Week 1 (cont'd)

It occurs to me that my response to the Thomas article might not have been as clear as it could be. I'm not overly familiar with Diablo II (I played Diablo, but never got very far), and it's not likely that all of us are familiar with Diablo II or MMOs in general. So while I was digging through my Haven & Hearth stuff I found a picture that I think may be able to get to part of my point that race and racism in gaming can be more confounding than it ought to be, and that PKers tend to be involved for their own reasons.

Pictured above is the aftermath of a raid on a peaceful town. Industry and agriculture was demolished, valuables were stolen, and the only witnesses died. Now some context, the culprits were an organized community who made it a point to rob and pillage other people's efforts, but were not sympathetic to any specific race, creed, or nationality. They were a multinational organization that entertained themselves with griefing. Their leader at the time was a Black Swede who personally found this to be the height of hilarity. They pillaged an English speaking village primarily because they could, but what of the swastika? In this case the picture is without disavowals, but the invocation of a charged symbol like this is quite purposeful. They're relying on the recognizability of the swastika as a taboo symbol to hold a type of semiotic value to the future witnesses, that they hold the transgressive power to wield such symbols without consequence (also, power over life and death). There is some connection between the power to invoke taboo speech and symbols and exercising power over other players safety and security; they're both social breaches for starters. For Thomas' KPK group, the use of race is related to the power over life and death (or in games, the power to grief), because the power to offend and the power to kill other players is interchangeable in relation to griefing itself, and griefing is often an end to itself. The leader of the raid in Haven & Hearth is far from a white supremacist, that wouldn't make sense to his personal place in the world, but I can account for a long, involved history of griefing from this player. It necessarily adds more questions than it answers, but how should one counter the use of racism to offend in a general sense when its usage relies on the audience to be sensible enough to be offended? I would have liked to have known how large the KPK phenomenon was, how many members, how active they were, and so on, but I don't have the Diablo II history I'd need, but it did ring familiar to me (from several games, actually).