Guilds and Government

One of the rocks that players and academics often throw at developers is that their virtual worlds "aren't democratic". Democracy is good; virtual worlds aren't democratic; therefore, virtual worlds are bad.

OK, so players often use "not democratic" as a short-hand for "not a democracy in which I am the president", and academics often use it as a short-hand for "not Utopia", but they do have a point: on the whole, virtual worlds really aren't democratic. Nevertheless, as Ted points out in his book, this is a consequence of players' having no reason to want to be political leaders: they'd get responsibility, but no power.

However, players do organise themselves politically, typically in what have come to be called "guilds". These aren't usually democratic either, but they do represent player self-governance. Furthermore, some of these guilds can get quite big.

So, here's a scenario. Suppose that a guild got large enough that the players in it wanted their own server, for guild members only. They approach the developer, the developer says OK, and sets up a special server that can only be accessed if you have the guild's say-so. This would leave the running of the entire virtual world up to the guild; guild officers could even be given customer service powers if that's what the guild wanted.

It's only hypothetical, but it does raise some interesting questions. Would developers ever want players to run their worlds like this? Would such a guild-operated world address players' and academics' complaints about lack of accountability? Would it wipe out RMT on that server? Would it be sustainable, if the guild had the right critical mass, or would it inevitably fail? What are the legal issues, eg. if someone put in a minimum wage claim for their CSR work, whom would they sue? Would developers still get rocks thrown at them for not being democratic?

Thought experiments: don't you love 'em?

Comments

[RickR]

When a player leaves the guild, would they get a character transfer to another server? If they were kicked out? What about existing characters joining the guild?

And who would they PvP against?

[James Grimmelmann]

I'll go out on a limb and make two predictions:

(1) This sort of experiment will take place.

(2) It will fail to quiet complaints that the world is not democratic.

What will happen, sooner or later, is that some schism within the guild that has obtained a private server will break out. The faction that wins the dispute will convince the developer to take some action: nerfing an item, banning a few players, deleting some content uploaded by the renegades, etc. The losers will scream bloody murder and claim that what happened wasn't democratic.

Lessons: (1) "Democracy" is used by players (and, unfortunately, by some people, myself included, who really should understand the distinction) as a shorthand for all sorts of rule-by-law virtues. (2) Player-player conflicts cause governance problems just as much as, if not more than player-developer conflicts. (3) Even in a democracy, there are winners and losers.

[grant]

I could see this possibly working if it were a small group of large guilds.

The thing is large guilds inevitably disintegrate. When this starts to happen you'll need to open the server up to a large influx of outsiders in order to maintain critical mass. After this you'll basically have a regular server.

One guild dominating a VW would probably eliminate RMT, if said guild holds the belief that RMT is evil. However, other types of real world exchanges would take over. E.g., I'll mow your lawn if you craft x widgets for y project.

[LoH]

I don't think most players that say 'democratic' want EVERYTHING to come up to a vote.

Of course, ask the average American what type of government they have - and they'll answer democratic - when what the US really has is a representational form of government.

That is perhaps the best answer for MMOs, either actively listen to your players (on balance) or a player's Senate might not be a bad idea to get a feel for how change is going to impact players from THEIR point of view.

Camelot for example has player representatives. On the whole, it's done far more good than harm (when they get listened to).

MMOs are typically dictatorships. While the word dictator is laced with bad connotations - a benevelent dictator is more akin to a kindly father figure that has his children's best interests at heart (and how most dev's probably view themselves). The problems occur when the player viewpoint is forgotten - or ignored. People then leave your 'country' or agitate for an overthrow.

The lesson that developers might best take away from how governments are run is huge amounts of effort is expended to get the populace to 'buyin' to change. In MMOs - change is most typically dropped into the players lap with no warning, no reasoning, no nothin. As paying customers - they resent that and even good changes can cause totally unnecessary drama and bad changes could have been avoided with all their attendent player attrition and expense.

[Sloejack]

In general I think the concept/thought dies off a bit when you examine the motivation behind guilding in the first place. Spawning a seperate server for a single large guild would have some cool factor at first, but ultimately since you're not actually competing with anyone for resources (mobs or other) and in theory everyone on the server is eager/required to group up and get to gether to take on challenging tasks I think it would degenerate fairly quickly after the cool factor wears off.

Now, extending the thought to say a half dozen or so large guilds and setting the world factions to align with those guilds could actually have some interesting game impacts. Ultimately though this idea would depend on providing game mechanics that would motivate the players and their respective guilds to interact with one another rather than just continue the game of one up manship in a PvE environment.

[Eugene N]

It depends on how great the powers you give the guild could get.

Consider the "free" unofficial servers for Ultima Online that are running rampant around the 'Net. If players were given the chance to create this kind of world with the tools available to them (SimMMORPG, anyone?) the possibilities might be quite interesting.

Actually, on that thought, wouldn't Second Life be counted as one of those games which gives the players that chance to manipulate the world to their liking?

[Bruce Woodcock]

My biggest issue with most virtual worlds isn't that they aren't democratic, but that they don't offer any constitutional protections. I don't really expect to participate in every decision that effects the world, but I would like to know what minimal set of RIGHTS I have, and know that there's some sort of fair and just procedure for how disputes are going to be resolved. I need to know the limits of "government" power, and where I can act with a relative feeling of safety.

Most virtual communities don't want to codify such a document because the people with the power in such communities don't want to get caught in a position where they can't wield it. They want a dictatorship or oligarchy, where they can do anything to anyone they want within their borders. The only recourse virtual citizens have is to leave when they lose confidence in a particular leader or leaders. If they are popular enough themselves, they can set up their own dictatorship with their own virtual borders.

[greglas]

I'm with James on point #2, at least -- yes, people will still be upset about things under the banner of "democracy" whatever that means to them.

But Richard said particularly:

"They approach the developer, the developer says OK, and sets up a special server that can only be accessed if you have the guild's say-so. This would leave the running of the entire virtual world up to the guild; guild officers could even be given customer service powers if that's what the guild wanted."

What you're posing here seems (to me) like a kind of hazy hybrid of guild & game owner, where the guild is essentially a live team. So here's the rub -- if the guild has CSR powers, can they use these in play? Would that be fun? What are the limits of their powers over the virtual environment. You seem to say that you'll give them whatever they want, but my hunch is that (I may well be wrong) most guild leaders wouldn't want much more control over the game environment and mechanics than they already have. If they take on ALL the powers, how do the senior officers of the guild differ from the current live team (because they all have in-world personae?)

What this question does for me is remind me that when you're dealing with *games* you either need a ref or an imposed ruleset or a very different kind of game.

Btw, this also reminds me of the Facism is Fun thread from 2.5 years ago (which is not a bad thing).

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2003/11/fascism_is_fun.html

[Scott Jennings]

So what happens to the server when 80 or 90% of the guild gets bored and moves on?

