Fascism Is Fun

In all of the debates around governance and virtual worlds, there has been this assumption that what we were working towards, what inevitably must happen, is some ideal form of egalitarian pluralism. Democracy, but better.

What if that's all wrong? I realize this is heresy, but here's the thing: We've bent over backwards to provide the players with the tools for creating democratic structures. Yet what have we seen them actually create? Oligarchies, plutocracies, cults of personality, tribes, cartels, militaristic feudalism, just about everything but democracy.

When I posed this question at State of Play's "Society and Games" panel, one member of the panel was obviously non-plussed. Having just pitched the concept of a pure social game, where the players would create the rules and be truly free, she was asked "What if the players choose to implement a fascist state?" Her response was that she would not allow it, thereby illustrating the "finger on the power button" principle in its starkest form. Even the egalitarians cannot put down the reins of power.

But I'll pose it again: What if democracy, although apparently a workable way to keep the state from trampling on the rights of individuals, is just a historical accident, a way of marketing the power of the state that makes it easier for the governed to accept their powerlessness? What if studying the societies of MMOG's proves this? What if the ideal state really is the platonic benevolent dictatorship?

Hitler was a madman, but there was a reason that the German people followed him: He provided a strong arm, surely steering the ship of state. Mussolini was not mad, and until he failed them by losing, the Italians loved him. He made the trains run on time, he forged order out of chaos, he made them strong among nations for the first time since the Roman Empire.

Perhaps there are better ways to make a state responsive to the needs of the governed than democracy. It's certainly a highly inefficient form of government, and only rich societies seem to be able to afford more than the thinnest veneer of democratic forms to hide their real power dynamics. Perhaps our idealogical blinders are preventing us from seeing the glaringly obvious: Power is its own justification, Might Makes Right, and people just want to be on the side of the winners.

Even in this era, we have examples of enlightened, benevolent dictators. Marshal Tito kept the Balkans peaceful for the entirety of his life while playing the superpowers off against each other. Singapore has as complete a despot as can be found, yet the people are healthy, happy, and for the most part wealthier than most of their democratic neighbours. And in online games, maybe Fascism is Fun.

Comments

[Edward Castronova]

1.

If you thought fascism was fun, you should try feudalism!

Seriously, these are the same questions I keep asking. Do people really want participation? Or are they happier having no power except the ability to complain endlessly on message boards?

[Cory Ondrejka]

2.

Dave> Minor correction, the egalitarian agoraXchange folks were (strangely) in the "Designing for the Future" panel. Credit to the moderator of that panel, Eddan Katz, for asking what they'd do if their design settled on fascism.

Also, there is currently a distinction in governance between p2p governance (guilds, groups, and the like) and the "governance" that exists between players and the developers. This is exactly the same distinction that exists between in world economies and transactions that involve the real world.

[Richard Bartle]

3.

Dave Rickey>she was asked "What if the players choose to implement a fascist state?" Her response was that she would not allow it

Her complete indifference to the raucous laughter that followed made her attitude all the more sinister. She didn't even recognise there was a problem for her here.

The way I read that presentation was that the game as far as they were concerned was a collaborative "design a virtual world" game. When their collaboration had finished they'd have a virtual world. The success or failure of this virtual world would be inconsequential; what was of far greater interest was the creation of a community of artists and art-thinkers to work towards the end of constructing this fabulous new world. I doubt she'd have seen it quite that way herself (I think she was kinda hoping people other than up-their-own-backsides artists would play in this world), but that's how it looked to me.

As for the kind of governments players want, the problem is that they're dealing with deities, not states. The law of the land can decree that I wear a seat belt while driving my car, but it can't stop me from driving without a seat belt - it can only punish me if it finds out. Virtual worlds have laws of nature, not laws of the land: if a VW designer wants, they can stop your car from starting unless your seatbelt is done up. It's physics, not politics.

Described in such terms, the virtual world developer can only ever be a dictator. They can dictate that some form of government is enacted by the players, but ultimately that government only exists through the dictator's largesse. The art woman wanted a democracy, so that's what she was going to get - because she's the dictator.

I can see interesting possibilities for experiments in utopian virtual worlds that are created by collectives of like-minded individuals and put into trust for their members, ruled by some governing council of deities (which may accept elections to deityhood). This gives us a committee with dictatorial powers instead. The danger there is that people are elected to the committee whose first job is to sieze power and stop anyone else from being elected to it. My guess is that legal checks and balances would be needed in the real world to prevent that.

Richard

[Tek]

4.

I've been thinking up a MMOG design where the survival of the players are dependent on their formation of a working government; the key attributes being its ability to police itself, delegate power, and have an efficient decision-making process. As far as I know, this hasn't been done yet (tying in consequences to governmental failure at least), and this is a model that I think could revolutionize some of the aspects of online gaming. At least that's what I tell myself...

Any thoughts?
-Tek

[Alan Stern]

5.

I vote for an enlightened dictatorship. Self-governance in online gaming is overrated imo. Then again, I'm a gamer and hence would not get a vote. Hmmm...

Something a bit more substantive, I agree with Richard Bartle above. The problem in mapping real-world government models onto a virtual world is that we're dealing with deities and not people (or at least not with people under the normal constraints of the average person). Until the deities deign to either relinquish their powers or unilateral control, no form of gov. "created" or "used" will in fact be comparable to its real-world analog. Even then, who would the deities relinquish their control to? Who would be the ultimate arbiter of the off-switch? As long as there is an off-switch and paying subscribers, the in-game governance is a sham, no matter its form.

