Steven Davis recently forwarded a scheme of using separate (card) decks to mitigate collusion in online casino and poker games. As he states it, "(c)ollusion comes from a partnership having superior knowledge from other players." The problem is that it is so easy ( "phone call, VoIP, or chat connection to share information") and that it is unfair to those left out.
Are MMOGs fair?
A while ago we discussed the possibility that MMOG players may prefer less randomness in their virtual worlds (e.g. using "sampling without replacement" vs. "...with replacement"). In Ghost in the Machine it was hinted that the ability to discern patterns in reward and AI are deeply ingrained in the successful MMOG experience.
Fertile grounds for encouraging unfair advantage in the MMOG?
What about the group and its design in MMOGs? Groups have advantages over the individual - from private chat with highlighted colors and efficient member management / communication displays (e.g. gauges and instrumentation for monitoring avatars). Yet, players don't participate equally well in groups. Some are socially less effective, others are time-constrained (casual players), and yet others hang out with a lovable but bumbling bunch of friends.
What about 3rd party technology, out-of-band communications and information technologies? A traditonal example here is with VoIP systems frequently used in MMOG communities. A group using Team Speak has advantages (especially in tactically complex and fast paced environments) over the one who doesn't. Yet not all groups use Team Speak, and fewer groups demand all members use it. Unfair?
Are guilds cartels? Consider the advantages of guilds and the advantages they afford to members over others: information and its access (some of it very sophisticated - both content and form), the ability to organize and project groups into that world, the ability to manage resources and its distribution (e.g. DKP systems), and protection on PvP servers...
Sure, many us may want to think of many of these worlds as exemplifying cooperative play. Yet discrimination by Uberness on all levels trumps, and so too the ability to exploit more effectively world and social resources. To command better groups-slots, to own useful social networks, these are but some of the ingredients of success.
Are MMOGs unfair?
I just got done with a really way too long post on why RMT is cheating. Cheating is, of course, unfair. And it is also wrong and bad.
But RMT is not wrong and bad BECAUSE it is unfair. It is wrong and bad and is ALSO unfair. You can cheat and still suck. You can cheat and do worse. You can cheat "down" as well as up.
Let's get our definitions straight, first. If, by "fair," we mean "equal," then games are, of course unfair. They reward players with superior skills. Smarter players do better. Players with more experience, faster typing skills, etc. do better.
Some game skills are predicated on group behaviors, if the game is based on group rewards (guilds, social skills, grouping, team play). As long as the behaviors do not violate game rules... rock on... and rock on unfairly.
Remember -- In game "immoral" and "ammoral" behavior is fine by me. If your character is a thief... he should steal. If she's an assassin, she should kill quietly and without honor. If he's a bastard... play him like one.
If you take a game so seriously that you want to use a tech like Team Speak... knock yourself out. More power. Again, as long as it's not against the rules set up by the publisher. Me? Any guild that asked me to get that heavy... I'd tip my hat and walk on by. Too too. Which is the point of being able to play the game differently.
Uh-oh... here come the RMTers... yellin' that they just want to "play the game differently" and how is paying for levels or swag any different than using Team Speak or twinking or just being a better player in the first place.
Read my lips: it's against the rules. If some game comes along and outlaws VoIP for some reason... fine. I'll be against that, too. Or, if I really want a game that includes VoIP, I'll go play that instead. And if RMTers really want a game with RMT...
If by "unfair," though, you mean "improperly against the rules..." then, no. Groups aren't unfair. They're part of the game. Some games, like WoW, try to make a system that balances both single and group play. If you want to go it alone, you can. I did, mostly, for quite some time, until I really got a feel for the world and it's flavors. When I got tired of the single-player experience, and wanted more, I switched into "guild mode." Totally different game. Cool.
Other games truly do reward group play much more highly than individual play. Is that "unfair?" Only if you'd rather be playing something else. Someone who spends lots of time playing WoW and complains that it's too heavily weighted towards rewarding group play... well... try Dunegon Siege. Geez. It's a game, my friend. There are a couple hundred ways to spend your leisure time that involve slaying fictional critters on a screen these days.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 08, 2006 at 12:16
I would say that just like in Life, the Universe, and Everything, games are obviously unfair. They should be. If the complex games we played were perfectly balanced, and didn't reward skills -- they would be little more that an exercise in coin flipping.
I don't want to play fair games.
Posted by: Yak | Apr 08, 2006 at 12:30
Fair is completely in the eye of the beholder. To some, a game of skill is fair despite the fact that each participant starts with different natural levels of it. To some, a game of chance is fair despite the fact that an individual participant may be 'screwed' repeatedly by 'bad luck.'
I'm with Yak. Fair = no real game to be played.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Apr 08, 2006 at 14:22
I think we should elect game developers into positions of political leadership. Especially over the economy. Never mind that they're not elected.
Posted by: Michael Chui | Apr 08, 2006 at 14:53
Seconding (thirding?) Yak's and Matt's comments, one way to look at games is to see them as demanding of their players certain resources, like skill (competence). But there are other resources that are useful in games, like social connections, and they can be useful whether they're allowed in the "rules" or not (or, more often, simply not mentioned). Money is just another resource, and although it is different, just as competence is different from connections, there is no "natural" reason it must be excluded from games. Pointing to the rules is idealistic, since games are not (and can never be) reducible to their rules.
Since we convert these resources one into the other all the time in everyday life, we shouldn't be surprised that MMOGs as persistent and open-ended (to varying degrees) open up the possibility to accumulate and transfer more than just competence across them.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | Apr 08, 2006 at 16:30
Yep, unfairness, injustice, and evil is built right into, nay, hardwired and coded into MMOGs and MMORPGs, and that's why we need to eradicate their culture/mechanical features from virtual worlds, especially if they aspire to be "better worlds" and completely break with this culture.
The IM, the Group IM, the Teamspeak, the outside-of-world Yahoo Messenger -- all of these not only create uberness, it's impossible then to have the rule of law AND have an independent judiciary -- because any court of law will immediately be confounded by the insidious IM.
You can't segregate witnesses or protect them against intimidation -- the group IM/the IM/the YM undermines all that. Witnesses can be coached, led, frightened, coerced -- it is impossible to convene what we knew for centures as "a court".
It's the Russian concept of "telephone justice" -- the judge gets a telephone call from the Party in his chambers, and figures out how he needs to rule -- in the game world, the call comes not on a telephone, but in an IM -- group, YM, intimate -- but what happens in room chat then is undermined.
Even just a normal mediation procedure embarked upon with good will and good faith is instantly undermined because everyone can talk in IMs and collude and undo what's being said in the room.
It's really all so humongously evil that you wonder why they don't nuke it til it glows and start over.
Every human transaction, even of the most innocent type with the best of intentions, can have a huge erosion of human solidarity and perception in many ways:
o group IM that takes place discussing the person in the room without his knowledge if he's not in the group, if the group is not on open enrollment. Often, people in this group are either questioning or ridiculing him, or putting forth false info about him or tendentious info
o if he is in the group, intimidating him as the dissenter through ridicule
o individual IM to other individual bringing forth gossipy/tendentious info about a person as they attempt to lead a group/make a point
o individual deal-cutting in separate IMs while the group is trying to arrive at a consensus/compromise
o Teamspeak undercutting all that happens in the room inworld and in inworld IMs, group of individual.
o YMs outworld undercutting all of that further
o The calling card enables some to p2p2u and not others
o You can see who logs on, where they p2p2, and you're possibly banned or muted
o Parcel bans of course prevent even those in the group from seeing what is said in person in chat in the room/on the parcel
o Mutes of others so that even if they speak in a group, their speech is ignored and the muter can ride over them even in a group that does accept him
o the extra added evils of forums, their muts and bans and intimidations
o Oh, and let's not forget the backchannelling in the IRC channel, where game devs hang out.