[greglas]

I dunno -- did the guild lease the hardware for a year? Richard needs to flesh out the hypo somemore.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, I'd continue to throw rocks, Richard, and guess what, you're providing excellent proof that open source does *not* = open society. All it means is an archipelago of egos, each one a fiefdom warring with the next, or conglomerating the next, each one closing in on itself, each one in fact vulnerable to all kinds of totalitarian memes as it becomes good only at keeping others out, not adjusting and adapting to new people and new impressions all the time, so that the first strong leader who can virally produce a meme to go through all the weakened cells will win, and it will be hard to undo for a long time to come.

Everybody thinks about how Google caved to Chinese hegemony. Everyone imagines that Google just caves in the one place, and retains its freedom and creativity everywhere else. What if caving to Chinese hegemony sticks...and spreads...and becomes the norm just because a future China will have the power and the people to inflict that hegemony? Made possible by that first capitulation.

The forces in SL that most resist the upheavals and losses of the world are those with really rigid and hierarchical social structures arranged around a powerful leader or powerful collective group-think clan. So that's why the Goreans (BDSM with celebration of the slavery of women and men in collars), the Furries (fierce tribal identity politics) or Neualtenberg (old leftie socialism masquerading as social democracy but really just the same old Leninism with the "Scientific Council" serving as the Politburo) are already integral units that would love to have their own servers and run their own worlds.

So the guilds are already forming, calfing off, and Daniel Linden is already explaining to us in the covenants meetings about the reform of the group tools that we will "each be our own Governor Linden" (like *he* is a model of enlightened dictatorship???) and we'll get to control all these things on our sim, able to mass-ban over huge swathes of territory (to whom will we appeal then).

In fact, the Goreans even push the Lindens further and ask that all abuse reports emanating from their domain be ricocheted back by the Lindens, without review, to their Chief Dom to be handled as they'd like to handle things, not by any TOS. Daniel concedes there will be "local culture". No notion of "hey, that's not cultural, it's criminal," will ever prevail.

Envision all these people going indy in their basements with their own servers and merely some kind of light licensing arrangement or open source from LL, and you have a peek into the hell of the Metaverse, a place with more check gates than the Erie Canal, where access will be everything, where people will be barred at a whim, where all the horrid arrogance and hubris of the existing game gods will be multipled a thousandfold. More little game gods doesn't mean more freedom, it means less.

A good example I like to cite is Hamlet nee Linden's blog. While in the Linden domain sitting on secondlife.com, if I post something to his blog that can't possibly be construed as a TOS offense, he can't justify removing it. I'd appeal to a higher authority than him, and I'd appeal to the rule of law within the publicly accessible TOS. As soon as Hamlet nee Linden goes indy himself, however, he can summarily and arbitrarily ban me off his blog, even if I so much as post "great article, Hammie," just because he doesn't like my face -- and that's what he does. And this is the Metaverse for you -- an archipelago of egos, arbitrary ruling their planets, and not half as enlightened as the Little Prince. What will bind them together except fierce tribal loyalties and this elusive concept of "likemindedness" which very much depends on chance first impressions, virtual encounters of the worst kind, etc.

Guilds will collapse upon themselves. First, they will not be able to have anything against which to defind themselves. Where is the enemy? We've met him, and he's us, like Pogo said. Where is the Like Mind? Well...now that it's all just us chickens sitting on the server together, with no external foe, and no interesting quest, we notice that the way that one person type *smiles* all the time like RP-idiots really does grate on our nerves...somebody else disagrees about the house style to build and it gets nasty...so much for the guild. I noticed that a kid brought into a guild of WoW that my son was in summarily ejected another kid just because of some lame halfline of a comment he made. This is not going to make for democracy, or even anarchy, but just authoritarianism of the old style.

I am endlessly puzzled by all these men in tights that want to replicate and reinstitute the Middle Ages. Didn't we get done with the Dark Ages? Why are the Dark Ages so fun? Didn't we go through the Enlightenment? Why are we going through an Endarkenment in Cyberspace now by bringing back the guild system, that little crypto-fascist corporativist tool to ensure comformity, "likemindedness," esprit du corps, animosity, etc. etc. I suppose these little entities are perfect for the shooting games, but they aren't the building blocks of a viable civilization.

The Metaverse should be free to have these corners of authoritarianism and even totalitarianism in them, but their demand for "freedom to be like Governor Linden" shouldn't become my closed society I have to move around through like checkpoints, constantly at risk to be ejected, banned, crashed, muted.

How did these "likeminded" think they were going to find each other?

[Prokofy Neva]

>What will happen, sooner or later, is that some schism within the guild that has obtained a private server will break out. The faction that wins the dispute will convince the developer to take some action: nerfing an item, banning a few players, deleting some content uploaded by the renegades, etc. The losers will scream bloody murder and claim that what happened wasn't democratic.

For a good example of this already happening in SL, see the Neualtenberg forums and discussions in the PolySci and Group forums at www.secondlife.com One strong leader refuses to submit to a constitutional amendment that reduces the power of the "scientific council" and makes it allegedly more democratic, or at least subject more to checks and balances by other other branches of government. A war of constitutionalism develops. The founder, even owning the buildings, is ejected and the issue of the IP of the creation of the buildings becomes part of the story. What rights do founders have? The Lindens' current group tools make it impossible to get rid of a fellow officer, because they did the right thing by removing "officer recall," which was only triggered as a griefing and a nuisance by rogue members or officers to try to throw someone off land they had purchased or just paralyze the group to new membership. That function was removed, but then the only way to get rid of a "problem" officer was to call the 1-800 number and ask them to be removed. Wierd, eh?

And this has been done a few times, i.e. Anshe Chung removed me from officer status in Metaverse Justice Watch after I object to her bussing in tenants and packing meetings with loyal subjects during elections, and prematurely closing off nominations of new people, invoking the problem of "griefers" entering an open group. Interestingly, another officer then invited me into the group and I guess as the group then fell into being a political parody and mainly just a staging ground for silly faction fights and goofy group IMs, Anshe didn't bother removing me, but did what most people do, formed another group with more "like-minded". This sort of arrangement just leads to endless factionalism where parliamentary blocs never get properly formed (and the strong executive branch of LL itself likes to keep it that way).

[Axecleaver]

I've been a guildleader of a 50-80 person guild for about six years. That's a relatively small guild by some comparisons, but I've learned a lot about VW governance in that time.

My guild governance can be described as enlightened despotism. I make decisions that most of my members don't want to be bothered with - event scheduling, where our player house in Dark Ages was located, and how to dispense group funds.

I choose my officers, and while I frequently consult my officers when I want feedback on how to decide something, ultimately it is entirely my decision. My guildmembers stay in the guild (the majority have been with us for 3-5 years and move to new games with us) because we have a community for which I am the caretaker, and make decisions that enrich the experience of my members.

So to answer Richard's questions... I don't think any guild would ever want a server all to themselves. What they'd really want is a server on which they had preferential treatment. What value would owning a server be if you couldn't lord it over the peons? You already have the ability to experience content with just your chosen guildmembers through grouping, so you have the chance to exclude undesirables built into most games, already.

If you modify your question to be, "Would developers find value in giving expanded abilities to guildleaders/officers?" Well, you've already got games like that today. DAOC, for example, allows guilds to claim keeps/towers and set their "difficulty." Guildleaders decide who in their ranks have the right to burn guild points to upgrade keeps. I'm sure other MMO's have similar features.

