Nomic World: By the Players, For the Players

Clay Shirky, god of group interactions and social software, has posted an essay on governance in VWs/MMOGs that came from his presentation at the State of Play conference. In the paper he asks "What would happen if we wanted to build a world where we maximized the amount of user control? What would that look like?" It's a fascinating question, especially in light of the on-going control issues of game developers (compare Second Life's ceding of control to their users, with the crackdowns on eBaying that are in the news these days).

Comments

[Tek]

1.

Excellent. I think we should look heavily in this direction for future MMOGs. In fact, I think it is the future (as in, something that will become a norm).

[Tobold]

2.

A MMO in which players can change the rules of the game already exists: A Tale in the Desert. Players can write laws that change the game, and get them voted upon. It works because Pharaoh (Andrew Tepper) has the right of final veto, and can strike down any law that is either too hard to code or too harmful for the rest of the game.

Without such final veto, a player controlled game would quickly break down. You just need to read the typical demands on a typical MMORPG official message board to see that the average MMORPG gamer does not have the capability to differentiate between his own advantage and the greater good of the game. People would vote themselves rich and powerful, and then wonder where the virtual inflation and lack of challenge is coming from.

[Luca Girardo]

3.

Fascinating and intriguing. (Side note: That is what I love about Terranova as site: the ability of retrieve and collect valuable studies, essays, articles and news that otherwise it would be difficult for a single person to locate. Making them available for a bigger audience and creating a sort of VWs Think-Tank)
I found also the link to the The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat in the essay very interesting. A paper wrote in 1990 and still pointing out several problems that each MMOG developer has to address during the MMOG development.
I doubt we will see in the next future anything going in the direction of a Nomic World for many different reasons. But at the same time I see there are several interesting concepts that can enrich future MMOGs. An advanced political system would for sure be a unique selling point at this stage event if it would need to a limited system being able to effect only some pre designed subsystems of the VW. Like taxes, wars, geographically borders, and so on. It would be far away from a Nomic World but still more involving then the current MMOG models.
There was a tentative going in that direction at least on an Economical and political way (Legacy Online) but it did not have much successful due to a lack of content and software design restrictions.
One concept that made me reflect about is the “Minimally Multi-player Online game” concept, so the one player per world. It is interesting that the current MMOG evolution is moving towards a sort of mixture of Massively and Minimally using the concept of instantiated content/spaces (missions, playing grounds and related) where players can isolate themselves from the rest. That is one of the most important features in the next generation MMOGs (even if AO has already some instantiated content too).

[magicback]

4.

Along the lines of Nomic worlds, Neverwinter Nights (NWN) applies the Distributed Model. In theory, we can string different individually-owned Neverwinter night servers into a seamless world where each "zone" can have different laws and physics. It's doesn't go as far as complete mutability nor does is it bounded complete by platform, but it does allow for seeing the effects of models instead of theorizing.

In other forums such MUD-Dev and IGDA forums, there were discussion on how this privately-owned contiguous "zones" would work, which in a way is essentially getting ownership of a SL server instead of buying the right to use one.

On a slight tangent, take a look a an review of Nobilis, an PnP RPG game.

http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_6455.html

It's a game in the same category as Normic. It's a good mental exercise on how to implement such a game as a MMORPG.

Frank

[greglas]

5.

Luca,

If you liked the Habitat essay, you might be interested in Randy and Chip's new blog, Habitat Chronicles, in the blogroll at right.

I'm glad you think TN is something like a "VW think tank" -- that was more or less our intentions in starting the blog. Of course, we're somewhat constrained by the blog format, but we're experimenting and I think we're all pretty happy with it.

If you look at chapter 6 of Richard's book and his bibliography (first link on the blogroll at right), you'll see that he's already started mapping out the scholarship in various disciplines on VWs. Of course, there are many approaches to studying VWs, so people from various disciplines bring various perspectives and backgrounds to the table. One of the interesting things for me, personally, is trying to figure out, e.g., what ludology and semiotics might have to do with the application of law.

[Tek]

6.

Tobold:

ATiTD is definitely revolutionary; Ren's made that clear a few times now, heh. I meant to imply that we're not sufficiently tapping this facet of gaming. We should build upon ATiTD's example. There must be certain aspects of it that would work in any MMORPG.

What I also should have clarified, is that I wouldn't want to give the players the Power of Code, so to speak, but just the ability to alter some parameters within the game; the effect of these parameters being set by developers. I think the metagame that this provides could be rewarding.

[Betsy Book]

7.

Is Second Life approaching a Macro World model by offering plots of land and, in some cases, entire islands as tabula rasa spaces for the creating of environments from scratch? Does the fact that only those who can afford land ownership exclude it from realizing the Nomic ideal?

I am most intrigued by the concept of CVS World. Are there any real (I mean, virtually real) examples of this among MMOGs? If only RL had version control. I guess all the time-travel movies in pop culture (Back to the Future, etc.) speak to that longing for the ability to go back and correct past mistakes. The problem is, what might be viewed by one person as a mistake could well be viewed by his or her neighbor as the preferred outcome. Would there ever be a consensus as to the right course of action? Or are rollbacks only feasible as a solution for apocalyptic mistakes in which all citizens agree this drastic course of action is necessary?

[magicback]

8.

Besty,

I don't know any CVS world, but I did post my mental exercise of a semi-CVS Nomic world that also integrates a regular TV show into the production called Alterstate. The concept of the game is that they fight to revise the world: rollbacks and rollforwards. It's a bit of Nobilis I mentioned before.

http://www.igda.org/Forums/showthread.php?s=6cbfee5ecbca280ce77f9b48d6d455c5&threadid=10306&perpage=15&pagenumber=3

However, as the ownership, and thus ultimate power, resides with the developers it fall short of Clay Shirky's ideals.

Frank