Yes, there's no question that Philip Linden's world contains a hugely evil matrix of ever-more complex, insidious, and privileging networks/groups/IMs/parcel bans/private islands.
It's really actually quite startling evil as it gets bigger. To be fair, I don't think he even realizes what he's wrought here, along with the rest of them at the Lab, because they still live in this kind of static, colonialist dream, where they just push out information on those big drop-down blue menus, and all the natives clap, and everybody helps everyone else, and everybody is in a positive spirit.
I don't think they see the heartbreak.
If Philip Linden claims he could be making more money in Second Life (this was his claim last week on Second Cast) than he does as the CEO of Linden Lab, I'd love to see him come in and try *under these conditions of collusion and collision*.
Sure, in RL, people have their cell phones and pagers and email and you sit in negotiations and of course people are leaving the room and taking instructions from capitals and making side deals and spreading false information and cutting and pasting out of emails that were supposedly "eyes only" and putting in transcripts of "off the record meetings" and all the rest. That's how governments and businsesses work.
But you can still get a meeting together where you say the cell phones are turned off, nobody is obsessively refreshing their email, and you can come to some kind of understanding/deal clinching, etc. The IMs can't rule in the way they can in virtuality.
Everybody focuses so much on the hardware and software for these worlds, they rarely pay attention to the new and awful and totalitarian forms of social organizations being formed. if anything, they are overly breathless and enthusiastic about each new friendster, podcaster thingie that comes along and imagining that this is bringing people closer together and leveraging their mass power when in fact more often than not it's amplifying the clash of civilizations.
Why aren't these social interactions on the existing media of communication studied more? Are they just taken for granted? What you'll see, far and few between, is only the occasional article like Beth Noveck's celebration of groups online -- which is filled with troubling concepts and insufficient contemplating of how Smartmob becomes Lynchmob.
Why should we bother about this when these are just games? Because I tend to think all of this is going to be very much dominating our real lives in a fairly short time.
Here's the sort of thing one finds on the SL forums these days:
"To the extent that this is indeed a communications medium we can stifle malefactors by refusing to supply them with bandwidth on valuable high signal-to-noise communications channels. For example, on an individual level I like the mute function. It lets an individual explicitly choose to pay no attention to a time-wasting troublemaker such as an IM-stalker. On a group level those who own a communications channel like a forum are under no obligation to provide costly bandwidth to everybody who wants it. It makes sense to ignore those with a track record of grabbing way more than their share of bandwidth to use for self promotion and denigrating whoever is on their hate-list. In both of these cases the owner of the bandwidth is making the decision based on first hand knowledge; it's not some overarching institution doing system-wide enforcement."
If you find yourself cheering along with this statement, then I have to ask you this:
o what would be the "right amount" of bandwidth for me or you to have as "our share"? Who will decide?
o who is the "we" who will decide the meaning of this set of functions to ban/mute/remove?
o who decides what is denigration?
o who gets to make the hate-list or decide that any individual hate-list isn't authentic?
o what if an IM-stalker is in fact a legitimate angry customer/messenger with important news?
o who gets to run/own/manage/decide about the bandwidth and everybody else's use of it?
o why can't there be an overarching institution -- why would individual bandwidth owners/providers get to lord it over others? Are we all supposed to find our own bandwidth? etc.
Yes, groups, far from being all smartmobby and leveraging wisdom of crowds and all these other fantasies are indeed functioning as cartels and mafias and conspiracies. New technologies have only made that *easier* even if it made *other good stuff* easier.
Third-party websites arrayed around a virtual world are also great evils -- they are like the wet counties just over the border from the dry county in that they are under no obligation to abide by the TOS, and yet they draw people in from the rules set that originated for the world itself. Most of their attraction is precisely in providing the wet county to the dry county's rules.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 08, 2006 at 21:33
Prok>
Third-party websites arrayed around a virtual world are also great evils
-----
Yea, let's keep "evil" out of this - I'm not sure these are moral choices...
I have long been puzzled about the apparent ambivalence of game communities to the easily indexable quests in MMORPG and the 3rd party websites and databases that have easily sprung up to help players short-circuit 'em. The easy answer is the one mentioned below - its part of the culture.
PlayNoEvil Game Security Blog Trackback>
there is the question: Is the game itself "fair"? A game that has known by its participants and has an agreed-to set of rules that can be reasonably enforced is fair. By this standard, casino games, even if they are biased towards the house, are fair. The rules are known. Conversely an MMO may not be "fair" if it is ripe for abuse (the often cited example of real-money transactions (RMT), is not in and of itself unfair. It only becomes unfair if it is not an explicit part of the game or a part of the culture of the game that is shared by all.). Collusion in Poker is only unfair since it is not part of the game or its culture.
---------------------------------
Fairness framed as above seems reasonable. However, the murky (and unstable) bit goes back to matt's claim that fairness is in "the eye of the beholder." Put it another way, Diplomacy the board game is in the abstract a fair one to most players. Yet one can quite easily imagine (and some have seen) games where players had preconceived motives - e.g. "I don't care who wins so long as its not John Doe" which seems to stretch fair play. Even fair games can be played unfairly.
Posted by: Nate | Apr 09, 2006 at 15:09
Collusion in Poker is only unfair since it is not part of the game or its culture.
In other words, if it becomes socially accepted, it's no longer cheating.
Posted by: Michael Chui | Apr 09, 2006 at 16:04
I think perhaps we need to qualify "fair" with "absolute fairness" and "reasonable fairness."
Yak & Matt both have good points- absolute fairness is a very bad game. If everything is made even... there isn't much variety.
However, there is a degree of balance that can be made- and I believe it IS good for the game's market and overall health.
In PvP, we have "fair" between those that want some form of strategic planning to give an advantage vs those that care only about the battle-by-battle competition. Game mechanics that support the "planner" can make the game seem "unfair" to tactician. Taking away any bonus for good planning penalizes the "strategist."
Similarly, if a game overwhelmingly rewards time-intesive play with competetitive advantages, they'll lose the casual players that can't invest 8 hours daily.
If the longest-duration raids drop overwhelmingly more valuable loot, then the people capable of doing these raids will overwhelm those that do not.
If our economic "faucet/drain" model relies on "draining" through optional, roleplaying-driven playstyles like rent, costume changes, and status-purchased items, then we're penalizing a playstyle, as many combat-oriented experience the "faucets" while opting not to have the house "drain."
What we can do- what we SHOULD do as developers is make sure that the different play styles are within some reasonable degree of fairness: insure that the 8-hour player doesn't make all your 3-hour players go elsewhere.
It's fine for advantages to exist, and for each style to experience different penalties and benefits. It's fine if one even seems a bit more advantageous than another... but if the advantage is too great, then you'll lose the other playstyles.
That's fine if you want to service just that niche- but don't delude yourself into thinking you've got broad market appeal.
Posted by: Chas | Apr 09, 2006 at 17:56
No, I don't think we have to keep "evil" out of it at all. It *is* evil. And it's ok to moralize about games -- they're going to take over affecting more and more of our RL soon and I don't want this kind of moral equivalency and moral relativizing to come soon to a theater near me.
The very word "collusion" raised by the OP contains a connotation of crime, malfeasance -- evil.
Perhaps there are things that are "cultural" and not "criminal".
For some, they'll always remain criminal. In fact, cheat-and-walkthrough sites destroy a game and make the players burn through the content faster and gut out the game and leave it as a burn-out husk forcing game devs to do even more stuff -- it's a cycle that just doesn't port.
Hacking off limbs in Afghanistan, or honour-killings in Pakistan may be characterized as "cultural" by some. But most international leaders will say, "that's not cultural, it's criminal." Cultural, but not an acceptable norm, and in fact criminal at a higher level, if only law and justice can apply.