[ashok]

I'd like my corp on EVE to be democratic, but that's impossible.

We're building to be a fleet, and engage in combat. Since we are armed in game all the time, and when running missions, are training for combat, we must stay hierarchical.

I bring this up because you might want to consider "democracy" versus other forms of government in relation to their purpose. Rousseau and Kant don't favor democracy because they think of it as warlike.

[Helen Cheng]

I don't believe that any guild would want their own server to play on. Two of the key motivations for playing multiplayer games (as I believe you had a hand in developing, Mr. Bartle *wink*) are achievement and competition. I can't imagine transferring my guild to a server of our own, simply because...what's the point? We already play with one another several nights a week, but to do it without a community of other people, where we don't have external forces driving us toward end-game achievement, and where we're the only real people that exist in a vast digital landscape - well, it would feel really...boring.

Secondly, one of our guild leaders was a very aggressive, powerful, and confident person. He ran his own business in real life, and when he logged into game, although he was fair about many things, he could also be extremely stubborn and dramatic about other things. His style of guild leadership became more and more dictatorial as time passed, and he ended up kicking people out without any discussion with other members (sometimes even officers). Guild members felt like they were tiptoeing around him. Eventually, due to the fact that he was also very busy in real life, he stepped down and passed leadership to a reliable person.

The result is that now we have become more democratic - we make sure to talk openly to guild members about different issues because the fact is, the members are crucial to the success of guild progression. If you can't get enough people to show up to a raid, then no one can raid. If the membership isn't happy, then they have many other options, including quitting the guild and joining another one.

Point is that in an online world, there is more equality of opportunity, and equality of ACCESS, than in the real world. As a result, people who aren't happy in a guild can go elsewhere, making the quality of leadership a huge factor in the attractiveness of a guild.

That being said, there are many other factors to consider as well, such as the guild make-up, culture, members, goals and direction, leadership, and so on.

Just a few thoughts.

[Michael Chui]

Token mention of LambdaMOO:

Players were given full democracy and said it sucked. If I recall my history correctly, the devs took the role of executive and judicial, while the players remained legislative.

Also:

A lot of fantasy stories seem to be about "Oh no, the king died" and ends with "Yay, we got a new king". Usually with some evil ruler during the course of the story that the protagonist(s) is/are pissed at. Actually, that kind of sums up LotR.

Finally:

But my example wasn't a game.

Part of the fundamental problem about doing this to a game world is that the devs take the role of referees. And while it's certainly possible, it's unlikely that a guild or even a group of players would be willing to become (vaguely) impartial and fairly arbitrate. Those who are willing used to just go and do it. Now the budgets are kinda high (not that that seems to be stopping anyone).

A player can be a fairly good referee. But a player also wants to play, and being a referee is tiresome, irksome, generally thankless, and usually a time sink without tangible compensation.

If this experiment is tried, that will be your first source of fallout. "It's not fun." Or, perhaps more accurately, "It's too much like real life."

[Prokofy Neva]

the devs took the role of executive and judicial, while the players remained legislative.

There's your problem right there, no independent judiciary.

We don't need players to be referees so much as we need there to be a rule of law -- the law is the standard by which the play is judged. Then you have a Constitutional Court to judge whether the law is constitutional. And an adversarial defense to protect the rights of the defendent against the executive.

It's more fun than you might imagine, or let me say that for some, it will be fun, and in a virtual world with its tools, it will all go much faster. Of course, there are all kinds of problems like the power of IMs to undermine sequestering and segregation of witnesses, etc. but there can be workarounds.

[magicback (Frank)]

My answer to most of Dr. Bartle's questions would be "no".

Now, if the guilds were required to incorporate and then sign a contract to lease and operate a server then the chances of "yes" are better.

From a business angle, the implications of providing "guild" packages of services and products would be a better spec of the thought experiment.

A related historical perspective on this thought experiement is the process of colonization. Lots of expedition groups were given broad powers to administer a trading post or a new colony. I don't know enough about the details to offer any details, but do hope that someone with better knowledge of this area of history can enlighten me.

[Bart Stewart]

What occurs to me is how guilds in virtual worlds are different from real-world sociopolitical organizations. Game guilds are much "flatter" -- they have far fewer levels of hierarchy than the typical bureaucratic real-world organization.

Imagine Stalin running a guild in WoW. Would the directness of power in a virtual world organization made him even more effective in carrying out purges? Or would he have been less effective because the "code is law" that defines player powers severely limits what players (even players in the same guild) can do to one another?

Similarly, I don't think just putting a guild on a server of its own is enough to guess the likely result. I think we'd also need to know the powers given to each member of the guild, including the guild's leadership, to affect other players.

I'd guess that a guild-only server that was PvP-enabled would turn into "Lord of the Flies" island within a month.

--Bart

[Michael Chui]

There's your problem right there, no independent judiciary.

Actually, that's an interesting idea. Set up a GameMaster union.

[illovich]

As far as the question of guild-based servers, I think that with the exception of very small virtual worlds--probably made by small, independant development groups--such a service won't exist, at least in the sense of the pre-built game-type worlds that tend to dominate these discussions.

I do see the potential for shards for people that build their own worlds (like MUDs) in the future, and I hope that this area will gain some momentum in the near future -- I think for example, the Neverwinter Nights client/server design was promising, although it seemed difficult to design truly persistant worlds with it.

But I could see larger demand for a guild to run and design a shard, rather than just run a copy of the institutional version of the VW.

On the democracy front, in many ways I think Star Wars Galaxies was the most promising player in the AAA camp for a long time, maybe it still is. It had representative democracy built into the Player City mechanics, and as of the NGE patch it's probably better. Unfortunately by the time the NGE patch rolled around, my home city had shriveled to dust, so I don't know what the player-run city is like these days... but I remember the city building aspects as very compelling, although it's tough to remember anything about it except the "rent" parties (where you'd go and do missions for hours to pay the city expenses -- good times, lol).

I'm not sure what else the SWG devs could have put in, democracy-wise without opening innocent players to griefing or other mischef.

For that matter, what sort of democracy do players want? A chance to change the loot tables? There's very little governance in most game based VW's short of CSR-style law enforcement, and since commercial VWs are defacto dictatorships, good luck with any democratic reforms--they'd probably never get past the legal department at the company.

[illovich]

I'd guess that a guild-only server that was PvP-enabled would turn into "Lord of the Flies" island within a month.

Now that I'd pay $14.95/month for.

[Chas]

I also believe the majority of such experiments would be dystopic. It also might not be too far from being tested. Prokofy Neva has hilighted the potential in Second Life terms, but let's not forget about "mulitiverse"

When "multiverse" (www.multiverse.net) was first mentioned on TN , the company stated that developers would essentially be given the assets of their first MMO to modify and use, as part of the toolset. Players/Modders COULD set up a community-governed variant of the main world and experiment.