And as a brief aside, I will always remember what my 9th Grade 'Global Insights' teacher taught us when we reached the Fascism unit. The first day, he posed to us the question: "What is fascism?" and told us to bring answers the next day. We discussed it a bit before he gave us his answer: "Fascism is human nature." That was his position and the basis upon which he taught the unit. It was an interesting take on this aspect of governance. I'd love to hear arguments against it because I bought the story at the time and still find it difficult to sufficiently rebut that point of view.

[ren]

6.

Tek wrote:
>I've been thinking up a MMOG design where the survival of the players are dependent on their formation of a working government
This is pretty much what ATITD (A Tail in the Desert) are doing the story arch of each ‘telling’ (one game cycle that lasts about 12 months) is based on players pulling together and creating laws etc that enable the community to bond – or not.

Just to echo what other have been saying on agoraXchange (well the heavily ‘edited’ version of my thoughts on this – I was too dumb struck to comment at the time):
- So the players of this world will get exactly what they design just so long as it’s the design that the presenters accept \ have already thought of – so basically a dictatorship pretending to be a democracy
- Did someone tell them that there is quite a history and set of tools for online collaborative design projects and they really don’t need to build any
- What was their point again?
o Overthrow the current world order generally
o Build a game
o Both
o Something else that I missed
- Can I get a grant too please ?

I find myself agreeing with Dave – especially in the light of the conference, there seemed to be a set of assumptions that no one (other than Dave) wanted to challenge, one being that democracy is intrinsically good and not that we could but that we should use games to promote it. I thought M Froomkin’s paper was good as he advocated that virtual world might be good for testing out alternatives (in the paper it is legal ones rather than state one but I think that the principle applies).

I guess the lesson from games is that benign dictatorship is the optimal state of affairs. The problem is getting the right dictator. When the stakes are low it seems that people are happy to let the _strong_ rule, but what current discussions seem to suggest is that when the stakes are raised e.g. when people think they have _real_ property interests, then they start to feel that that they should have more participation in governance and democracy \ user participation starts to creep in.

Richard Bartle wrote
>The law of the land can decree that I wear a seat belt while driving my car, but it can't stop me from driving without a seat belt
>if a VW designer wants, they can stop your car from starting unless your seatbelt is done up. It's physics, not politics.

Couple of points here, yes VW designers rule over physics, but in the physical world I suppose that it could be very illegal to sell a car that would start with the seat belt undone.

But this makes me think of another points – seat belts cost lives !
Well according to a study that I heard about last year seat belts have the effect of making drivers feel safe, which makes them drive less well, but most deaths are pedestrians not drivers.
Solution – simple make it so that cars have a large metal spike sticking out of the steering wheel, chances are that this will make most drivers drive real safe !
So what if we tested this kind of approach in a VW (er world not car) a la Froomkin, and what if it did work in the world, I wonder if demonstrating such counter intuitive things in VWs does genuinely move the debate forward.

Ren
www.renreynolds.com

[Richard Bartle]

7.

Ren>there seemed to be a set of assumptions that no one (other than Dave) wanted to challenge

I WANTED to challenge them, it was the fact that I might as well be speaking to a brick wall that put me off. Arguing with polemicists can be fun, but you really have to have the time...

>I thought M Froomkin’s paper was good as he advocated that virtual world might be good for testing out alternatives

VWs have been used for trialling RL ideas before, but we need to see more of it. My only reservation is that the players ought to be made aware that they're guinea pigs before they play, otherwise there's the moral angle about whether experimenting on people without their permission is acceptable or not.

>I suppose that it could be very illegal to sell a car that would start with the seat belt undone

Sure, but then I could do up the seatbelt and sit on it rather than putting it on. If the law wants to make me comply, it has to ensure that the likelihood of my being caught and punished is enough to make me think twice (this is assuming I'm not a law-abiding citizen). Unfortunately, what I find a deterrent, other people might not. Raising the stakes so that they are deterred too swiftly reaches the "might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" level, where even petty crimes command such great sentences that you may as well do a major one if you're planning on committing any crime at all.

Virtual worlds don't have to do this because they can access their physics and are omnipresent.

Richard

[Kenny Dembner]

8.

One question that comes to mind on this thread is, well, "Could it at all be related to ethics and morality of today's age in comparison to ages of yore?"

I am looking at the example of the US in this case, and why they started a democracy in the first case?

"Taxation without representation" is what I learned in school. We were being 'unfairly treated.' I believe that the definition of unfair has changed significantly with the heavy reliance on currency.

What are the sources of power in these MMOGs? Are they based on the amount of currency one has access to? What about some sort of 'social currency' where friends/supporters are the denomination?

I'm not sure, also, if there is an explicit reason to form a democracy, with a dilution of power among people who don't know each other. Our forefathers were fighting for the same thing, freedom. What could they be fighting for in these MMOGs? Perhaps these MMOGs need to be dominated by a totalitarian regime before a democracy will take place?

Thanks for listening to my rambling,
Kenny

[Ryan Kelln]

9.