I'll never forget the creator of Eve Online at SOP III saying with a twinkle in his eye:
"Fraud is fun."
The heists in Eve costing people even RL money apparently have been part of its amazing popularity among a certain power-gaming set.
It is fun, because it's inside the four walls of the game. But...what if it gets out?
I imagine the incredible dramas of Second Life involving heists of people's club accounts and messy divorces, etc. are part of the thrill of the game for some -- but it costs people RL damages.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 09, 2006 at 19:29
Prok said:
>> Third-party websites arrayed around a virtual world are also great evils
Nate replied:
> Yea, let's keep "evil" out of this - I'm not sure these are moral choices...
Oh don't be silly. You talk about "fairness" and "unfairness". These are terms founded upon moral choices.
You can pussyfoot around the fact that you are discussing an ethical distribution of goods as much as you like, but if you remove morality, whether based upon natural law or some tenuous, self-referential contruction of behavioural norms, then you end up with no point to your post, with its heavily morality-based assumptions and its use of terms like "collusion", "discrimination" and "unfair advantage". Puh-lease. If you want to be a moral relativist, at least stick to it yourself!
Prokofy is perfectly justified in his use of terms, and lazily dismissing that fact in a spectacularly condescending one-line imperative is ridiculous. That his argument is based on what you view as some sort of problematic and culturally-specific binary oppositions is no excuse.
Posted by: Endie | Apr 10, 2006 at 06:16
To be scrupulous here, I used quotes aruond "fairness" and "unfairness" above by way of scare quotes, not direct quotations.
Posted by: Endie | Apr 10, 2006 at 06:19
Endie>
Prokofy is perfectly justified in his use of terms, and lazily dismissing that fact in a spectacularly condescending one-line imperative is ridiculous. That his argument is based on what you view as some sort of problematic and culturally-specific binary oppositions is no excuse.
---
I think what is going on here is a contrast of an interesting (and deeply rooted) view among some of the virtual worlds community as to whether virtual worlds such as MMORPGs are extensions of the real one, or whether they are *just games*. The answer to that question determines the answer to this question: how closely should one read "fraud" as represented in the fiction of a game world (citing earlier example) as morally dubious (e.g. fraud committed in the real one).
Sure, this is a perfectly reasonable discussion (and I admit in the fine balance a disturbing and interesting one) so long as we don't arrive at a conclusion that I feel seems inevitable if carelessly taken to extreme: all those who participate in such corruption (e.g. play MMORPGs) are well, evil.
As for fairness and moral certainty. I think there too exists a balance between Cricket as God's game and the Laws of Cricket as good sportsmanship.
Posted by: Nate | Apr 10, 2006 at 07:52
That's extraordinary. Prokofy, you seem to be saying that private communication is inherently evil, that having the ability to dissociate from (block) people who annoy you, intimitdate or sexually harass you is evil.
And I don't think your example of a real-world meeting in which IM and phones are banned is free of side channels. There is the body-language channel, there are semantic side channels (double meanings, references, allusions). With certain RL friends of mine I can organise limited collusion against someone entirely through the medium of public chat. Is this evil?
Is the occasional husband/wife team found in MMORPGs to be banned entirely, on fairness grounds?
Posted by: Peter Clay | Apr 10, 2006 at 08:27
>That's extraordinary. Prokofy, you seem to be saying that private communication is inherently evil, that having the ability to dissociate from (block) people who annoy you, intimitdate or sexually harass you is evil.
What is inherently evil about these tools is that they very often undermine human solidarity and cooperation because they can be used to do that -- and they tend to be more often used for that purpose than the positive purposes you outline.
Your statement appears literalist and deliberately exaggerated to me to make a point. It's as if you're saying nobody can ever stop annoyances or intimidation, and that to claim there is *evil use of* these tools means that they serve no purpose.
I'm claiming there is a widespread evil use of these. I won't even say *misuse* because their chief purpose in many groups in virtual worlds is to create cliques, power groupings, magic circles, etc. and to exclude, ban, grief, ostracize others.
The *ease* with which they can do this; the *multiplicity and velocity* of these tools tends to make them devolve to the evil use -- and the rapidity and devastation of this ease of causing evil is of concern, especially as it expands like wildfire on the Internet and becomes the mode of choice and the norm for humans.
One of the reasons some public schools even ban the use of MySpace.com is that become in an instant, through messengers, AIMs, and publication on MySpace.com, a child's reputation can be instantly destroyed. It's almost impossible then to undo the vicious rumour. Not dozens, but hundreds of people get the message instantly and don't get the correction.
At least when we were all in sixth grade passing around what we called the "slam book" writing anonymous gossip and reading it under the desk, enough time elapsed in this more cludgy medium of the marbled notebook that the teacher could grab the slam book -- or the offended party could be shouting indignantly the counter story by recess.
Don't you see?
Many people are familiar with the evils of email in an office, how overly-emotional communications are fired off to masses of people; how tone is missing; how private comments are put out to the public, etc. It's a corrosive acid in a work environment.
The same is true of these features of virtual spaces.
Imagine if there were a check-off box that asked you to explain the motivation for your muting of someone, and the Lindens, say, could gather this server data.
I have no doubt in my mind that "sexual harassment" or "verbal harassment" in an IM will constitute any significant percentage of the reasons for muting people. In fact, it will be interesting to see the clusters of muting on some kind of map. Some people, like teens coming to the adult grid on mom's cell phone and flying around prim-bombing everybody and shouting swear words, will have a huge cluster-cloud of mutes/bans surrounding them. Those are obvious cases.
The rest of the people will have a strange chicken pox of bans/mutes/ignores/card-cuts. It will appear highly subjective. A person might be muted by one person yet celebrated and friended by others -- and why? Due to a chance encounter? Some silly point of friction? Some locked-in impression? Who you mute changes by the week often. People who mute each other sometimes end up as partners. Etc. It's a very subjective, emotional, and volatile thing, and to look at muting as merely some useful function only applicable to sexual harassment is to see it as a very limited thing -- a medium with no message, when of course it *has* a message!
Most of the time, muting is used to silence dissent of one kind or another, and sometimes it is merely the dissent of a partner who asked you to take out the stray prim garbage but you were too busy watching a video on your parcel.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 10, 2006 at 09:28
Virtual worlds must give players tools to include and exclude people from groups -- otherwise how would we form communities? MMORPGS are team sports. It's silly to talk about collusion between team members. Teams are SUPPOSED to cooperate (within the bounds of the rules of course).
By the way, fair games are generally much more fun than unfair games. Chess, golf and football are all fair. Games with inequitable sides can still be fair, but the easiest way to ensure fairness ("balance") is to force the players to bid for the sides they play immediately before playing. In other words, all players have equal opportunity to play any side.
Posted by: Ken Fox | Apr 10, 2006 at 10:14
Nate said:
>> so long as we don't arrive at a conclusion that I feel seems inevitable if carelessly taken to extreme: all those who participate in such corruption (e.g. play MMORPGs) are well, evil.
Oh, I agree with you, not Prokofy, utterly on the real specifics of his post, and perhaps should have gone further to make this clear. I merely mean that "good" and "bad" are perfectly legitimate terms in any discussion of distributive justice, whether we are talking about the ideal republic or a virtual construct.
Re the original post: I am well off and technically skilled. So I can implement solutions that give me a big advantage in-game (WSG team with teamspeak > WSG group without). I duo with my wife for much of the time, and we collude almost without thinking about what we are doing. We gain real advantages, just as we would by buying gold. If people have a problem, then lrn2mrry nub kthxbye ;)
Endie
Posted by: Endie | Apr 10, 2006 at 10:16
An interesting debate but one's that largely academic -- thus TN seems the perfect spot for it. :)
Everyone (with very few exceptions I would hazard) who plays MMO's knows about and uses some form of metagaming resource, be it IM, quest databases, VoIP, whatever. Seems to me it's only "unfair" if a metagaming resource is not universally available. Since anyone playing the game has the potential to use these resources, how can it be unfair to those who choose not to? They have become part of the rules and framework of the game, like it or not. Getting pwned in the BG's by a guild with TeamSpeak? Then you know what you must do.