Last I checked, the early developer "beta" tools are asset-neutral, ready for potential prototyping or creating demo's, but not a rich library of game assets that would allow such flexibility. We'll see how it emerges.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

"Democracy" can be found in guildstructures, certainly. They are not inherently non-democratic. Besides, that even non-democratic guilds can be "democratic" on some levels:

1. Larger alliances.
2. The threshold for leaving is low. (a guild splits if the leader doesn't cater for the majority or a major minority)

[Andy Havens]

I'm seeing a strong WoW "bent" in the flava of how we're discussing "guild" here; i.e., a team put together on one side of a two-sided war with the general goal of more efficiently whomping-ass on the other side's teams during PvP. I'm going to assume that Richard meant something more along the lines of what I might call a "meta guild" or an "uber guild" or a "club" or "association" or "union" or sumfin. If I assume wrongly, well... sue me.

No. A typical WoW guild, even a huge one, would have no fun with its own server. There is, as has been pointed out, no fun there. You'd all stand around going... so... who do we fight? Unless you were all REALLY into PvE or hard-core RP, and that was the raison d'etre of the guild/server -- to keep out the light-weights -- it generally wouldn't add up to a reason to play on yer own sphere, I don't think.

But I'm casting back, now, to conversations of recent memory here and on other MMO boards. What about a "meta guild" who was opposed to all forms of RMT, twinking, guild boosting, etc.? Where the point of the sub-guilds was in-game comms only? And no voice chat, either, because not everybody had that? A "we all must be level, or it's not fair" guild. IE, the "cheaters suck" meta-guild. With players, in the case of WoW, from both Alliance and Horde? That would make sense as a server-wide "creed based guild."

What about a highly GLBT-friendly guild world/shard/server? Or a profanity permitted/encouraged server? Or sexuality/erotic dialogue encouraged? Or RMT encouraged? Or pre-teen only? Or a tutorial-server, where old-timers could help larn the younguns on the finer points of how to RP?

I think that if there's a "binding thread" (or two or more), you could end up with some really interesting flavors of a game. To a degree, SL already offers this with "islands" and private areas, and the "teen zone," which is PG only content. I think you could probably have a "meta guild" that also charged extra for the "right" to play on a server where they provided a play experience above-and-beyond that which the publisher provides in the "vanilla" context.

I can see, for example, "social mods" laid on top of WoW, and folks paying extra to be part of and get certified in the "Six Sigma Alliance Model." There's enough complexity in WoW, and in running a guild that you could layer all kinds of hoo-hah on top.

Horde EST anyone?

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, I quite understand that we don't necessarily have to take "guild" literally and it can be "meta-guild" like GLBT or Linux users. And SL doesn't do this only with islands or the teen grid but with groups like Thinkers or Mainlanders or Public Sex Commission that span sims, mainland and island both. These groups are often event-driven literally, i.e. they hold events, people come, and get the group taq to wear on their head.

Raph Koster really said it best this last week in a comment a little bit buried in a somewhat boring discussion about "whither the Internet" based on Pew's survey.

http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/02/imagining-the-internet/#more-516

"# What is your greatest fear for the future of networked technologies?

Humans grew up in tribes where you didn’t get to pick who else was in your tribe. We grew up in situations where we had to learn to get along with people who had opinions that were different from ours, and networked technologies are allowing us to form tribes that are homogenous. They’re allowing us to find groups of people who are just like us. And I think it’s wonderful to be able to find my tribe of people who read the same books I do and like my music and watch the same TV shows and in general share the same view of the world. That’s wonderful, because it makes you feel like you’re not alone any more. But on the other hand I think it’s incredibly important for the human race to be exposed to multiple viewpoints and to get to interact with people that we wouldn’t necessarily interact with if given our choice. One of the real risks in the networked environment is the lessened friction of connecting with people. People will choose to hang out with people they already know. They will choose to read the books they already know they will like, rather than taking a flyer on something new. Statistical analysis shows that this is the case when we look at all of the communities of interest that have formed on the internet. You can graph, for example, what political books people read, on Amazon, and what you find is Democrats won’t read the right-wing books and Republicans won’t read the left-wing books and almost no books cross the divide and are read by both, and that’s a very dangerous thing for our political establishment. That would be my worry about this low-friction information culture. Biology teaches us homogenous cultures are not a good thing – they’re very vulnerable."

[Leigh]

Actually, as many of you probably know, A Tale In The Desert (now the third version) actually has a pretty orderly democratic system built in. Players propose and vote on laws, which are then enacted... by the Pharaoh, sure, but the players do get to decide by majority consensus.

[Michael Chui]

Leigh,

How does ATITD handle misbehavior? I'm aware of the Demi-Pharoah's power, but I find it hard to believe that that's the only recourse when wronged. I'm under the impression that the community itself is rather small, and so maybe everyone knows and stuff...

In other words, is there a judiciary system besides the Demi-Pharaoah's ban power?

[WorldMaker]

Beyond the Ultima Online free server examples (which someone else noted), another example of Guild MMO "forking" is the obvious example of much of MU* history. How many MU*s were started by a particular group of MU* players from some other MU* who were either able to borrow the original's source code for their own server, or started their own code to be somewhat like that last MU*.

Different economics, obviously, but I think that the precedent does somewhat point to the fact that it is "only a matter of time", really, before we might see something at least somewhat similar.

Probably more interesting is the question: why hasn't it happened yet? When does it become "profitable" for MMO owners to lease servers or other assets to groups that might be interested?

[Richard Bartle]

Bruce Woodcock>My biggest issue with most virtual worlds isn't that they aren't democratic, but that they don't offer any constitutional protections.

Why should they? What is it you want them to protect?

>I would like to know what minimal set of RIGHTS I have

The simple answer is you have the right to stop playing.

Is it that you want to know what the minimal set of rights you have are, or is it that there are particular rights you want?

>and know that there's some sort of fair and just procedure for how disputes are going to be resolved.

This is a reason for choosing one virtual world over another, but it shouldn't be a requirement for virtual worlds in general (which is sort of implied by your use of "rights"). Some virtual worlds in the past have thrived on the basis of their being the domains of completely capricious gods for whom the words "fair and just" are taken as challenges to their authority which must be struck down. If it's part of the game that fairness and justice are ignored, then that should be allowed.

>Most virtual communities don't want to codify such a document because the people with the power in such communities don't want to get caught in a position where they can't wield it.

I don't think they'd necessarily mind codifying it, it's just that there may not be a lot to codify and it wouldn't look all that attractive to people who were hoping for a parliamentary democracy.

>They want a dictatorship or oligarchy, where they can do anything to anyone they want within their borders.

The thing is, they're not governments, they're gods. This is whether they want to be gods or not. They can do anything they want within their borders because they can't not do anything they want there. Any meaningful power they may wish to give away, or to say they'll never use, could under some unfortunate circumstance be the very power they wish to invoke.

>The only recourse virtual citizens have is to leave when they lose confidence in a particular leader or leaders.

This is the constitution you were asking for.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

greglas>What you're posing here seems (to me) like a kind of hazy hybrid of guild & game owner

Yes, that's right. The developers would just hand over a shard and then get on with their usual business of developing content, fixing bugs and so on. The guild could do whatever they liked in the shard they bought, for as long as they rented it.

>where the guild is essentially a live team.

The guild is essentially a live team anyway, isn't it?

>So here's the rub -- if the guild has CSR powers, can they use these in play?

