Terra Nova: Playing Politics

Like many others, I've been working through a copy of Dungeons and Dreamers. Like Dr. Mortensen, I've got some criticisms, but I'm generally enjoying it. This is probably due to the fact that I am interested in whether Richard Garriott had a good time in high school. (Turns out, unlike me, he did, but like me, he was selling his computer games in ziploc bags.)

One interesting chapter in the book provides vignettes of mod makers. For intellectual property law aficionados, game mods make for fun IP market dynamics. Mods like Counter-Strike (based on Half-Life) are just one example of how open source software promotes popular derivative creativity. (For more examples, see Coase's Penguin by Yochai Benkler.)

Borland and King talk a bit in the chapter about Velvet-Strike. (The section seems to grow from one of King's Wired articles, which you can read here -- good stuff). Counter-Strike, as you may know, is a team FPS mod of Half-Life where terrorists fight with counter-terrorists. Velvet-Strike mods the mod by allowing players to promote virtual peace by placing spray-painted protests on game walls. There are also "intervention recipies" for virtual peace-making posted on the website. So VS is kind of like a land reform mod for Monopoly. Anne-Marie Schleiner, the creator, explains the impetus behind the project here.

The VS website has a whole section devoted to flames the team has received. The flames (which are in many ways standard flames) are worth reading just for the purpose of seeing how certain typo-prone Counter-Strike players see themselves, understand the message of the game, and interpret the Velvet-Strike mod as a form of political software speech that they don't like. Some of the flames are just standard pro-war, anti-feminist jabber. Some are internally contradictory "lighten up" flames. This one in particular I found interesting, in light of some recent posts here.

Dear Anne Marie,
I know real revolutionaries and your video game is a joke. No offence, but civil war and freedom fighting is not some little game in your precious little suburban world. [etc.]

Virtual peaceniks can get flak from all quarters, it seems.

Update: Relatedly, Jill is working on (maybe she finished) a thesis section on political games and Gonzalo F. just made one and, btw, wrote a master's thesis on the subject.