My view might be a simplified one, but it is realistic, which in my experience is usually a good stance when discussing "fairness".
While I agree that resources like quest walkthroughs help players power through content much quicker than developers intend, rather than wring our hands and shout "thottbot is evil!" we should be working on better dynamic quest engines, or some other solution. Humans by nature will always choose the shortest path between point A and point B.
Posted by: RickR | Apr 10, 2006 at 11:03
I think Prokofy is underestimating human adaptability.
Consider the accusation about email not conveying "tone". I read in interesting book, published in the 1800s, about the dangers of Telephones. It commented how hard it is to get the nuances of normal conversation across over the telephone, resulting in serious communcation problems. It struck me because I had seen, and made, the same arguments about text communcation - except I had held the Phone as an example where there was sufficient bandwidth. Playing Ultima Online, in which characters are forced to move in single grid steps, I discovered I could identify people by their walking patterns. Likewise, I suspect that the "problem" of insufficent bandwidth in IM to convey emotion will be settled by new issues.
Yes, the existence of invisible back-channels lets people collude and engage in an under-meeting, sabotaging the apparent top level meeting. But is this always a bad thing? A meeting which prohibits collusion can easily be controlled by the chairman with sufficent personal force. I'd think of the movie Conspiracy here. I think of the movie A meeting without backchannels *allows* the chairman to spread misinformation safe in the knowledge that it cannot be checked. "Did you know the ACLU was a communist front?" While the truth may out later, the goal of the lie wasn't the lie itself, but the intangible character assassination that went with it.
I guess my point is that collusion and back channels aren't necesssarily evil. Society will adopt to incopreate them and develop the relevant new rules of etiquette that go with them. Some areas, such as IRC, may descend into random /kicking and /banning as the standard mode of operation.
I do agree that more attention needs to be paid to the potential of Lynchmobs rather than Smartmobs. I am also worried at the glorification of "smart mobs" despite the fact the mobs don't seem very smart. Sadly, this is a result of the mob members *not* using the backchannels that they have available to them to verify the data before acting on it.
Posted by: Brask Mumei | Apr 10, 2006 at 11:29
Prokofy, I'm just struggling with your use of the very strong term "evil" to cover "cliques, power groupings, magic circles, etc." My use of the marriage example wasn't coincidental; it's an example of a magic circle whose confidants will privilege one another.
I can certainly agree with you that spreading malicious gossip about people is bad, that gratuitously excluding people is unfriendly and upsetting to them, and that there's a lot of this going on. But the "block" button (I'm not familiar with SL and its mechanics in this area) is a symptom not a cause of exclusion.
Suppose X and Y are listening to Z. X finds what Z is saying or the manner in which it's said objectionable. Y does not. This happens repeatedly in some social setting. What are the options of X?
Blocking may be the least disruptive option, as it allows X and Y to continue interacting and Y and Z, whereas X withdrawing or counter-flaming Z are both bad for Y (and everyone else in that social setting)
Antagonism is even worse if you're trying to achieve some shared goal under stressful conditions (e.g. various game combat situations), rather than just hanging out.
There have been numerous times in life I've noticed where someone leaving a group is better for both the group and (in the long term) that person, even if the parting was stormy.
Can we have a discussion of the good that can be done by exclusion, then weight that against the alleged "evil"?
Posted by: Peter Clay | Apr 10, 2006 at 13:20
Forgive the naive question, but it is sincere:
What would a "social" game in which the evils of private communication were stripped out look like? And would it still be "social" in any meaningful way?
I assume that, in addition to banning Teamspeak and IM, an ideal game would also get rid of private chat features, /whispers, in-game mail, etc. (all of which could be equally well-used to facilitate insidious plots).
But what do you have left? A "social" game in which we cannot communicate, lest we do great evil to our fellow players (by, say, not wanting to group with them on a given night)? Is it even social any more?
Posted by: Jimpy | Apr 10, 2006 at 13:39
Jimpy, it seems to me that you, too, are taking my comments with heavy literalism, exaggeration, and extreme -- you can't seem to take the point about their evils, that jars you in some fashion, so you feel called upon to even sarcastically suggest that the entire social software scene should be removed.
Why would these have to be *banned*? Who said anything about banning them? I certainly didn't. And how could you ban them, anyway? Even if some Net Nanny could get rid of IMs from some war game, for example, or Team Speak, in the mistaken belief that this causes evil insidious collusion, people would just walk around those obstacles and talk on Yahoo messenger or whatever they need -- in Eve Online people even began to talk on regular land lines from what I understand to perpetrate their fraud.
It's human nature that contains evil within it (and not exclusively evil either, lest you start on on that topic); the social software merely reflects it -- it's merely a tool, after all.
You can't make better people with newfangled social software tools. In fact, people have a propensity to allow the ease and insidiousness of these tools to undermine some good things they had established over the years in their various civilizations -- these were trust and cooperation and collaboration in the f2f mode.
So *all* this means is that you have to *compensate* for the insidious qualities and you have to be aware of their damages.
Example: if you're going to attempt something like a court of justice, you could create a separate server/space in the virtual world where the IM functions were simply shut off. Just as some worlds have no-fly zones or "safe zones," it stands to reason that you'll have a no IM zone where people are forced to deal in chat. There could be a device to take a true copy of the transcript hashed to prevent tampering. Of course, there's the YM issue. Everybody can always have open a whole bunch of windows! But unless they put in one of those hugely hobbling and annoying functions that shuts a game down when you go into another window, we're stuck with that. Getting rid of illicit IMs would be a start.
In the same way, there could be appeals mechanisms to some higher authority in the community, whether an actual functioning independent judiciary, or some impartial council of elders, to whom one could go with a claim against those who ban/mute/slander. There might be some attempt to reason with people who arbitrarily and viciously ban/mute/slander others so as to make them have some accountability for their actions to a wider circle than their hot-house clique.
You don't have to take the "social" out to prevent evil, Jimpy. You do have to work with more than just NPCs and "code is law" and server statistics, however. And frankly, even if you *did* take the social out of the social game, you wouldn't take out the evil. People find ways of being evil even playing Animal Crossing.
I'm absolutely going to reject any idea that morality is "improper" or "inappropriate" to interpose into this discussion. First, I'm bolstered by the OP's referencing of "collusion," a morality-laden concept already. Second, I'm reinforced by my own experience in which I see that the hunger for justice and truth in these virtual worlds is very great. Some want to role-play on the truth/justice side of the story. Others want to role-play on the lies/conspiracy side of the equation.
It's not a game if you only let evil prevail, either. In fact, allowing social tools and evil to prevail everywhere, especially when it involves cheat-hacking in closed games and real-life harm and economic damage in virtual worlds makes people stampede out. They close the window. And they go questing for another, better world.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 10, 2006 at 14:04
I'm with Chas. (And, to a lesser degree, Yak and Matt.) Some "unfairness" is good; too much is bad.
Now let me take that to a place where few will follow. /grin
1. Talking about "fairness" requires asking the question: fairness to whom?
Around whose idea of fairness should a MMOG be designed? Should the game be structured to be fair to (i.e., to provide rewards to) the smart, persistent, socially connected player? Or should it be designed to be fair to the average, casual, independent player?
Political conservatives often feel that their liberal friends misunderstand the concept of fairness. Conservative theorists like to point out that there's a difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. From their perspective, defining fairness as equality of opportunity is preferable because rewarding effort yields positive results for a society; defining fairness as equality of outcome damages a society because it devalues effort.
