To my surprise last night, I overheard the evening news talking about prayer and sin. After a quick search, I found out the Vatican has issued Ten Commandments for Driving. It seemed a bit silly at first, but anything that makes drivers safer and friendlier is a good thing.

I wonder when (if?) MMO playing will be so widespread that it will prompt the Vatican to issue Ten Commandments for Playing an MMO. 2020, perhaps? Until then, here’s a few I thought of:

1. Be kind and courteous.
2. When using forums, think before you post. (See Posting and You.)
3. Share.
4. Ask before you prompt. Before challenging someone to a duel or inviting them to your group, send a private message to ask. Don’t repeatedly challenge someone to duel.
5. When going through a small dungeon or area and encounter another player, ask to group with that person before killing the boss. It’ll save the other person the respawn time.
6. After killing a foe, don’t set up camp at their body to wait for them to resurrect only to kill them for a third (or more) time.

I think players have a habit of ignorance; They don’t realize the avatar on the screen (either in the game or on the forums) is a real person. Or is rude behavior as prevalent in real life as well? I’ve been lucky to develop circles of friends in both virtual and real worlds; Not everyone in these worlds may be nice, but I’m very thankful to have an environment of kindness among these friends.

What commandments would you add to the list?

Related Links and Previous Posts

• Interacting with people makes good games great
• What Uru Live could have been (and now could be)
• Raph Koster posted Commandments for Online Worlds last year, with a target towards game developers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Gaming, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.