Groups and Responsibility

To start this off I'd like to outline a little scenario that I ran across the other day in World of Warcraft that is the inspiration for this upcoming post. I will also try to explain some of the things I am referring to. The other day I was running a dungeon (requires a group of five people). When we started one of the group members asked if we could skip a few of the bosses. Everyone in the group agreed to this and off we went barreling to the first boss we couldn't skip. After this boss died, the person who had asked up to skip ahead dropped group and left the dungeon. At first I wasn't sure why he dropped but, after thinking about, I came to the conclusion that he probably dropped because the item that he was going for didn't drop off the boss.

This was perhaps a round about sort of way to get to the point of this blog post but I felt that the story outlines it. Do we, as players, have any sort of obligation to other players with whom we group? I think that, perhaps, that question is too broad to be examined in just a blog post so I'll trim it down to something more manageable: Do we, as players, have an obligation to complete a group objective when it is possible for us to do so? I will offer a tentative answer here in the form of a maybe. The reasons why I say maybe are that there are some questions that need to be answered before we can determine that any obligation exists. Is there any implicit obligations in joining a group? Is there such a thing as an unstated group objective? There are likely more concerns than these but I want to focus on these.

The reason why I ask if there are any implicit obligations when joining a group is that groups are simply assembled and set inside a dungeon. In theory it is up to the players to decide what they are going to do in that situation. They don't have necessarily try to kill bosses since there is no in game mechanic that would force them forward once they have entered a dungeon. With this in mind I would say that there are, strictly speaking, no implicit obligations towards completing a dungeon when joining a group for one. At least in terms of game mechanics. There does seem to be an assumed goal behind joining a group for a dungeon and that is to try to complete the dungeon. This is a community driven goal rather than a designed goal but I think it can be safely said that it is an implicit one if that is the normal behavior of groups. I would say that this question must be taken as a maybe even if, in practice, we follow the assumed goal in pretty much all cases.

This does hinge on there being such things as unstated group objectives in the first place. I would like to argue that there unstated group objectives depending on the type of group. This is a more general question since I think it applies to any type of group. As an example for this, let's say that I joined a sales group. In that case, the unstated (or it wouldn't need to be stated) goal is to sell something. It is implied by the very name of the group. Other goals of the fictional sales group would have to be stated somewhere. So if one were to join a dungeon group then one would inherit the goal, or obligation, of what the group entails. Namely, running the dungeon if we go by the assumed goal of the dungeon. If one were to just join a group that wasn't specifically a dungeon group then there wouldn't be this unstated group objective.

Now there might be some question as to whether we have any obligations towards anonymous people in a game but I want to put that question aside. This isn't because it isn't a valid question but because it's one I think lies outside the scope of this post. I have the impression that we do have some obligations towards anonymous people but I don't want to get deeply into it.

So while the conclusion that I come to is a maybe (leaning more towards we do have an obligation in groups) all of this could have been circumvented by simply making a statement up front. In that sense he would have discharged his obligation by stating specifically what he was going to do. The rest of the group would have had to decide what to do then (allow him to continue running with us or replace him) but his obligation would have been gone. Perhaps honesty is the best policy even in a video game.