Following this philosophy, the optimal MMOG environment would have equality of opportunity for all players, but would not try to guarantee equality of outcome. Every player would have the same chances to create a "good" character, to fully explore the game's content, and to join a guild. And from those voluntary actions, players are free to reap the benefits of smart, persistent, and organized action. "Fairness" means that those who put in the effort get the most rewards.
Isn't this pretty much the situation we have now in most MMOGs?
I think a good argument could be made that it is. Although I'd discourage anyone from leaping into the Michael Moore fantasyland on this, I believe it's probably fair to conclude that the Pareto law effect shows up many MMOGs with strong player economies because these game economies are designed around the conservative "equality of opportunity" philosophy of fairness.
MMOGs that embrace the conservative assumption that effort should be rewarded wind up with power law distributions of economic assets.
2. Michael Chui: I think we should elect game developers into positions of political leadership. Especially over the economy.
Oh, dear God, no.
The reason we have questions of fairness coming up with respect to MMOGs is because the efforts at social engineering that constitute MMOG design are surprisingly short-sighted. The whole idea of MMOGs is that they're "massively multiplayer," but where's the testing that would reveal how a few smart, hard-working, and organized players can so quickly dominate an entire server's economy?
If a game's economy isn't consciously designed to produce equality of outcome, why should anyone be surprised when a relatively small number of players is able to dominate that economy? If there aren't features imposed that "punish" the hard-working players in order to flatten out the power curve, why be surprised that the average, casual, solo player complains that the game is "unfair?"
Those who practice social engineering in politics (whether from the Left or the Right) are very bad at it. But they're still demonstrably more effective than MMOG designers, who always seem startled when a few players take over a server.
The latter aren't people I want trying to impose social engineering on a grand scale, no.
3. How much of the dramatic shape of the power curve in MMOG economies is due primarily to their laser-like focus on Achiever gameplay?
When you design a game in which the most prevalent form of reward by far is "stuff" of one kind or another (XP, skill level or character level, money, loot, rank, badges, etc., etc.), you dramatically sharpen the shape of the power distribution curve.
If you build an accumulation game, the Achievers will come. And they will bring with them their certainty that fairness means equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, and you will get the Pareto effect in spades.
4. Well, what about actively trying to flatten the curve?
If designers placed caps on how much and how quickly rewards could accrue from effort, or defied convention by consciously offering social and exploratory gameplay comparable in power to commercial and combat gameplay, or offered few accumulatable rewards, would it work? Would it be a fun game?
Would it be a commercially successful game? Would hardcore players want to play a game where the "weak" are rewarded, where fairness is defined to be equality of outcome?
Is there a functional middle ground between equality of opportunity (power law) and equality of outcome (flip a coin)?
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Apr 10, 2006 at 14:48
If designers ... defied convention by consciously offering social and exploratory gameplay comparable in power to commercial and combat gameplay, or offered few accumulatable rewards, would it work? Would it be a fun game?
Many people would find such a game fun. But: absent some form of familiar (i.e. "kill-monster-get-gold") gameplay, few of those enjoying such a game would be typical core-gamers (i.e., achievers). And it's these people upon whom buzz depends, who populate message boards and blogs -- and to a large extent who make the decisions on which games get funded, published, and distributed.
Asking about whether you can make fun games that don't depend on the well-worn themes of achievement and accumulation is like asking if screws can work like nails to fasten pieces of wood. Sure they can, and in many ways they're better. But don't try telling that to someone who only knows hammers. To them, it's an all-nail world.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Apr 10, 2006 at 15:41
Profoky -
I find myself neither jarred nor particularly sarcastic. You may be reading a higher degree of incredulity or disdain than I feel.
But I confess, I have a hard time following you when I see juxtapositions like:
"What is inherently evil about these tools is that . . . ."
and
"It's human nature that contains evil within it (and not exclusively evil either, lest you start on on that topic); the social software merely reflects it -- it's merely a tool, after all."
Which leaves me thinking, wait, so are the tools inherently evil, or are they neutral and the people are evil?
Or how about,
"Why would these have to be *banned*? Who said anything about banning them? I certainly didn't. And how could you ban them, anyway?"
Followed closely by,
"you could create a separate server/space in the virtual world where the IM functions were simply shut off."
So wait, it is impossible to ban them? Or it is easy to create a seperate server/space where they are banned? Or is the idea simply to shut off the in-game functions and ignore the reality we all know - that people would use out-game methods to communicate anyway. In which case, what is the point of the space?
I'm not necessarily hostile to your viewpoint. I just can't figure it out (which could certainly be attributed to my lack of insight).
My attitudes may also be informed by the fact that I basically only play "stab the goblin" type online games (not so much the "build a house" ones). And I make somewhat heavy use of both in-game and out-of-game social tools.
For example, I use the "Friend List" and "Ignore List" functions to both remain in touch with people that I wish to play with (which is an exclusionary act) and to conveniently filter out those who have done me some perceived wrong (albeit, I think I have one whole person on that list - still, I DO use it).
I also "collude" in that I play with people in a guild. Nate is right - the social grouping confers certain advantages (and costs, but I'd say the good outweighs the bad).
So I'm trying to find the "evil" (and no, without simply dismissing its possible existence). Is Guild Chat inherently evil? Or how about the sub-section of it called "Officer Chat" (only visible to a subclique of the whole)? Or are the people evil, and the chat function therefore . . . facilitates the evil? Encourages it?
Assuming either Guild Chat is bad or people are bad (and Guild Chat faciliates that), should a game designer remove it (or at least consider removing it?)
I don't reject the idea that "morality" can be part of a gaming vocabulary, but I'm still struggling to face to it.
You say,
"We need to eradicate their culture/mechanical features from virtual worlds," so yes, you DO seem to be talking about banning "The IM, the Group IM, the Teamspeak, the outside-of-world Yahoo Messenger."
But, from where I sit, that just moves the venue of the evil you describe to things like private chats or telephone calls. I'm also not sold on the "evil" yet.
I am, on the other hand, going to seriously tackle the issue of trying to be "evil" in the context of Animal Crossing. :-)
Posted by: Jimpy | Apr 10, 2006 at 16:24
There is something inherently evil about these tools, yes, because of the destructiveness of their power. Mechanical, technical things without any live human civilian controls often do become evil or wreck havoc, yes. You don't have to be a nutter with a tinfoil hat to see that they erode human solidarity and kindness, and even as they purport to enhance cooperation -- and do to some extent, they also thwart it. I don't think they've been dispassionately studied enough, and I think most of this technology is too new to see clearly yet what it's accomplishing.
>Which leaves me thinking, wait, so are the tools inherently evil, or are they neutral and the people are evil?
I understand your sense of "gotcha" and sense of "boy, I'm catching someone in a contradiction here" but I can only say, as I've outlined already: both are true.
They *are* inherently evil because they can take slander and lies and replicate them with a speed and distance unknown to humankind in all its history. They overtake their makers in that sense. But they are also just communication devices, and it's people who are responsible to use them, and could provide the correctives and adaptations to mitigate the disaster.
I don't play those "stab-the-monster-games" so I don't really imbibe your culture but I take your point -- you might have experiences, as have been outlined on this blog, of people that you were friendly with at RL work, say, but then when you had to go out slaying dragons, they turned out to be horrible wimps, or terribly selfish bullies, or whatever.
And that's something I'm trying to capture too, that sense that these tools access an emotional side of human nature that is different in quality and sense than the intellectual side which often knows better and behaves better.
I said *eradicate the mechanical features* -- what I mean to say is eradicate the mad mechanical functioning of these things forever and anon with no correctives, no review, no appeal, no adaptation to mitigate their down side.