That would be up to the guild. They could request not to have those powers if they wanted. They could request that a few of their number had them - those who like doing CSR stuff - on whatever conditions they wanted. The guild would get to choose. If they decide to do so democratically, fine; they're the ones paying for it.

>You seem to say that you'll give them whatever they want, but my hunch is that (I may well be wrong) most guild leaders wouldn't want much more control over the game environment and mechanics than they already have.

If that's what they want, OK, give them that.

>If they take on ALL the powers, how do the senior officers of the guild differ from the current live team (because they all have in-world personae?)

They differ because the developer doesn't have to pay them.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

greglas>did the guild lease the hardware for a year? Richard needs to flesh out the hypo somemore.

Take it whichever way you want. What would happen if the guild leased hardware for a year and then fell apart? What would happen if they leased it for a month and then fell apart?

It wouldn't matter to the developer either way. They've been paid up front, and when the payment stops they can re-use the hardware. Whether they want to provide some safe passage to another server or not is up to them, although I'd recommend against it because the people on the servers they migrate to will find their social system suddenly taking a whack, especially if the incomers all have epic gear they've picked up from their CSR buddies.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

Helen Cheng>I don't believe that any guild would want their own server to play on.

Some of them seem to spend all their time in instances in WoW. Why not have an entire instance of the whole game to themselves?

>Two of the key motivations for playing multiplayer games (as I believe you had a hand in developing, Mr. Bartle *wink*)

What's with the Mr? You can call me Richard, you know...

>I can't imagine transferring my guild to a server of our own, simply because...what's the point?

Because maybe you don't like how the game is when it's open to all-comers? Maybe you're a strong role-playing guild, or maybe you're vehemently anti-RMT, or maybe you want a world where all the players are RL-female, or maybe you'd like everyone to speak Esperanto. Maybe you want to use access to the server as the goal for recruiting members in other servers, as part of your efforts for virtual world domination? Maybe you just want a world that's more "democratic"? Maybe you want to charge regular players extra to play on your server because of the superior customer service you'll be offering?

There are plenty of reasons why a guild might want a virtual world of its own. Some are more valid than others in terms of "the play is the thing". If your guild doesn't want to have its own server, fine, it doesn't have to have one.

>we don't have external forces driving us toward end-game achievement, and where we're the only real people that exist in a vast digital landscape - well, it would feel really...boring.

End-game achievement is boring almost by definition. If the game is ended, all that goes on is merely there to pass time while players realise it's ended.

>Point is that in an online world, there is more equality of opportunity, and equality of ACCESS, than in the real world. As a result, people who aren't happy in a guild can go elsewhere, making the quality of leadership a huge factor in the attractiveness of a guild.

This is good, but it is in no way incompatible with wanting to run your own guild server. If you kept finding that wherever you went, the other players always wound up spoiling the game for you, maybe you'd come to think that, you know, maybe it's not all that bad an idea to emigrate to a new world and set up your ideal society without intrusion from the unenlightened?

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

Andy Havens>I'm going to assume that Richard meant something more along the lines of what I might call a "meta guild" or an "uber guild" or a "club" or "association" or "union" or sumfin.

Yes, sorry. I meant anything that might manifest itself in a virtual world as what we have come to call a "guild" (the quotation marks were deliberate), but whether that's for gameplay or social or accidental reasons isn't particularly important. The main point was that there are social groupings enforced in code (at minimum by inclusion/exclusion abilities of some "leader"), which is the basic form of self-governance that players have for whatever purposes they decide to self-govern.

The question was, at heart, what are the implications of allowing this self-governance model to have its own territory in which there is no external friction?

Richard

[Bruce Woodcock]

>Is it that you want to know what the minimal set
>of rights you have are, or is it that there are
>particular rights you want?

Yes, there are particular rights I'd want. I think that's obvious. Most of the rest of your comments were making fun of the fact the only rights and rules you had were the right to leave, which I already acknowledged as lacking...

Having different communities offer different rights ENABLES the choices people make to be more meaningful. Also, I think it's far easier to get the people in power to agree to a set of basic human virtual rights by appealing to their own sense of right and wrong, and to get them to see the benefits of limiting their power in certain situations, than to get them to essentially cede all power in adpoting a Democractic process.

You see this in the rise of Western Democracy; ordinary people started out with almost no rights, and Lords and Kings slowly began to acknowledge basic rights of the governed long before they were allowed full participation in the political process.

Bruce

[Stormgaard]

Circle Jerks - don't you love em'?

Of course you miss the point entirely in your premise that said guilds would be PAYING for their own private servers and all power would come down to WHOEVER PAYS THE BILLS.

It seems like this is less a "Thought Experiment" than it is some long boring-ass way to explain why Democracy isn't any good.

[Richard Bartle]

Bruce Woodcock>Yes, there are particular rights I'd want. I think that's obvious.

OK, what are these rights, and are they compatible with what it is you want the rights to protect? Example: you may want freedom of speech as a right, but also want to play on an RP server. If people can say whatever they like on an RP server without sanction, it won't be an RP server for long. Thus, in this case, the right you want would screw over what it is you wanted to use the right for. Are the rights you want like this, or are they independent? If they're independent, why would a developer not want you to have them? If they're dependent, why would you yourself want them?

>Most of the rest of your comments were making fun of the fact the only rights and rules you had were the right to leave, which I already acknowledged as lacking...

That may be the only right you have for certain, but ho boy, is it ever a powerful right! It's better than anything you get in the real world.

>Having different communities offer different rights ENABLES the choices people make to be more meaningful.

I agree, although I thought the point of "rights" was that they apply to everyone, irrespective of community?

>Also, I think it's far easier to get the people in power to agree to a set of basic human virtual rights by appealing to their own sense of right and wrong

I agree, but I can also give you a hypothetical virtual world which would be ruined were the people in power to impose a set of basic virtual rights on it (other than the right to leave it). It's good that virtual worlds can grant their players rights as a means of attracting people to them, but it's bad if all virtual worlds have to adopt these rights whether they want them or not.

>and to get them to see the benefits of limiting their power in certain situations, than to get them to essentially cede all power in adpoting a Democractic process.

I agree that this may be a tactic that we may have to use if they plan on doing something worse!

>Lords and Kings slowly began to acknowledge basic rights of the governed long before they were allowed full participation in the political process.

As I said, though, we're not talking lords and kings here, we're talking deities. If in Reality, some RL Creator suddenly started to take an interest and threw his/her weight around, making old people young again, turning oil to water, stopping TV from broadcasting soap operas, that kind of thing, it would be a real pain and people would squeal like crazy, but ultimately they could do nothing whatsoever about it. Deities are deities. In a virtual world, you can use RL law to make the deities into governors, but then your world has no deities, which ultimately means you have a world with unchanging physics. That's fine for Reality, but Reality is bug-free (leastwise it hasn't crashed yet).

Richard

[Mike Sellers]

Richard: The question was, at heart, what are the implications of allowing this self-governance model to have its own territory in which there is no external friction?