In most MMOGs I've played or heard about the guild/social structures are almost never democratic. It isn't that the players don't want a democracy, just that they don't need one.

Games try to make everything exceeding fair and balanced for each player. As well players aren't allowed to dominate or discriminate against other players without violating the game's ToS/EULA/etc. Basically the players are living in a utopia, where leadership is mostly about how much pain and suffering the leaders can withstand, and the only payoff for all the effort is social capital. Besides social capital leaders do not wield any more power than any other player.

Furthermore when you can't permanently kill other players it's hard to form effective death squads. :) More seriously, without the threat of death you can't truly impose your will on others.

So there is no need for democracy because there is no disparity between players. Equal opportunity for all, violent force is at most an economic burden, and you can never, ever get rid of your enemies.

Democracy is about empowerment, but MMOG players are already immortals whose further empowerment usually involve 'farming mobs' not emancipation.

[Nick Yee]

10.

Expanding on Ryan's point: In a world where you are immortal, a world where you can choose to leave at any point, a world where rewards are specified by developers and bear little resemblance to how things work in real-life (ie. water costs more than guns in SWG), why do we assume that the social/political forms that emerge shed any light on "human nature"?

I mean - if the underlying premise includes immortality, then do we really care what the conclusions are?

Afterall, there are games that make a whole bunch of worse atrocities "fun": murder, arson, torture and even genocide. Sure, the Ren Faire is fun, but that doesn't mean that people actually want to live in feudal societies, right?

[Peter Ludlow]

11.

One of the things I've commented on in The Alphaville Herald is the fascist aesthetic that has been built into to factory jobs there. You slave away in uniforms while slogans are flashed at you like Trust MOMI (Municipal Observation and Management Incorporated). Meanwhile explosions can kill you (several die per shift) and starvation during a shift is possible if you don't green properly before going to work (a full day at work will total your energy bars). I guess someone at Maxis decided that fascism is fun.

[Tek]

12.

Here's something I didn't think of earlier: what are the legal ramifications of giving another player explicit power over another (through direct game mechanics)? Can you let in-game dictators order someone's death and take all of his possessions? Is it just that the player must be given the option to be ruled or not? Or do you just need a "WARNING: DICTATORS!" label on your game box?

So this leads to the question, can there be any real VW dictators, in the true sense? Or are these player leaders really more like generals or even "event coordinators"? In the same stride this demonstrates the prevalence of the power structures we see: you don't need democracy since there's no real threat of power abuse. An evil "dictator" won't be able to keep many followers.

[Bob Kiblinger]

13.

I tend to agree - MMORPGS really don't offer much insight into human nature because of the parameters. They do tell us about human nature when there are no reprocussions/crime&punishment for one’s actions, but that is not a realistic mirror of real life.

I think the population of an MMORPG breaks down into two groups. One group of people (the maniacs) see these games as a stress relief valve and spend most of their time wrecking as much havoc as possible. These people would be anarchists if they did translate into the real world (and they don’t). The other group (the realists) see the game as more of a socializing, reality-based experience. Neither viewpoint is wrong of course, but I believe the realists stick with the game for a much longer time period and take the "game" very seriously. The maniacs seem to have little loyalty to any MMORPG - and seem to jump from game to game frequently. If I were a gaming company looking to keep my stockholders happy - I would gear my game towards the realists - they keep subscription numbers high and the bottom line profitable.

[ren]

14.

>Ren>there seemed to be a set of assumptions that no one (other than Dave) wanted to challenge

Richard>I WANTED to challenge them, it was the fact that I might as well be speaking to a brick wall that put me off. Arguing with polemicists can be fun, but you really have to have the time...

Well with the last lot, indeed what was the point, but more generally as I’ve said think the two camps i.e. law and game design, had a bit too much respect for each other \ fear they did not know enough about the others area to argue. As I say, next time I think there will be a lot more dialog.

Ryan Kelln>Furthermore when you can't permanently kill other players it's hard to form effective death squads. :) More seriously, without the threat of death you can't truly impose your will on others.

I don’t think this is the case, in fact somewhat the opposite, for effective governance there needs to be differential sanctions. This can be put into place where one has a guild system and social sanctions and things like access to group resources can be controlled at a granular level (I think there was quite an early thread that covered some of this here on terranova).

Tek> Here's something I didn't think of earlier: what are the legal ramifications of giving another player explicit power over another (through direct game mechanics)? Can you let in-game dictators order someone's death and take all of his possessions?

I know I keep on about it, but, ATITD has allowed players to vote for leaders and those leaders do have the power kick a player off game i.e. have their account closed (the booted player gets one month subscription back I think).

I think _legal ramifications_ is a very broad question and it needs to be split out:-

IANAL, but:

Property Generally – until we get some definitive cases then the virtual assets that a player controls I don’t think would come into it except in some pretty exceptional cases (see my comments on going bankrupt in another thread).

Tort Generally – general types of harms are going to be difficult to prove at the moment as _its just a game_

Reputation – I maintain that reputation in a virtual world is getting more significant, so if one player had the power to ban another player from a virtual world then I think it is conceivable that the banned player might have a case based on damage to their reputation, just so long as they could show some material harm

Ren
www.renreynolds.com

[Richard Bartle]

15.

Ren>they did not know enough about the others area to argue. As I say, next time I think there will be a lot more dialog.