I guess my vantagepoint is one where I see how many of these features that I view as horrid hangovers of MMORPG culture -- very juvenile, emotional, and arbitrary features of playing at war -- are all carried over/pasted on to the culture/matrix of Second Life, and just seem downright awful to me much of the time.
In real life, I can't put someone at work "on mute". I can't "ban the person from my property" in quite the thorough, mechanical, dumb way I can in a virtual world. Sure, you can start objecting briskly that a key card or a gated community or a "administration only" or whatever kind of walled-off section of RL is the equivalent. But it's not with the same kind of devastation, thoroughness, and lack of appeal.
Right now, in SL, it's possible to create master shit lists of avatars and ban them with one click from hundreds of servers -- with populations that are now like villages (the whole thing is the size of Boston I hear).
You know, it's very hard to get across what I mean. Most of you all on this blog are still doing all the fun gaming stuff there is to do in WoW and Eve Online and all those fun games which still work with rules in that old-fashioned way of an enclosed mechanical toy, where the game devs make them from behind the curtain, the players eat up the content, and they bitch about the content and demand more content. But imagine a world where those whiners get to make the content and get to become the game devs.
If some of you could come over and do the hard slogging we're doing here in Second Life, you'd see what I mean. I don't mean just parachute in and script some whirling thing in the sandbox and go, wow, groovy, or come and sit AFK in some lecture with Howard Rheingold, I mean really work the levers that they've created as they are now, and see what happens in the society.
I realize, of course that there are these projects like Mynci Gorky's survey or Tom Bukowski's sociological study of different groups, etc.
That's all well and good, I guess I don't think of it as really having to work the levers and eat the dogfood in the same way as people really living there, either to have a primary social/entertainment sort of experience, or to have a business or try to do software prototypeing. I could be wrong -- I just am not seeing enough published studies of how the MMORPG features carried over into an open-ended box which could enable them to replicate across the whole known universe.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 10, 2006 at 20:54
For the particularly pointy-headed interested in hearing one thinker's engagement with this issue, I recommend this essay by N. Katherine Hayles on the transformative effects of technology on human subjectivity.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | Apr 10, 2006 at 21:10
Prokofy Neva wrote:
There is something inherently evil about these tools, yes, because of the destructiveness of their power.
Tools are not evil any more than an airplane or a nuclear bomb or a box cutter or a bottle of whiskey is, regardless of their capability. Waxing melodramatic doesn't change that fact.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Apr 11, 2006 at 00:22
Re: >Tools are not evil any more than an airplane or a nuclear bomb or a box cutter or a bottle of whiskey is, regardless of their capability. Waxing melodramatic doesn't change that fact.
Social tools, like airplanes or nuclear bombs or box cutters, have a way of getting out way in front of their users, of not being controlled by their users, and of having unintended and unforeseen consequences when they execute. When an airplane knocks over a building and it falls and kills thousands of peole, the airplane assumes the quality of the evil agent that set it in motion -- it doesn't remain neutral anymore.
Waxing condescending and witheringly technical about this obvious fact doesn't change it; in fact, it reinforces the point all the more that those technicians in charge of making and deploying these tools who are not willing to contemplate their larger affect and long-term consequences are not to be trusted with them without oversight from the rest of society.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 11, 2006 at 01:22
I am more a programmer than a gamer, but my wife is a power gamer through and through and I've put a lot of thought into why she finds powergaming so fun. Using cheat websites to zip through quests is, to my way of thinking, akin to reading the last 10 pages of a murder mystery and pronouncing that you "know who the killer is". She doesn't value the "journey" at all.
I think the answer is that she values a meta-game implied by the MMORPG but not explicitly designed or coded for. In any of these games, the game she is actually playing is to *see how fast* she can progress through the levels and the XP and the worlds. Why? Because that is the only realm in which her skill as a player is of primary importance over the skills and stats of her avatar. In a world in which all quests are documented and known widely by players, one cannot demonstrate superiority by completing them, but one can by completing them faster or better than anyone else. In a world in which her sword wacks are equivalent to 1000 others of her class with her same optimized stats, her fighting skills demonstrate nothing about her.
The meta-game then, of speed and efficiency and voluminous knowledge at her fingertips is where she can show her skill and truly test her skill against others'.
So is she playing unfairly by grouping with others also good at this meta-game? Or by using TeamSpeak so she can use her keystrokes to fight and cast and not to talk? Is she cheating to read quest sites and tactics forums?
Not at the game she is actually playing--the meta-game.
Not everyone on the server is playing the meta-game, but the ones who are all have the same level playing field and use groups and TS, etc.
Is she cheating when she rearranges her GUI windows into a more efficient layout? Is she cheating when she zooms her 3rd person camera way back during fights so she can see behind her? These are features built into the game and discovering meta-uses for these is core to her enjoyment of the meta-game.
So when you ask "Is grouping unfair?" I think simplistic answers start with EULAs and features, but the real place to start is "Which meta-game are we talking about?"
- Keith
Posted by: Keith | Apr 11, 2006 at 02:01
Prokofy Neva:
Social tools, like airplanes or nuclear bombs or box cutters, have a way of getting out way in front of their users, of not being controlled by their users, and of having unintended and unforeseen consequences when they execute. When an airplane knocks over a building and it falls and kills thousands of peole, the airplane assumes the quality of the evil agent that set it in motion -- it doesn't remain neutral anymore.
Wow, well, your concept of morality is apparently fundamentally different from mine.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Apr 11, 2006 at 02:14
Prokofy Neva> Social tools... assume the quality of the evil agent that set it in motion -- it doesn't remain neutral anymore.
Yikes. I'm with Matt on this one. There is no such thing as an "evil tool." Good and evil are in the hearts and minds of the users. My hand is as capable of evil as is a nulcear bomb. More so, in fact, as the bomb can't do anything without a hand upon it. Things are not evil. People can be.
I think you also have to be very careful when discussing how one group ("the rest of society") or another might have "oversight" over another ("the technicians") in terms of some kind of definition of what tools are appropriate, right, etc. We, in fact, DO have oversight -- laws. Making them and enforcing them is hard, tricky, often dirty and thankless work... but the mechanism is there.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 11, 2006 at 05:04
While it is, perhaps, interesting to consider third-party web sites evil. The reality is that these external tools exist. I do find it kind of bizarre that people complain about the "rest" of the Internet while they want their games from the Internet.
The more interesting, and practical question is, as a game developer/VW builder, existing in the real world with third party tools, web sites, RMT services, etc. Build a game that works and makes my customers happy?
For my purposes, "happy" is that all of my players have a consistant understanding and agreement and operational support for the set of formal systems that the game provides and informal mechanisms that it supports.
Clearly the disagreements over RMT and TeamSpeak show the costs of disagreements in this area. RMT and TeamSpeak are not inherently evil - they do cause problems where they are not available uniformily and provide an "unfair" advantage to some players or, more specificly, they are perceived to warp the game from the view of some participants.
From a very, very practical point of view, this costs the game developer / operator time and money and customers. So it matters.
We can all wish for the world to be "flat" and Pi to be equal to "3", but those assumptions may run into problems when we run into folks with a more sophisticated perspective.
RMT, voice chat, and third party web sites, guild schemes, and the potential for collusion cannot be "wished away". They either need to be embraced by game developers or consciously engineered around.
Posted by: Steven Davis | Apr 11, 2006 at 08:53
Prokofy, did you really just call an airplane evil?
I still don't see the evil in these tools. I don't even see the evil in using the tools to blacklist huge swaths of society. Humans form groups. It's what our species does. Why are group forming tools evil?
Posted by: Ken Fox | Apr 11, 2006 at 09:16
This Prokofy guy is a troll and a windbag. Stop feeding him, please; it only swells him up.
I'd like to hear more from commenters like Bart Stewart. His last post got me thinking.