Isn't this answered by the behavior of players on "free" UO servers? Essentially, the admins of these servers have replicated (however questionable it may be legally) the UO experience; the game is in the players' hands. Is the result any differet than when the game was in EA's hands? I may have missed it, but I haven't heard of any renaissance (governance-related or otherwise) arising out of these worlds. They are ultimately still the same kill-monster-get-gold fests that we have in almost every other virtual world, no matter who's running it.

Stormgaard: all power would come down to WHOEVER PAYS THE BILLS.

This is an essential truth of online worlds. If you own the hardware and pay the power/bandwidth bills, you have all ultimate rights to whatever happens in that world. In Richard's terms this makes you a diety of the world (Tolkein referred to this as subcreation, acknowledging in his parlance the part of both God and world-god, if you will). This reality makes discussion of "human rights" as Bruce asked about often seem moot.

Any right a player/inhabitant might be granted inevitably has an asterisk attached: you can do this so long as we don't shut down the server. This is precisely the situation with Second Life, for example (though apparently some residents are surprised to discover this, or do their beest to forget it), and it extends to any other game or virtual world. Players can operate within the world with whatever governance abilities and rights the admins give them, but ultimately there is no argument (and no real-world parallel) to the power to hit the big Off Switch.

All that said, and with full acknowledgement of the Asterisk of Damocles hanging over the heads of anyone in a virtual world, I think there is a useful discussion to be had about what powers people might need to have in a virtual world to govern themselves. Right now in virtually all online worlds those powers (and thus rights) are sparse and ad hoc at best. This is a discussion we've had in the past, but thus far little progress has been made in open implementation.

My point is that turning over a server to a group of players changes nothing. The nature of the world doesn't change, and the players/inhabitants still have no mechanism for deciding who takes the place of the former admins: who covers what, who can change what, etc. Would they evolve some form of consensus or even democratic method of decision-making? I doubt it; those forms are incredibly hard work, especially for people who ultimately just want to play a game ("let someone else worry about it" isn't an effective rallying cry for shared regulation). For any new significant forms of player governance to emerge, the players must be given an array of basic, atomic tools and mechanisms (that do not exist in any mainstream online world today), and they must have sufficient incentive to see such tools as worth their time and effort. Then we might see some interesting things happen... as long as the lights stay on.

[greglas]

Mike> Isn't this answered by the behavior of players on "free" UO servers? Essentially, the admins of these servers have replicated (however questionable it may be legally) the UO experience; the game is in the players' hands. Is the result any differet than when the game was in EA's hands? I may have missed it, but I haven't heard of any renaissance (governance-related or otherwise) arising out of these worlds. They are ultimately still the same kill-monster-get-gold fests that we have in almost every other virtual world, no matter who's running it.

Yeah, I'm basically with Mike (and the prior commentors who pointed out the lack of democratic structure in most guilds) -- if the guilds took over the servers, you'd basically be saying "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Why? Because the trouble with virtual democracy is that it takes up too many evenings.

...

Now, that being said... We can count on conflict between users and controllers and we can count on appeals to the state to intervene and we can count on, during those appeals, rhetoric about popular democracy, essential rights, unlawful exercise of power -- so we haven't solved this. What we've pointed (I think) is that handing over governance to guilds won't take these particular rocks out of our hands.

[Andy Havens]

Mike said: "Would they evolve some form of consensus or even democratic method of decision-making? I doubt it."

I disagree. With half the statement. Because it doesn't need to be democratic,

I'm not sure why we're worried about democracy when it comes to rule making in games. What I have noticed -- and what we've discussed in previous threads on RMT, use of voice-chat, RP, etc. -- is that we already have a multiplicity of interpretations of "the rules." I ended up, after an enormously long series of comments back-and-forth, being convinced that RMT doesn't count as "against the rules," if the publishers don't put up more than a token resistance to the practice. That is an example of democracy (or unopposed anarchy) in action.

Game rules are not, by definition, democratic. Richard has used the term "god" quite a bit above to refer to what happens "be default" in a game. I think that's a bit deimorphic, as it presents the publishers/programmers with a set of benign and/or evil intentions. Much of what happens in games is (if this is a word) "definitional." Rule-driven. Like they say about gravity; it's not just a good idea -- it's the law. If more than half of the soccer players on the field decide that they don't like gravity, well... that's their perogative. But I don't think Newton is going to reverse his earlier decision.

On the other hand, a bunch of kids playing soccer out in back of the school can decide, on a whim, to make the goals smaller. Or bigger. Or closer together. Or that you can use your hands, but just as fists. Or that Stan needs to play with his hands in his pockets 'cause he's just too damn fast for the rest of us.

That's democracy in action in games, and what we're, I think, talking about in terms of setting up "game shards."

But let's be clear about something -- the democratic process of setting up a game shard (server, world, off-shoot, whatever) in order to have a game with one or more specific rule-sets, environments, flavors, etc., does not in any way assume that *democracy* itself is going to be one of the rules that is grafted into/onto play within that shard.

For example; if I were to lead a band of brave new brothers/sisters into a WoW shard, it would be a HELL of a lot less democratic than the average WoW server. If, by democratic, one means the excersize of a wider variety of play options and behaviors. The "Andy Shard" would be hard-core RP, no RL chat in the open, no RMT, no twinking, no corpse-camping, etc. etc. The point would be to play the game as a character-based RPG. Not a level-fest. Not as a chance to gank newbies. All would be accountable to an authority that could kick you off the server if you broke the rules. Not a democracy; a rule-ocracy. Why? Because anybody who wanted to play that way came to this shard to play that way, and if you break the rules, you're spoiling it for the rest of us, so piss off.

I can imagine the "Anti-Andy Shard," too. All RMT all the time. Level wars. That's fine, too. You stay on your server, I'll stay on mine. The problem I had with WoW when I left was that there was waaaayyy to much "democracy" happening; except it wasn't democracy. It was anarchy. Which, for many people, is fine. It just wasn't my cup o' mixy tea.

Democracy is great for certain things. But games? I don't think so. I don't want to vote and have parliamentary procedures every time a new feature comes out. I just want to play. And if I decide that the rules and system of a game are fun enough for me to spend time and money on, I'd prefer other people to play by those rules, not try to squirm out of them because they think that "game democracy" gives them the "right" to cheat if they can.

If specific game shards/servers provided specific places where folks could play versions of the game that were more to their tastes, I think that's a great idea. And, though I agree with what Prokofy says about exposure to different and new ideas when it comes to politics and science... I don't believe that I should have to indulge in entertainment variations forced on me by others. If there were a "no kids allowed" showing of certain movies, for example, I'd sure as heck pay extra for that.

[Bruce Woodcock]

>OK, what are these rights, and are they
>compatible with what it is you want the rights
>to protect? Example: you may want freedom of
>speech as a right, but also want to play on an
>RP server. If people can say whatever they like
>on an RP server without sanction, it won't be an
>RP server for long. Thus, in this case, the
>right you want would screw over what it is you
>wanted to use the right for.

The point isn't so much what the right is, but simply that the right is more defined. You suggest, for example, that one is subject to sanction for saying arbitrary things on an RP server. Correct. But many RP communities have no rule that states thus, because you can be sanctioned for what you say even if it's WITHIN RP constraints. They can sanction you for pretty much ANY reason.