It could get quite acrimonious if they think they know more than they do. I don't expect virtual world designers to start claiming they know about the law because obviously they haven't been to law school so they're easy to expose as know-nothings. However, I can envisage lawyers (especially those who may have played virtual worlds for a couple of years) coming to believe they know everything important about virtual world design. We'll get problems then.

The way I saw it, the game designers had an idea of what they wanted the laws to be and the lawyers were saying why they could or couldn't, should or shouldn't, have it that way. There were some interesting things coming the other way, where lawyers had ideas for using virtual worlds to find things out about reality; as I've mentioned before, though, they're not the first to have this idea (nor hopefully will they be the last).

>if one player had the power to ban another player from a virtual world then I think it is conceivable that the banned player might have a case based on damage to their reputation, just so long as they could show some material harm

As always, this depends on the virtual world. If you were playing a virtual world where the whole setting was some kind of post-revolutionary "j'accuse" environment, you could hardly complain if your reputation was damaged - that would part of the point of the world.

I'm concerned that lawmakers will look at the big commercial virtual worlds of now and make their laws without thinking of the smaller non-commercial worlds of now nor any of the worlds of the future. There must always be a way that non-threatening virtual worlds that are non-standard can protect themselves from too-broad laws designed only with standard virtual worlds in mind.

Richard

[Euphrosyne]

16.

Some interesting comments, but the discussion seems to ignore (imo) the fundamental point.

Ryan and Nick got halfway there by pointing out that the ethical infrastructure of quasi-immortality makes the politics of game worlds almost completely worthless for extrapolating "true" human nature. In a way, most games are more perfectly democratic than any society because every player starts off with literally the same potential, and has the same mechanisms available.

But to address the somewhat heavier original pondering over real-world political systems: It's a *game*. A wholly encapsulated sub-reality inside our broader existence. Trying to analyze the system from within ignores the structure that made it possible, and it has been democratic free markets that have made these games (and more importantly, constructed the infrastructure on which it is played). This is not boosterism, just recognition of historical fact.

My real point is: it's not so much that the armchair fascist can happily retire to his comfy analog existence after a day of being beaten down--although that is significant. What's important is that there is a discrepancy between the two, rather regardless of the heirarchy. Not every gamer lives in a western democracy. Surely there are some furtive players in Islamic states or China today whose online existance is far more free and democratic than their real lives.

In the end, we aren't working toward a single "best world" that all gamers must enroll in--the open market system that allows players to choose a fascist, feudal, or libertarian second existence (or third, fourth, fifth...) really is the foundation for the very existence of each particular world. So long as people keep that in mind, then they will be free to choose and form their virtual political systems however they wish. And, given the economics, they can afford to be whimsical.

Dressup is fun. Make-believe is thrilling. As the virtual and the real continue to blur their borders, political considerations will be an issue; but not the same issue that it has been for thousands of years. If fascism could be ended with the flick of a switch, it wouldn't have ever caused the evils of the past. So long as we are able to move on to the next world at our whim, we'll all remain free.

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

17.

To put my thesis up front: I think democracy in a game world is not the ideal form of government. (I'll talk more generally about virtual worlds if I don't get too long winded talking about game worlds. ;)

The biggest problems about democracy in an online game is that 1) it takes a lot of work, which people usually don't want to bother with in a game, 2) the nature of online worlds don't support some of the basic premises of democracy. Both of these conspire to make demoncracy not appropriate for a game world where people want to have fun.

Democracy is hard work; anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. ;) How many people really take the time to become informed about issues that affect them? I admit, even in my own life I can't bring myself to get motivated by local politics. The time it would take me to make informed decisions about the process simply isn't available, and I don't have anything in my life I value less than local politics. I try to keep an active interest in state and local politics, but that takes a lot of work as well. In general, Joe Sixpack doesn't care about most politics. Hell, most people don't think their vote really counts for anything, anyway, so we have very sad turnouts for even national elections. A quick google search showed that we reached about 50% elegible voter turnout in the United States for the 2000 election. That means that only half the people able to vote actually cared enough to do so last election. Can we really expect people to care more about the goings on in a virtual game world compared to the offline one? Is this something we should really hope for? If not, then how can we expect more than 50% of the people to really care about a democracy in a game world?

Now, let's talk about those poor saps known as the "elected" in our democratic game worlds. The work is HUGE. Organizing people, establishing rules, providing necessities, etc, etc, etc. The work never ends! People that have held top positions in player guilds know the work that goes into maintaining such a guild! Developers also know that holding admin positions in worlds is a LOT of work as well. Unfortunately, most of the reasons for holding office don't hold in virtual game worlds. You are disconnected from your constituents in a very basic way, so you don't get to see your policies affect them personally only through their avatar. In addition, it is hard to exploit power over people that can leave the world at any time, and when you have the "final authority" (aka developers)looming above you all the time. As Dave pointed out, there will always be someone with their finger on the switch that might disagree with what an individual does.

Allow me an example from Meridian 59. In Meridian 59, if someone kills an innocent they are flagged as a murderer (red name). A murderer takes higher penalties if they die than an innocent does. In addition, innocents can attack murderers without penalty. The only way for a murder to become an innocent again is to get a pardon from a player-elected Justicar. (The system is a bit more complex than this, but I'm hitting the main points for simplicity's sake.) The player-elected Justicar is basically an element of player justice; in theory, a person that attacked an innocent with due cause could get the Justicar to remove the murderer tag.