Posted by: Rich A | Apr 11, 2006 at 11:25
Have to agree with Matt here. I believe that evil uses exist for a tool, but the evil resides in the user, not the tool. Tools can be destructive and constructive- many at the same time.
KeithNot at the game she is actually playing--the meta-game.
Of course, the "see how fast" game she is playing is just as illusory in value as the other one. It's a 100-mile marathon race where some have the luxury of running nonstop, while others have to stop, go to work, then come back to where they left off. Being the "fastest" is more affected by free time.
There is an inherent futility in every aspect of a persistent world- nothing really holds up well as a measure of "superiority."
Did you lose in PvP because of a foe's tactical advantage, or because the foe was a higher level or because he had the time to be better equipped? Is it valid to compare the 8-hour-daily players with the 2.5-hour-daily players in rate of achievement, or should any competition determine the achievement-per-hour, and how does that penalize the social gamer's rating? Is it valid to compare the PvP stats of a soloer, easily overwhelmed by stalking teams, with the stalking teams themselves? How about the player whose advancement "race" is hindered by a mature game economy, where the costs of inflation have grossly outpaced the coin accrual of the lower-level players- something the early-adopters avoided?
Despite this, competition-minded sorts WANT a way to feel superior to others, and if a out-of-game tool does not affect their metric, it's a tool. If it does affect how they measure success, it's a cheat.
Teamspeak may damage immersion for some and radically affect the way you're treated ingame, (gender, age, disability,what have you), but the value to the powerleveler and raider is unquestioned. RMT might seem like cheating to the achiever, but might allow a Roleplayer to me to continue focusing on non-revenue-generating RP. Puzzle walkthroughs devalue the problem solver's achievement, but gives the person interested in a story that is losing its pace (or the achiever frustrated with the wait) a way to get through.
With so many variables, anyone can have his or her own metric for competition, but they're only valuable to people who share those values- and those RULES.
---
I recall one guild that kept announcing their "firsts to kill ____" list... on a roleplaying server. They were quite proud of their achievements, while many just joked that this was like being the best scuba diver in the sahara. Others assumed the guild achieved by ignoring the "roleplaying" aspect of the server: claims of "first ROLEPLAYERS to kill ____" implied that the other "firsts" mattered little, followed by the "first to kill without voice chat" and finally the "first roleplaying, non-teamspeak, non-ventrillo, non-twinked, intoxicated, all-female dwarf team to kill _____."
Personally, none of those achievements matter if a halfling wasn't involved.
Posted by: Chas | Apr 11, 2006 at 11:29
Um, I'm not a troll and a windbag, I ask important questions about people like you, who have arrogated to themselves not only the design of tools but the parameters of their use and their application, often with a *refusal* to look at how they have unintended consequences.
This is no different than the larger debate that any democratic and free society has to have about scientists, technicians, civilian leadership, the military, etc.
>Yikes. I'm with Matt on this one. There is no such thing as an "evil tool." Good and evil are in the hearts and minds of the users. My hand is as capable of evil as is a nulcear bomb. More so, in fact, as the bomb can't do anything without a hand upon it. Things are not evil. People can be.
Well, that's fine. I realize that's a school of thought, and one well-represented here, and that's just *your notion* -- thought you present it here as some kind of absolute fact and absolute interpretation of the world to which I'm supposed to be subject.
But those of us who are not technicians don't agree. In fact, human error, and things like Chernobyl, show that in fact bombs do go off even when the human hand and mind didn't run them coherently. We're not Luddites or FUDdites, either, to say that. We can perfectly well appreciate the need and indeed urgent need for new technologies and their uses. We're just people more readily willing and able to suspend disbelief in the vapourware that you often peddle as social progress which isn't really. We're willing to look at the unintended consequences.
Just to site a simple thing, to bring the discussion back to virtual worlds. Everybody said we had to have p2p in Second Life. We had to kill telehubs. It's absolutely clear to all of us who had reservations and critiques about p2p that the price we've paid for this new social software, this new teleportation capacity,is grey squares. The asset server, the entire server farm, just doesn't work as well as it did with all those people jumping like grasshoppers all over it and demandingly asking its database to show them more textures, etc.
Of course, the technicians try to narrow this problem as merely this tweak, that patch, this special programming effort. But we can all see what happened: they made the world more accessible AND they made it more bland and grey and requiring more load time TOO. Duh. So was it a good trade-off? Maybe. But it's an unintended consequence.
An airplane that has a suicide bomber in it who has decided to bomb a building becomes evil, because it is no longer under control of that bomber when he dies of a heart attack or loss of oxygen -- it continues on its deadly mission.
Sure, tools are neutral at one level, and sure, evil is in the human heart, not in a wrench. But the nature of these virtual tools are such that these old distinctions are now becoming eroded and dissolved between neutral, non-evil, non-essentially-evil implements like a hammer or even arguable an airplane, and the evil of the human heart.
The new social/Internet/virtual world tools in fact so blur the distinctions, and so *remove* those old meat-world divisions that they raise really alarming new concerns about new-age totalitarians and how they will secure the kind of information and mind control that a Hitler or Stalin or a Pol Pot could only dream of.
I'm puzzled as to why it's left to me to raise these issues, as surely there are sociologists and political scientists here on this blog not so blinded by science that they can't give this a wider sort of contemplation. Dismissing this very legitimate concern as trolling and windbagging doesn't increase one's faith that science can be left to its own devices.
Indeed, the Internet social software scientists often get themselves a huge year-long pass to ever get any criticism of their works and wares by calling *anybody* who dissents "a troll and a windbag". I find you have to try *extra hard* to get past that.
Group tools can be used for good and have good in them. But group-forming tools have unintended consequences, some of them pre-programmed and built into the code-as-law approach that are evil. These include:
o replication -- endless, endless, endless - whether a grief ball that spaws from giveinventory or a cut-and-paste lie, it's the kind of lie that goes around the world before the truth gets a chance to get its pants on (as Churchill said) -- and then goes around the world aggain about a million times -- there's no kill copy function, there's no appeal.
o blocking -- the blocking achieved by mutes/bans/access-only is unassaialable, not subject to appeal, not subject to the rule of law or any higher authority -- it's just WETFIFLD (whatever-the-fuck-I-feel-like-doing). WETFIFLD is supposed to be enlightened coming from tekkies. It's often *not*.
o sealing -- the groups that have open participation to join can rapidly seal, feed on their own perceptions, and never take any new feedback -- they're often so in awe of their niche, their openness to merely sorting others into a niche, that they don't realize...they're in a niche...which becomes a groove...and closes in on itself.
o no opt-out -- many of the tools are imposed on you whether you want them or not
o rule-of-links rather than rule-of-law -- the tools function not by any overarching value, not by any accountable and accessible norm, but just how ever many times it is clicked on...and the whole reason it gets clicked on is because it was already clicked on by whole bunches of people ruled by WETFILFD -- and WETFILFD isn't necessarily the "wisdom of crowds" or "smart mob" but just "mediocrity with a lot of time on its hands".
o destruction of privacy -- with all the IP harvesting, avatar key stripping, and other info scraping, there is so much gathered and preconfigured and preassessed that it becomes hard to move around -- on an alt, or with a new set of behaviour
o information-harvesting -- colledting of identity portraits but with no rule of law, no set of principles, not overarching authority that can interpret whether someone has been justly served by the system -- and no appeals process.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 11, 2006 at 13:00
I do find it kind of bizarre that people complain about the "rest" of the Internet while they want their games from the Internet.
They want worlds. That's all there is too it. Worlds. Not 3-D racks on the Internet to flip through like pages of the WWW. Sure, some will want that, too. But they want WORLDS. That means suspension of disbelief, walls, rules, and no reality intrusions.
