It is interesting that you use this analogy.

It so happens that I’ve spent a good deal of time playing World of Warcraft (as I have written about a few times), which, of course, also has PVP as well as PVE elements. And if I were analogizing participation on Less Wrong to aspects of WoW gameplay, I would unhesitatingly say that the sort of patterns of communication and engagement which I prefer (for myself) and admire (in others) are most like the PVE, not the PVP, part of WoW.

What I mean by that is the following. World of Warcraft famously includes many different “things you can do” in the game (the better to appeal to a broad player base)—you can do solo questing, you can advance trade skills, you can explore, you can go hunting for exotic pets, you can engage in “world PVP”^[1], etc., etc. However, all of that is in some sense peripheral; there are three sorts of activities which I would consider to be “core” to the experience: roleplaying, organized PVP, and dungeons (including, and especially, raids).

Dungeons and raids are high-end PVE content, requiring the cooperative participation of anywhere from 5 to 40^[2] people. Organized PVP is battlegrounds and arenas—that is, teams of players facing each other on defined battlefields, fighting to achieve some objective (or simply kill everyone on the other team before they do the same to you). And roleplaying is, by its nature, more amorphous and less inherently structured, but in overall form it boils down to using the chat functionality and the character emote features to act out various scenarios (which are defined wholly by the players—think of any text-based roleplay, except with character avatars being portrayed by WoW characters), possibly aided by some aspects of the “actual” game world^[3].

Now, the thing about roleplaying in WoW is that there aren’t any “rules” or “game mechanics” that are imposed on it by World of Warcraft, the computer game. The players can, of course, define and follow whatever rules they like, but this has no more force than following the rules of a tabletop RPG (like D&D). It’s all just text. You can have your character slay purported dragons, just as you can in a TTRPG, but this is unconnected with any actual WoW-game dragons—it’s just text. Even if you have your actual WoW character take this or that WoW-game action—including the killing of actual game creatures—to add verisimilitude to the roleplay, the two things still have no connection with each other except that which is imposed by the shared fantasy of the roleplay.

In other words—in terms of the game mechanics of WoW—roleplaying is epiphenomenal. It does not involve or result in accomplishing anything. (Which is not to say it can’t be fun!) Any in-game character actions taken as part of roleplaying, per se, have no requirements imposed on them, and cannot in any meaningful way fail, since their WoW-game consequences as such as irrelevant to the roleplay.

This is very different from high-end PVE.

I’ve written about WoW raiding (see the links at the start of this comment). It is a very seriously and determinedly cooperative environment, and high-end raiding guilds/teams exhibit a degree of coordination, of unitary action, which is deeply impressive. (And it’s very easy to get used to this sort of thing, to start to take it for granted—until you try, for example, to defeat some difficult raid boss with a less experienced or more ad-hoc raid group, and find, to your dismay, that what seemed easy, even boring, for a team where everyone knows exactly what to do and calmly does the correct thing every time, is impossible for a team without that degree of both individual skill and group synchrony.)

In high-end WoW PVE (in raiding, in “heroic” dungeons, etc.), success and failure, for all that they are made up of only bits and pixels, nevertheless very much satisfy the condition of “not going away when you stop believing in them”. If you don’t perform the correct in-game actions, you simply will not defeat the encounters. You either do it right or you fail.

And there are all sorts of ways to try to ensure that everyone on your team performs as well as is required. But if someone is doing something incorrectly, which they must do in order for you to defeat some raid encounter, either they fix their mistake, or you replace them, or you don’t succeed. There aren’t any other options. Similarly, if your team is failing to defeat some encounter(s), either you identify the problem and fix it, or you don’t succeed. It doesn’t matter how anyone feels about the situation, or about each other, or about anything else. The game code has no concern for any of that. You must play correctly, or you will fail.

I emphasize again that WoW high-end PVE is a deeply, thoroughly cooperative endeavor. You cannot, by construction, gain any benefit whatever from causing any other member of your raid team to fail to defeat a raid boss—because it’s the whole team that succeeds or fails, together. If you cause any other team member to perform worse, you sabotage your own chances of success. (Certainly there are “free rider” problems, and similar game-theoretic concerns—but those can, at worse, motivate you to invest less effort than you otherwise might; they offer no reason to direct your efforts against other players.)

And (not unrelatedly, I think) almost all good high-end PVE guilds in WoW—and especially those raid teams which take on the most challenging of raid content—tend to be friendly, supportive places, with camaraderie aplenty… while, at the same time, expecting, and demanding, nothing less than one’s consistent best, from all their members.

My point is this: the sort of distinction you are proposing, seems more to me like the distinction between roleplaying and PVE, than like that between PVE and PVP. (I can think of no aspect of participation on Less Wrong which I would analogize to PVP in WoW or any similar game.)

If you wish to “play” in an unstructured way, explore, etc., that is fine. There is no reason to abjure such activities wholesale. But in order to accomplish anything non-trivial—to collectively take on a real challenge of any sort—one has to make demands on those who wish to take part. This has nothing to do with opposition, with any adversarial context or attitude. It’s not PVP, in other words. It’s PVE with real stakes.