A friend of mine recently started playing Meridian 59 with his wife. She wasn't keen on PvP, but she was active and ran for Justicar. Her experiences were summed up as this: "There are two types of Justicars. Those that pardon their friends, and those that do it right but *never want to do it again*." Since the position carries a lot of power over other people, it is highly sought after. Murderers will gladly resort to violence against the Justicar or his/her friends in order to force a pardon out of the Justicar. Even a "fair" Justicar runs the risk of upsetting one side of a dispute by giving a pardon to an enemy. This creates more enemies for the Justicar, something that can be very dangerous in a world with open PvP. Often, the Justicar position is obtained by someone affiliated with a guild, and the Justicar hands out pardons to murderers who have killed in the name of the guild.

A second example: Guilds can "vote" for the guildmaster in a guild. Every character in the guild gets one vote, and at any time the person with the most votes wins. All new guildmates come in with their vote already cast for the existing guildmaster. I have very rarely seen this system used to depose a current, active guildmaster. Even guilds with a missing guildmaster often prefer to disband rather than elect a new guildmaster. Something to be said for strong leadership, I guess.

So, we come to our second problem: the rules of virtual worlds don't necessarily support the basic notions of democracy. The most obvious example is that the fluid concept of online identity means that the premise of "one person, one vote" is immediately violated. Are two different characters on the same account allowed a single vote each? What happens if two people share that account, are you restricting the voice of one or the other? What if someone owns multiple accounts? What if someone has access to another person's account and votes with that account? What if someone finds a way to exploit the system and casts multiple votes with a single character? A dizzying array of questions that throws even the most basic premise into doubt!

Beyond that, as people have mentioned above, you have the creator(s) of the world that ultimately have the final say whether they choose to excercise it or not. The administrators of M59 take a fairly relaxed attitude towards the goings on in Meridian 59, but there might be cases where we might want to step in (even behind the scenes) even if a "majority" has made a decision concerning a game server.

Okay, I've rambled on too long, so my comments on non-game worlds is one sentence: Whatever works. ;)

My thoughts,

[torill]

18.

The thing the experienced roleplayers I played with in Dragon Realms tried to make sure everybody understood was that DR was a GAME. It is not reality, and it shouldn't be mistaken for this.

Now there might be a difference between a game and an online world/community, but I think it would not be healthy if we mistake the community of minds with the community of geography.

Within a community of minds, fascism can be fun! Not because I think a dictatorship is a better way of ruling a country, but because I would enjoy the challenge. I don't think I would be the kind of brave hero to go up against a real dictator - I would not try to assassinate Franco or even Hitler. While I hope I would dare to do My best to undermine them, I am a very mediocre revolutionary, I fear. But in an online community, or in a game, I could try my hand as a part of the opposition.

It might get me kicked by the immortals or administrators, and so what? I can just go through a different server with a different IP address, make a new character and try out a new strategy. I don't need to fear for my children, I don't need to worry that our doors will be kicked in at midnight and my husband shot in front of my eyes to show me the error of my ways. I may get a few nasty emails and perhaps somebody will hack my connection and plant a virus if I have been REALLY bad, but there will be no breaking of bones, no burning house, not even a little Berufsverbot.

I think the connection between In Character and Out Of Character is something we need to remember both as players, participants, administrators and researchers. It limits both what we can do, what we can learn, and what effects game strategies has. It also opens up for the exact same things, just with a different value, a different meaning of the same things in the flesh world.

And yes, in role-playing games, you need evil. "The bad guy" should be accepted, respected and then enjoyed. There's nothing like a good adversary in a game!

[Edward Castronova]

19.

Alek: "But I am really scared by the idea, that studying an artificial social reality, with it's basic assumptions - an ontology of sorts - so different from real world societies, might give a simple answer to a question that social sciences are meticulously researching in these - allow me to say this - more real societies."

I guess, contra Alek and Nick and a few others, that I'd prefer not to allow you to say this. I believe the essential forces of economics emerge whenever humans interact under conditions of scarcity and specialization of resources. The essential forces of sociology emerge whenever individuals sort themselves into groups. The essential forces of politics emerge whenever the structure of resources and groups create collective interests, issues that everyone cares about but that need to be resolved by the community as a whole, through designated leaders.

I don't see how the lack of mortality in virtual worlds can be invoked as an argument against the reality of the political pressures that emerge within them. Today, in my town, the citizens of Anaheim are in a political struggle over the placement of a pawn broker's sign. No one (yet) has invoked the death penalty over the issue, and I doubt anyone will. But it's still politics.

More broadly, I'm sympathetic to the argument that events in a virtual world are idiosyncratic to that world. Generalizing from those events to wider conclusions requires quite a bit of care.

But the claim that generalizing is impossible, or only allowable for trivial aspects of behavior ("when thrown together into community, people argue"), goes much too far, I think. It's very easy to dismiss the goings-on in a virtual world as a tempest in a teapot, or as 'just a game,' or 'virtual and hence not real.' I mean, what makes political engagement 'real'? Surely the touchstone cannot be the realness of the objects in question; people have had bitter politics over lots of intangible things, from flag colors to communion wafers.

