignored for the sake of simplicity or self-projection? Is it good to marginalize our faults?
The micro-attention might be far worse than a macroattention grabber could ever hope to be. Death by a thousand cuts.
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Oh, how I hate and enjoy forums and fanfiction sites so much.
Especially the abandoned fics. My goodness the plot bunnies scattered to the wind. I cannot tell you how many dreams I've had of half-written abandoned fics wherein I attempted to finish the story in said dreams.