>Are the rights you want like this, or are they
>independent? If they're independent, why would a
>developer not want you to have them? If they're
>dependent, why would you yourself want them?

I don't really know what you mean by depdendent/independent here, unless you're asking if they are game or server specific. I'd say the IDEAL of freedom of speech is indepdent; some servers would have this, and some RP servers might have a more limited form of this. A user wants this so they know the limits of protected behavior; a developer is genereally resistant to this because they want to be able to sanction for reasons they can't well-define.

>That may be the only right you have for certain,
>but ho boy, is it ever a powerful right! It's
>better than anything you get in the real world.

Oh, God no. I would disagree 100%. To prove that, just imagine the real world where the only right was the right to move anywhere to someone else's rule. That wouldn't be all that powerful if everyplace was a dictatorship in which you had no other rights. I think I'd much rather have, say, the US constitution and no freedom to emigrate than the freedom to emigrate and no US constitution.

Now, one may say VR is somewhat less analogous, because there's no limit on virtual spaces. You can set up your own kingdom if you like. True enough, but your personal kingdom might not be very fun if it doesn't have the infrastructure of, say, a fully interactive 3D world, a large population engaged in specialization, etc.

>I agree, although I thought the point
>of "rights" was that they apply to everyone,
>irrespective of community?

As an ideal, sure, but it's unrealistic to expect the same rights to be available in every virtual context. If that bothers you, then simply think of the exclusive set of "universal" rights, and another set of "community" rights, much like the difference between constitutional and local law. We don't even have set local laws in most of these places.

>I agree, but I can also give you a hypothetical
>virtual world which would be ruined were the
>people in power to impose a set of basic virtual
>rights on it (other than the right to leave it).

That's a whole different debate, though. I'm not saying, "These are the rights, and every VR world must have them." but rather "These are the ideals, and it would be nice if each VR's controllers address them in some way, and in any case to define some minimal set of rights that apply to their own VR, instead of doing whatever they want whenever they want."

>As I said, though, we're not talking lords and
>kings here, we're talking deities.

I would disagree somewhat here inasmuch those that are have power in communities often do not have deity-level power. A GM may be able to do certain things to a player, but not anything. In a web community, the guy who runs the server may be the ultimate deity, but those who run the forums may have more limited powers. You may be right in that such laws could never apply to the ultimate deity, but such people rarely interfere with the day-to-day goings on within the world. And of course, none of this applies to a bug or a power outage...

I sense you're trying to move the debate down the road to far more fundamental statements about reality and/or virtual reality. I respect that, but to me it doesn't really matter if the ultimate answer is we have no rights, some rights, or all rights. I just want those empowered in virtual communities to advertise and adhere to some set of "rights" they feel are fair and just, rather than playing everything by ear and making decisions on a whim.

Bruce

[Bart Stewart]

I think I was taking the term "guild" too literally earlier... but the conversation is much more interesting now. *g*

Is the notion of "democracy" in a virtual world just silly when programmers can change the laws of reality on a whim? How can you have any right to self-government if the very definition of "you" can be redefined by someone else?

(Note: This road has been traveled here before, as in Avatar Rights from 2003. Worth another look from the point of view of players owning a server, though.)

1. The question of what "rights" are in RL has never been settled. The English Magna Carta and Bill of Rights each state some; the U.S. Declaration of Independence names a few; the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen others; America defined still others in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the American Convention on Human Rights; the United Nations has the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and so on.

Probably the most important distinction is between natural rights, which everyone is held to possess simply by virtue of being human, and legal rights, which are whatever rights a government explicitly grants you (and which may be re-interpreted, modified, or revoked at any time by that government). In the virtual world context, it seems obvious that players (and I mean players, not player characters) have legal rights... but do they have natural rights as users of virtual worlds?

What about player characters? (As in Raph's "A Declaration of the Rights of Avatars".)

What about non-player characters? (As in "Equal Rights for Norns" from the "Creatures" community.)

2. As Mike points out, is it really a "right" if a divinity could simply negate it (and all other rights, and in fact the entire universe) with the flip of a switch?

3. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't read a question like #2 without thinking about the RL parallel. If you believe there exists in our real world a deity or deities who could snuff out our cosmos with a thought, what does that say about our "rights?" Why bother with democracy... or anything else?

4. What if your deity-of-choice is non-interactive? Does self-government suddenly become a viable action if no divine entity ever directly affects the world?

5. As noted, a server with no "deity" (no developer) would be static in terms of the rules of physics, much as in a RL universe with a non-interactive deity. (Bearing in mind that someone has to pay to keep the server running, and that this confers a rather draconian form of divinity on whoever's paying the bills.) Even so, as long as the "deity" is non-interactive while the server's running, and players are able to choose how to organize themselves socially, isn't a democratic form of government theoretically possible?

6. To end on a practical note, self-government is the hardest of all forms. Given the trouble we have with this in RL, what are the odds that it would last for any length of time on a server populated by today's gamers? Isn't it more likely to work (if at all) on some sandbox game, or in a virtual world that's not a game at all, because democracy requires a critical mass of mature, "I'm willing to accept limits to my actions so that the group can prosper" thinking?

--Bart

[Leigh]

Michael wrote:
How does ATITD handle misbehavior? I'm aware of the Demi-Pharoah's power, but I find it hard to believe that that's the only recourse when wronged. I'm under the impression that the community itself is rather small, and so maybe everyone knows and stuff...

In other words, is there a judiciary system besides the Demi-Pharaoah's ban power?

Leigh wrote:
Unfortunately, I'm new to A Tale In The Desert, but it's my understanding that bans usually come about by majority vote. This would follow the same process as other laws -- first circulate a petition, then vote on the proposed law. I would imagine that the proposed law would have to list the player's offenses, or else it wouldn't pass.

I've heard that the legal system is really slow, and it's hard to pass laws. So I think that this sort of ban is uncommon. But the legal system is used sometimes -- for instance, I heard a story from the first year of ATITD. There was a player with an offensive name that bothered many players. In response, a law was passed to change his name to Flower.

But the ATITD community is very small, so if, for instance, someone was cheating people in trade, it would be mentioned in the chat channel and other people would refuse to trade with that person. If someone spammed the chat channel, then everyone would start ignoring them. Cooperation is a big part of this game and (what I heard is) if someone earns a bad reputation they'll find it difficult to play and will probably leave anyway. In this way, there are community punishments for obnoxious behavior, so that bans are not always necessary.

[Mike Sellers]

Bart: as long as the "deity" is non-interactive while the server's running, and players are able to choose how to organize themselves socially, isn't a democratic form of government theoretically possible?

Only sorta. If the social ontology of the world (how the world was constructed to support community) includes facilities for shared governance, then this is possible. OTOH, the forms this takes in the best cases are usually still pretty crude: e.g., people standing in one part of the village square or another to indicate their opinion (their "vote") on a particular issue. Few if any worlds now have built in social "physics" for things like, say, holding a hidden vote, determining if you have a quorum for a vote, allowing community ownership of objects or other groups, or maintaining a fundamental governing document (a constitution or set of by-laws). Just as even gravity has to be coded to exist in an online world, there are myriad aspects of social/governance that we simply take for granted but which must be consciously engineered to exist in an online world -- and which the end-users often cannot even simulate much less create on their own (beyond the "stand over here if you agree" level). This is an area that few game developers have explored, and one in which even the theory is often sparse.