What makes a politics real is the emotional investment of the polity. In the end, the people decide for themselves what the National Interest is. There are no reliable objective criteria. No king or minister has survived long by telling the public that its concerns are irrelevant.

Virtual worlds should attract study on these grounds alone. Indeed, it often seems that there's more genuine political interest in virtual worlds than outside of them. More people (percentage-wise) seem to be invested emotionally in the politics of these places than are invested in the politics of states and nations. Remember, there was a time in Earth's history when it was common to go to political rallies, to follow the political news of the day, to choose friendships with respect to politics, and to conceive of oneself as a party member. Those days are no more. Meanwhile, the policies of every virtual world in existence seem immersed in user debates raging at white-hot intensity. A crusty politician (Tip O'Neill) once said "All politics is local." Well, what's 'local' in the internet millenium? Not my village but he net community I've chosen. For increasingly many people, the only politics that holds relevance for their daily lives is the politics surrounding such things as class balance in virtual worlds (an equity issue if I ever saw one).

Yes, it would be dumb to extrapolate directly from player politics to voter politics. But if we accept the possibility of reading the players' emotional characters while in a sandbox world, as most readers here seem willing to do, we should also admit the possibility of reading their political character as well. Politics is the result of personalities in conflict; if we can know the one, we can know the other.

[Thomas Malaby]

20.

I agree with Ted, and I've fought against this too-easy distinction between "real" experience and "play" in much of my previous work on gambling. Gambling is of course an activity that problematizes very obviously attempts to distinguish with finality between play and "real" experience. This is not to say that there are no kinds of experience that are more "play"-like, but the dichotomy that the category of play creates hides more than it reveals. In my view, the easiest way to understand the difference of degree of "real-ness" that is at issue here is by simply asking the following question: "What is at stake for those pariticpating?" In gambling, reputation and money can all be on the table, and the fact that it's a game doesn't keep the consequences from being truly devastating or salvific at times. While there are game circumstances where relatively less is at stake, it's not the category of "play" that is going to help us identify them.

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

21.

Edward wrote, "It's very easy to dismiss the goings-on in a virtual world as a tempest in a teapot, or as 'just a game,' or 'virtual and hence not real.' I mean, what makes political engagement 'real'? Surely the touchstone cannot be the realness of the objects in question; people have had bitter politics over lots of intangible things, from flag colors to communion wafers."

What makes offline life more "real" is the fact that I cannot log off. I don't agree with GWB's policies, but avoiding them requires a significant cost in moving or losing my posessions, the difficulties of applying for citizenship in another country, etc. Even then the policies might still affect me since US policy works on a global scale, and I don't have the resources to move off-planet. If someone came to a game I'm playing and put in place policies I found as distasteful as current US policies, I would quit the game and find a new one. The only potential "loss" I incur is in-game possessions (which I really don't own according to most EULAs), and friends (which can be contacted just as easily via IM or email).

Consider this: if Anaheim were a collection of nomadic tribes instead of a modern US city, would there be such furor over a pawnbroker's sign? Probably not, because people that dislike the sign could just move out of the area, or the pawnbroker could easily take his unappreciated business elsewhere easier than he could currently. Neither group has high mobility, so there's a fight.

The ability to leave the world is a fundamental difference between virtual worlds and the offline world. If I design and administrate a game world, and people come to the game world expecting to be entertained, then they will leave that game world and not look back (or, they might not even show up in the first place if I get bad word-of-mouth). The same applies to a virtual world built for non-gaming purposes: if it doesn't meet the users's expectations, they will most likely leave it.

Thomas Malaby wrote, "In my view, the easiest way to understand the difference of degree of "real-ness" that is at issue here is by simply asking the following question: "What is at stake for those pariticpating?" In gambling, reputation and money can all be on the table, and the fact that it's a game doesn't keep the consequences from being truly devastating or salvific at times."

You pointed the important issue out yourself: the effect is based on the stakes, not on the game. If I play a single-player computer blackjack game and lose my $10,000 starting pot, I'm not going to be as affected as if I did that in the offline world. In the game, I simply hit the reset button (or create a new account) and start over. In the offline world there's no reset button, so the effects are much more immediate and long-lasting.

My view on things,

[ren]

22.

I’m firmly in the ‘these are real’ camp. And more and more I see virtual world politics as real.

As Ted indicates with his reference to Flags, one way to conceptualise politics is in terms of the creation and enforcement of what we might term symbolic norms – where enforcement is both symbolic and oftentimes physical. In this sense much of what we discuss here about the macro level of virtual worlds is regular politics.

To use what must be our favourite example – property. There is no ontological difference between virtual property or any other type. This is because property is a social value that we attribute to things some of the things happen to be physical, but their state is socially constructed i.e. property-ness is not an attribute of objects-in-them-selves.

So what we have in may of the discussions we have here is political struggle between competing ideologies. At this level there is no difference between it and say the difference between the Franco-German idea of Authorial Rights in property and US system that tends not ignore these. What is different is the particular character of the struggle – the objects have a particular set of contingent properties, the groups are not nationally based. But all struggles have a particular character and the ones at stake here are not exceptional – think of the green movement or the anti-globalisation movements, these not based on nation states, they contest meaning etc etc.

Brian 'Psychochild' Green > The ability to leave the world is a fundamental difference between virtual worlds and the offline world.

