At the risk of picking up on something which has already been addressed elsewhere, I want to spitball about the concept of democracy in virtual worlds.
Yes, yes, we all know the arguments: users want democracy but can't be trusted to exercise it; democracy is not fun and so doesn't belong in a game; it's the developer's world, and they spend a lot of money to build it, and if users don't like the absence of democratic involvement well, they can take a hike. Of these, the only one that I ever bought was the idea that it was the developers' world and they could set the rules.
In another life I wanted to be an architect, and these days I still spend too much time reading about urban planning and the like. And I keep getting echoes of the same sorts of issues there as I see in VWs and politics. So take as one high-profile example, the discussion about the buildings and the memorial at the WTC site. Now, Larry Silberstein has the right to rebuild the buildings, and as long as he complies with zoning requirements, no-one can tell him what to build or what it should look like or how many million square feet of leasing space it should have. So why do millions of people (New Yorkers generally, relatives of victims, firefighters everywhere, etc) think they should have the right to be involved in the decision? Because they feel like they are affected in some meaningful way by the decision, and so should have a say. It doesn't matter that they won't be putting up a single penny of their money to build the new buildings, they still feel "democratically" tied to the outcome.
Why is then that, when the initial Silberstein-approved plans met with such disapproval, that Leaping Larry S and Governors Pataki and McGreevy agreed that it would be a good idea to establish a competition, and allow for participation from New Yorkers, relatives of victims, etc? The short answer is that it was good politics. Larry S can tell everyone to go to hell, but in the end it becomes a difficult political football if he doesn't provide for the processes of consultation and involvement, even if in the end he pretty much ignores it.
Now, to me, involvement in decisions in virtual worlds feel a lot like the processes involved in urban planning. Many ordinary Joes and Jills (users) feel they should have a right to be consulted in decisions that affect them, even as property developers (game developers) chafe at the idea of other people telling them what to do with their building (world/game).
In offering this observation, let me say two things. First, I think that it demonstrates a fundamental decision of mine to buy the "this is a world" concept. A number of really smart people--Greg Costikyan, Eric Zimmerman, Raph Koster, maybe even Ted Castronova--keep insisting that these are games in some meaningful sense, not worlds, and that this is the secret to understanding why concepts of political philosophy (or law) just don't apply here. Thing is, I just don't buy that. I don't want to try to defend why here, but I will another time. But it's important to understand this point, because one simple way of arguing against this is just that this stuff doesn't matter, or is reliant on some quasi-philosophical conception of games as separate from moral decisions in other contexts. This is, as they used to say in my moral philosophy classes, bollocks. But let me leave that argument for another day.
Second, I'm not trying to defend a normative claim here that "we MUST introduce democracy to MMORPGs". I'm just making a descriptive claim that people tend to have expectations of political involvement in a number of arenas outside the usual "Pull lever #214 to vote for Schwarzenegger." And games designers can continue to ignore this as long as they like, and it will continue to be a cap on their long-term success. It may be that politics is too messy to code well, but I doubt it. And I suspect that the key to the next paradigm-breaking VW is politics and community, and not user-created-content (as I kept hearing all the time at the State of Play conference)
(Hmm, my self-imposed "Keep Posts Short" rule just got busted wide open)
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