So, given a non-interactive "deity" and some assurance that the server will keep running, if sufficient social/community tools and mechanisms are included in the world, then players could come up with all sorts of neat shared governance schemes.

--

I wanted to say something about "democracy." It gets tossed around in discussions like this with a fair amount of ambiguity. Some see it as the ultimate form of distributed governance -- the opposite of the dictatorial autocracy existing in game worlds now. Others use it as a handle for "I get to be involved" without thinking exactly what that might mean. Few, I suspect, understand that as Aristotle said, a pure democracy is the worst (least efficient and least likely to bring about long-terms stable results) form of governance.

I tend to use phrases like "shared governance" or "shared regulation" in discussions like this one. The point here is that many players want to be more involved in regulating what they and others can do, or at least they want to be able to be involved. Imagine if players could set which areas of a game were PvP-enabled and which weren't (or even which allowed goods bought via RMT or not!). They might not be thinking "one player one vote" or even "one player one compulsory vote" but those are both pure democratic systems. What they want instead is a voice. How that voice gets turned into decision-making is a bit more nebulous for most folks.

I don't think democracy is a good match for in-game shred regulation. It's a lot of work, it's often an interminable process, and it has a lot of structural dependencies (who can vote, how often, who can propose votes and how often, what constitutes a quorum, when can decisions be revisited, what constitutes a majority, etc.).

But that is not to say that some form of "shared regulation" is a bad idea. I happen to think it's an excellent idea for all sorts of reasons. The trick, however, is to give the players the tools they need to decide for themselves whether their shared regulation will be anarchic, autocratic, representative, oligarchic, or even democratic. Each (and infinite shades between) has its benefits depending on the context, and I don't think any game developer is wise enough to know in advance which one is best for all situations. As has been said many times, "tools not rules" -- this is true in enabling shared regulation/governance more than anywhere else.

[toben]

Tibia is an example of self-government by dictatorship. Groups of players form Internet gangs to rule individual servers w/ world populations ranging from 500-1000 players. The limited world size, population, and unregulated griefing allow for these gangs to set their own laws and enforce them by murder and intimidation. It's a lot like Lord of the Flies Online or living in a prison.

[Bart Stewart]

Mike> Few if any worlds now have built in social "physics" for things

True enough. Would you say that another minimum condition for democratic organization (as you define it) is that players have the power to create new things?

In other words, do virtual worlds have to look like Second Life to have a shot at democracy, or could one of the more tightly constrained game worlds ever hope to be democratically run?

To put it another way, just how much control must players be able to exercise over each other, or over the world, before they can be fairly said to be exercising a democratic government?

--Bart

[Andy Havens]

Bart said: "To put it another way, just how much control must players be able to exercise over each other, or over the world, before they can be fairly said to be exercising a democratic government?"

I would say that, to whatever extent you want to define it, democracy would need to be available, in game terms, not as a system of government, but as a feature or a "meta feature."

Guilds, for example, in many games can be, in fact, democratic, but the features that are guild-implemented are not. In WoW (if I remember correctly), anyone at a certain officer-level or above could kick out or promote other guild members. You could democratically determine -- in a systematic way -- whom to keep in and promote, but the feature itself is, essentially, hierarchical, not democratic. A democratic guild promotion system would involve something like one member pushing a button that says, "I nominate so-and-so for promotion," someone else pushing the "I second the nomination" button, and then everyone getting to vote. Democracy as feature.

All kinds of other "options" in a game world could be "democratized," of course. And you could determine, either democratically or not, which features are to be voted on. Wouldn't it be weird, for example, if levelling was based on a peer review of higher-level players. "You're just not ready for Level 60, Junior..."

You can take it to whatever zany degree you'd like. You could have the "philosophers' zone" where all combat is resolved by democratically voted upon debates. No combat! Just beardy chat! The dwarf wins, so the Tauren must lay down and die! If the publishers will support it with tools... the universe can have democratic gravity, language, gold, blood, etc.

But first y'all gotta vote on whether or not that's more fun... Maybe for some kinds of games. But as a GM and long-time RPG player, I gotta say that once you agree on some pretty basic rules, democracy gets trumped by "God," and the GM is God, and good GMs make "fun" the Co-Deity.

[Todd]

what about this? a game in which the only rules that are said to exist are the ingame physics and the monetary system (make it a real cash economy) then you let the players determine all the other rules (professions and everything else) then watch what happens? I think that players would band together (like guilds) in a coopertative manner. what i am envisioning is something like Eve online and Eutropia but where the players determine the ingame rules of conduct and give them the power to enforce those rules of conduct. what would those rules be would they be the same game wide or only in those areas in which a particular guild (for lack of a better word) control. It would of course have to allow for PKing (you might even be able to work out an inheritance clause in which if you are killed your next character might be able to inherit some or all of your former toons items and gold. you could also let players and guilds stake out productive tacks of land and defend them from other players or guilds. This is just an idea that I am working on but I think that it would be interesting to see how players create their own rules within a VR and how they enfgorce those rules.

[Mike Sellers]

Bart: do virtual worlds have to look like Second Life to have a shot at democracy, or could one of the more tightly constrained game worlds ever hope to be democratically run?

I don't think that players have to be able to create "things" for shared regulation or a form of democracy to take hold. They need to be able to exchange goods and services (which they can already do), and the more they can do toward controlling physical and social entities (land, objects, sub-groups) the more relevant such shared control is likely to be to their experience in the world.

For example, maybe the players can decide on the tax rate for everyone living in the town -- but if they can also redefine the town's boundaries they have a greater degree of control that is otherwise left with the developers. And if you take this further and they can (with tools supplied by the game) decide that they want one person to decide the tax rate (call him the Mayor) or maybe formally give this responsibility to a council of three Wise Women, then the explorable governance space and relevance increases dramatically.

As another example, Meridian 59 has a limited form of consensus democracy in how its guilds are run: at any time each full guild member can put their support behind someone to be the guild leader; whoever gets 51% support gains the leadership abilities (and the former leader loses them). This game has much less in the way of crafting, etc., than do many newer MMOGs, but the ability to have a smooth change in control and leadership based on consensus (without the paralysis of pure democracy) is a powerful part of the game for many players. OTOH it's just one form, the one that we decided to include, and the players' ability to change it is highly constrained by the feature set itself.

Todd said: what about this? a game in which the only rules that are said to exist are the ingame physics and the monetary system (make it a real cash economy) then you let the players determine all the other rules

Without the RPG overtones, what you're describing is a form of Nomic. With the RPG/physical world overlay you're describing a sort of blank slate game (no, not that blank slate game) that might appeal more to students and academics than most game players.

[Todd]

I am sorry but I forgot to add that enforcement could be anything from a ban on play for a given period of time to a lack of guild protection for a given period of time to even a guild PK execution with denial to inheritance rights for next character. I am sure others could come up with more creative consequences but they could be developed and I think enforced in the right VR environment.