In the context of what I have said above this is not the case. While you as an individual can log out of a given virtual world, that world still exists, its economic, social and political effects still exist. Now they may not matter to you in your every day life, but there are probably innumerable nation sates who’s existence does not matter to you in your every day life – this does not mean that their politics are not real.

OK, I’m gonna go all the way with this and wave credibility behind at this point. The logical conclusion of this is almost that there is no difference, in kind, between a MMO and a nation state the difference being only one of degree. This is not the quite case, it would be mad to deny other facts about nations and the physicality of life in them. The other obvious parallel with where MMOs are going is a trans-national corporation these have external effects and are powerhouses of symbolic meaning. But as we have been discussing here the micro-politics do not easily fit into simple producer consumer terms that would typify corporations.

It this seems to me that MMOs it seems are destined to occupy a position somewhere in between. As Ted pointed out in a recent paper MMOs can have very real economic effects but just so long as nation states deny the ideology that virtual money is real this will look like a void \ a drain. More than this effects will stretch out in more general terms of community and meaning making.

To get back to switching cost and not purely economic costs but social ones, it would make almost no social difference to me if I lived where I do now or 100 miles away, indeed it would make little difference if move from the UK to the US, however take away my IP connection now that would be a social cost – this might be a sad indictment of the break down of local communities in general or my life in particular, but it does not make it less true, an I can’t be the only one.

Ren
www.renreynolds.com

[Thomas Malaby]

23.

Brian 'Psychochild' Green> You pointed the important issue out yourself: the effect is based on the stakes, not on the game. If I play a single-player computer blackjack game and lose my $10,000 starting pot, I'm not going to be as affected as if I did that in the offline world. In the game, I simply hit the reset button (or create a new account) and start over. In the offline world there's no reset button, so the effects are much more immediate and long-lasting.

The distinction you make regarding gambling and computers is misplaced. It is misleading to compare a single-player blackjack game with pretend money to RL gambling, and this is all the more obvious given that there are plenty of gambling sites online where you can lose $10,000 of "real" money just as easily (if not more so) than you can lose it at a casino. Given that it is empirically obvious that VW objects/characters/currencies have value in "real" dollars, then it is no longer tenable to hold onto an idea that those participating in the games can not have something at stake, in a presistent (that is, its effects hold even after they log off), significant sense. While we can differ as to how much is at stake for VW participants *relative* to RL, it is a blind avenue to insist that VW experience is somehow of a different order. Wherever human communities create value (economic, cultural, social, symbolic) then people can have something at stake.

[Brask Mumei]

24.

"What makes offline life more "real" is the fact that I cannot log off."

Really? I would say it isn't that hard, phsycially, to cancel one's real world account. There are certain problems - absense of other games to play, inability to change ones mind and create a new account (Though some say one will automatically relogin with a new account).

UO, EQ, AC, DAoC, SWG, are not transparent sleeves one can jump between with zero cost. Your friends that you make in the world can't be seamlessly transported to another world. Even if you do move to another world, the social environment which you lived in cannot be recreated.

I consider it instructive that some of the hardcore PKers, who frequently dismiss those they kill on grounds that it is nothing more than pixels on the screen, express the feeling of loss when they cancel their account.

If one is embedded in these worlds, you can't merely "leave them". To leave them is to kill a part of oneself. You would not have much problems convincing me that it is a LOT easier to change virtual worlds, or to log off from them. But I don't accept the claim that there is some fundamental difference in kind. We all choose to continue to live. We all choose to continue to play. Telling players that they should just stop playing if they don't like the direction of the game is as heartless as telling people they should just suicide if they don't like GWBs policies. One should remember that the same PKs who railed against whining newbies who should just not play if they don't like to be PKed, whined equally loudly when their playground was yanked away.

- Brask Mumei

[Euphrosyne]

25.

Edward--
"What makes a politics real is the emotional investment of the polity....There are no reliable objective criteria."

I would assert that emotional investment is a utilitarian aspect of politics, not its essence. What makes politics real--its actual foundation--is its coercive force over the populace. If I had diplomatic immunity from any prosecution under my country's laws, politics would cease to be "real" for me, regardless of the emotional involvement of my community. I believe it was Mao who observed that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The difference between political systems is who holds that gun, and what they hope to achieve. Which leads to my next comment...

"Remember, there was a time in Earth's history when it was common to go to political rallies, to follow the political news of the day, to choose friendships with respect to politics, and to conceive of oneself as a party member. Those days are no more."

I know of no such broad time in "Earth's history". I do know of several such specific times and places--and in modern times those actions have been strongly associated with socialism, communism, and fascism. On the contrary, there is a strong history of aversion to politics and parties in America...going all the way back to the Founder's writings there is a sentiment that "no politics is good politics", so to speak.

My earlier comments were in no way meant to write off game worlds as "less real". However *at this time*, game worlds do not have the same consequences as the analog world. They provide a great experimental space for a range of human interactions--but it is too early and too easy to make facile deductions from them. In time, online and offline societies will merge further, but this brings me back to an intellectual pet peeve: The assumption that this new and novel, and yet unknown, world can be conceived of in 20th century terms. Trying to analyze the socio-political structure of game worlds in terms of "fascism", "democracy", etc comes across as unimaginative and, frankly, pessimistic (for evidence of this discussion's bias against history, note that the word "monarchy" has yet to appear). The mechanisms, the consequenses, the motivations...are and will continue to be different than historical offline politics. As such they will need new conceptions, labels, and scholarship.

