Location Taken: Lake Crescent, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008
First off, I have no specific thing to say about the photo. I had nothing that worked with the subject I’m thinking about, so I went with a generic-but-pretty photo of a lake that’s otherwise tough to talk about.
Anyway, now that that’s clear, on to the topic at hand.
The MMORPG I regularly play, Guild Wars 2, has been running an election themed story arc for the last two weeks. It pitted “typical good guy” Ellen Kiel against “greedy businessman” Evon Gnashblade. (Their characters are more complex than that, but they can boil down to that without much effort.) An opening had formed in the City Council of Lion’s Arch, and both of them wanted the job. And it was up to the players to decide who won.
Now, this wasn’t just “vote for text string A or text string B”. This decision actually will have a small but lasting effect on the game, beyond just which of the personalities would be affecting the politics of the city. There’s a dungeon known as Fractals of the Mists, which has (currently) eight random maps of which you get three to complete per run (plus a bonus map that always adds in as a fourth in certain cases). It’s got a lot of features that are designed to make this an “infinite dungeon”, where you can always ramp up the difficulty to try and fight a tougher challenge than before, so lots of people play in this dungeon, working their way up as high as they can. Which, since the current best level people get to requires 50 or so runs of 3-4 maps each, means seeing the same nine maps far too often.
Both candidates offered a new map to be added to the fractals, and since it’s one of the few long-lasting changes from the election, it became a point of contention. Ellen Kiel offered a look into the moment of explosion of the Thaumanova Reactor, which was powered by chaotic forces. The remains of the reactor are still causing problems, teleporting in random beasts and leaving pockets of wild magic around. On the other hand, Evon Gnashblade promised a look into the Fall of Abaddon. Abaddon was one of the six gods of the Humans in this world of Tyria, but he rebelled against the other gods, was exiled, and subsequently went mad. He caused a lot of problems for the inhabitants of Tyria, and was eventually defeated as part of the storyline in the first Guild Wars game. In other words, a look into an epic battle of extreme importance to this world that culminated in the fall of one God and the rise of another.
So, here you have a choice between an explosion of chaos and an epic fight of divine importance. Guess which one got the most attention from the various forums and other places associated with the game. Based on all the campaigning those people did, both online and in game, it looked certain Evon Gnashblade and his Fall of Abaddon fractal would win.
The results came in today. Ellen Kiel won.
Mind you, I thought long and hard about which one I’d rather have win, and Ellen Kiel was my preference. Personality wise, I find her a bit flat, but well, I’ve got a weakness for engineering disasters and the like. The story of the reactor sounded far more interesting, and the place has outright fascinated me ever since I first saw it. But that’s my own odd quirks, and with all the campaigning, it seemed less and less likely for her to win. And then she did.
I wonder if it’s actually because of the active campaigning by the other side. You see, the election wasn’t a “one person, one vote” thing. Lion’s Arch is a city of pirates, and buying the vote is a proud tradition. So you could put as many Support Tokens into the bin as you could get your hand on. There was even someone standing right next to the voting place outright selling Support Tokens. Now, you could get them lots of other ways too, and you accumulate a lot just from playing the game even without trying. This means that one determined person who went out of their way to do the things that gave more tokens could counteract a hundred people who just tossed in the handful of votes they got naturally.
My hypothesis is that because of the campaigning making it seem like a landslide victory for Evon, his less-fervent supporters didn’t try that hard. They tossed in all the tokens they got for him, but didn’t go out of their way to get more. The Ellen voters, on the other hand, thought that they were outnumbered and knew their votes would have to have more weight to matter, so they sought out more and more tokens. This ended up tipping the balance.
Why do I think that? Well, I did mention I was an Ellen supporter. I’d collected well over a hundred tokens to vote for her with, and if I hadn’t misread the time that the election ended, (I thought “pm”, it was “am”) I would have cast all of them for her, after spending a noticeable amount of gold to get the item to double my votes temporarily. I still gave her some 50 tokens in support earlier, to the 10 I gave Evon (you needed to put in votes for both to get all the achievements). And I was a dispassionate supporter. I very rarely play in the Fractals of the Mist, it’s just not something I enjoy that much, so even though I’m curious about the reactor explosion, it won’t change how I play the game. And really, I would have been quite happy with either candidate winning, since Evon was the more interesting personality. So I can just imagine how much more effort people who actually cared put into the election, if my half-hearted support was strengthened as much as it was.
So instead of a wave of dispassionate people voting for the “good guy” or the developers of the game setting up Ellen to win from the start, as some people are claiming, I suspect it was just a quirk of human psychology that ended up making the less-vocally-supported person win due to the supporters on the other side. Our brains are full of that sort of strange wiring, after all.