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

26.

Thomas Malaby wrote, "The distinction you make regarding gambling and computers is misplaced. It is misleading to compare a single-player blackjack game with pretend money to RL gambling...."

A nitpick: "RL", while an accepted abbreviation, is a counterintuitive word to use when trying to argue for the "realness" of virtual worlds, that is, "non-real life" activities. I prefer the term "offline" for clarity.

Anyway, my point was that it was the gambling that created he issues surrounding it, not the game. While I agree that being a game does not invalidate the fact that people gamble with it, it does not change the fact that I could "play" blackjack without gambling. I argue that the distinction of "playing" is valid: I can play blackjack for no stakes, or I can gamble at blackjack for money.

Applying this to politics in virtual worlds, this is the difference between the person obtaining an item for in-game benefit vs. someone obtaining an item to sell outside the game. This does not mean that politics/economics/whatever in game worlds are meaningless because they happen in game worlds, but they do not necessarily change the nature of the game for some people. People can play a lot of these games blissfully unaware of the issues of facism being fun, democracy not working, or the eBay issue. Admittedly, this is interesting to us as developers and researchers, but I don't think we should ignore that there are other issues in virtual worlds (such as the goal of having an entertaining game world) which interfere with some of our usual assumptions.

So, I further argue that the nature of the game world requires a change in our fundamental assumptions about how things work based on observation in "physical reality". The nature of the virtual world DOES change the nature of politics, economics, etc., because the nature of virtual worlds does not necessarily mirror the nature of what we call "physical reality". If this is not the case, then what is the purpose of a site like TerraNova that discusses these issues in terms of virtual worlds?

For example, I could create an item with zero mass and give it a non-zero momentum in a game without changing the mass; for example, I could make an arrow that weighs nothing but still does damage when fired from a bow. Likewise, one cannot generally enforce the "one person, one vote" philosophy of democracy in a virtual world on the player level since the semi-anonymous nature of the internet prevents me from verifying that no person uses multiple characters to vote multiple times, as I pointed out above. Designers and researchers ignore these vital differences at their own peril!

This isn't to say there aren't some very real aspect to virtual worlds, or that this difference in the nature of virtual worlds makes them unworthy of study. Rather, it says that you can't immediately say that "all democracy is good" or "all facism is bad" when it comes to virtual worlds.

Some clarification,

[Brask Mumei]

27.

One thing I'd like to clarify here... In my opinion, "Fascism is fun" in a VW so long as:
1) You are on the winning side.
or
2) Your personal stakes in the matter are near zero.

In the first case, it is fun as it gets things done smoothly, and in a way that one agrees with. One rarely encounters the forcible suppression of opposition as one is rarely the opposition.

In the second case, you are either aligned with the state (in which case #1 applies again) or you are not. In the latter case, you can happily rebel, and suffer the brutality of the suppression as you have divorced your characters suffering from your own.

If one is attached to one's v-worldly possessions, and one happens to differ from the state, the behaviour of a fascist organization is quite similar to that of the grief player. One will not say: "Wow! That's so cool that my house was destroyed because I didn't bow to the supreme leader!"

- Brask Mumei

[Nate Coppedge]

28.

My viewpoint is that there simply isn't enough emersion and player-power experientially in the worlds to encourage government and true socieities.

[Estariel]

29.

Is democracy a governmental form optimised for maximum happiness or for maxiumum success?

The higher end of Everquest includes content that can only be overcome by many (70+) players acting in concert; in practice only the most powerful guilds can complete it. The politics of these guilds seems to fulfill the desired study criteria about being player-driven, but with a cost to leaving(/being cast out) larger than most serious players can bear.

The most successful guilds (in terms of progression) appear to be the most "fascist" in their leaderships, with all the seething discontent that brings. Some second division guilds are more egalitarian and happy places (as so successful in a different way), but at a cost in rate of progression.

Democratic activities pop up from time to time, but practised leaders can manipulate the questions, and the background information, just as well as any RL demagogue.

Where is the New Tanaan Times or the Norrath Enquirer?

[G_RAM]

30.

Alex wrote:
>But the character of the stakes, around which >politics evolve is also important - maybe >instead of thinking about 'realness' of >politics it is better to consider kinds and >strength of powers that it involves - I hope we >can agree that power is a good measure of the >significance of actors and their politics.

It seems to me that the stakes of in game politics is increasing at rather large pace. I am a philosophy undergraduate student and also according to a recent article I have read a "power gamer." I can personally attest to my growing investment in MMO's. I even have plans over this summer to attempt to make some sort of living off of gaming in MMO's.

But beyond a growing economic investment in VW's I also have a social one. The campus that I live on has a network counter-strike server. It serves not only as a game space but also as a social gathering point for a regular group of gamers who often socialize offline at parties, bars, and etc. Admins are generally benevolent dictators but they can also abuse there powers in ways that are not just and are disruptive to the social environment and it is rarely considered fun with this happens by anyone but the admin and a close circle of friends who do no need to worry about his abuses of power being directed at them because of there close personal social ties off-line.

A more fun enviroment would seem to be a more democratic one.

[Hero]

31.

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32.

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33.

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