There's an interesting post on SL forums now,
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=98809
"Virtual Worlds Where Matter Matters"
This and similar posts explain how people don't just want games and skill-grinds, but they want some kind of traction that gives them more interactivity than just an open platform where anybody can make and sell stuff, but only if highly skilled in PSP and computer programming.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 11, 2006 at 13:09
After reading Keith's description of how his wife views play, something that Nate and Ken Fox said struck me: Do powergamers/metagamers play MMORPGs the way they do because their natural concept of play is "sports?"
The point has probably been made already, but I mention it because I'm curious whether any practical use has been made of it. If so many gamers really approach play as a sport (Callois' agon + ilinx, as opposed to the mimesis and alea forms of play), why aren't developers explicitly designing games to satisfy that concept of play?
This doesn't mean literally implementing some existing sport as a game -- there's no need to fight EA for the NFL license. What I'm asking is why there aren't more AAA games designed from the ground up to model their gameplay on play-as-sport, rather than on mimesis-heavy roleplaying?
I've never played it, but an associate has told me about something called "Bloodbowl." Apparently you pit teams of fantasy critters (orcs, ogres, elves, etc.) against each other in an arena, where they happily dismember each other in a quest to score goals. It's sort of like rugby with optional chainsaws.
Why aren't there massively multiplayer online games that consciously take the sports approach to play of Bloodbowl? To put it another way, why are hundreds of millions of dollars being invested to develop still more mimesis-heavy fantasy combat games if the desirable powergamers/metagamers are just going to ignore the RP trappings to get to the tasty sports game underneath? Why not just design a MMOG from the very start to use the sports model of play?
I'd be interested in hearing if anyone thinks this has already been tried, or if there are examples known to be in development.
Otherwise, would this be worth trying? Or is there some reason why -- despite stories like Keith's -- the RP aspects of the many MMOGs currently in development must be there?
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Apr 11, 2006 at 13:24
Bart>Why aren't there massively multiplayer online games that consciously take the sports approach to play of Bloodbowl?
... Or simply give the tools for players to organize their own "faction" pairings (much like a guild war) with their own sets of optional rules, enabled or disabled at their whim.
Or a "powerleveler's competition" that compares your rate of XP gain/hour against other participating members. Then, you know that you've competed againt x number of other people and come in y place.
Give the people the tools to organize even "metadata" competition based on what THEY value.
Prokofy Neva-
I don't think you're a troll or a windbag, and I find
your alternate perspectives refreshing. I'd love to get your perspective on a number of ideas, as I'm sure they would be very different. I may not always agree, but I want to be aware of those alternative views.
I, myself, stand by my contention that "evil" is not inherent in the object, but in the action and conscious actor. Personifying "evil" on an object rather than on the action/policy/neglegence, misdirects attention away from the action that CAN BE changed.
I'd rather explore the "evils" of negligent quality control or insufficient failsafe design- than focus on an "evil" nuclear reactor meltdown. The action-based "evils" can lead to change.
As I understand your argument: An evil person starts a neutral object on a course to do something destructive (evil) and releases control. The object assumes the property of "evil" as it continues on its course, even though it does not have the ability to form intent.
Following this logic, an evil person tricks a child into... say... delivering a package... that the child has no reason to suspect is destructive. The evil person ceases to guide the kid, and the kid delivers the bomb. By this logic, you'd suggest that the child is evil? The child completed delivery of the bomb without knowing it was a bomb, much as an unthinking plane doesn't know of its state.
Some dictionaries support the use of "evil" to any object that is characterized by misfortune, regardless of the object's capacity for intent, so, in that way, you could argue that the "agent" becomes evil.
Without starting a debate in philosophy, I'd suggest that most studies in morality (good) and immorality (evil) would see the above as a literary license, and not a mechanism for study, which focus on actions and consequences. The evil and good is in the decision-maing. Objects incapable of independent action or cognition remain neutral.
Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't examine whether an object's applications facilitate more good or more evil actions.... it just shouldn't be confused with whether the object itself is inherently good or evil.
Posted by: Chas York | Apr 11, 2006 at 16:53
I love Bloodbowl. It's a miniatures game where people play the role of a team's coach. The team earns cash by winning and spends cash to hire new players (represented by painted lead miniatures). The players also earn new skills and/or injuries depending on what happens in a game.
The MMORPG difference perhaps is that Bloodbowl is a first person game -- the person IS the coach. The figures manipulated in the game are not proxies for the coach.
Another interesting thing is that the Bloodbowl rules are reviewed annually by a rules committee with player participation. This is not democratic by any means, but there's orders of magnitude more player control than in any on-line game I've seen.
Posted by: Ken Fox | Apr 11, 2006 at 18:31
Bloodbowl:
Aye, my Dwarven Steamroller (actual steamroller) used to grind the elven linemen to pulp. I love the different racial characteristics: while elves focused on the passing, high-point game, dwarves were about holding onto the ball for as much of the game as possible.
While ingame, in-story "sports" would be great, there IS plenty that can be done for allowing player-run metagames. Many times, guilds TRY to have such games, but are hindered by the lack of support tools.
Too often, the infrastructure to enforce these is too cumbersome to maintain. Races need players at each waypoint confirming pass-through, hunts need some form of "trophy" to track kills, often leading to allegations of "bought" stuff, and prizes/wagers are often reneged on or stolen.
- Hunting / gathering contests (kill x)
- Race contests (go to these waypoints)
- Exploration contests (find these 7 hidden items)
- PvP contests (using customizable rules)
These could be relatively unobtrusive steps toward player-made content- they build upon use current game mechanics but give organizers the ability to better prepare, plan, and implement.
Devs could organize their own, but the true value will come when players use the tools provided to organize their own.
Posted by: Chas York | Apr 11, 2006 at 18:50
Prok>
But the nature of these virtual tools are such that these old distinctions are now becoming eroded and dissolved
-------------------
I can't buy into the whole 'evil' coloring, but I do agree with what an aspect of what *I think* you are saying. Namely, that in the virtual age, tools and their driving verbs are harder objects upon which to hang intent, cause-and-effect, and ultimately personal responsibility. Starting with the plausible deniability afforded by multi-tasking, to pseudo-anonymity in communication and working all the way down to add-ons and bots: I am pointedly blameless in a new category of commons.
-------------------
Bart>
Do powergamers/metagamers play MMORPGs the way they do because their natural concept of play is "sports?"
This is fascinating. The structure of sportsmanship perhaps need not be strictly a power/meta gamer outcome, or for that matter precluded by role-playing. I imagine it may require, however, a flavor of "having to get along up front and in personal" (which physical sports embody) and which diplomacy too well embodies. So to the extent that role-playing allows one to fudge a personal responsibility, perhaps...
Posted by: Nate | Apr 11, 2006 at 20:55
I think Nate's summed it well with this:
"Starting with the plausible deniability afforded by multi-tasking, to pseudo-anonymity in communication and working all the way down to add-ons and bots: I am pointedly blameless in a new category of commons."
Absolutely. You are blameless, you always have an alibi, and you always have a ride out of town. It's very insidious. You are, in T.S. Eliot's memorable words, "distracted from distraction by distraction."
Re: Chas York:
>I, myself, stand by my contention that "evil" is not inherent in the object, but in the action and conscious actor. Personifying "evil" on an object rather than on the action/policy/neglegence, misdirects attention away from the action that CAN BE changed.
I'm thinking this is a very much longer and off-topic discussion. I think we'd have to figure out whether we believe matter is evil. As Plotinus said,
"Matter] is the substrate which underlies figures, forms, shapes, measures and limits . . a mere shadow in relation to real Being, the very essence of evil, if such is possible. [1.8.2]"
A hammer then isn't just a hammer, but non-being, and therefore containing a tendency toward evil.
We can put aside all the wierd philosophical debates we might have, however, and just recognize a simple thing: the train that left the train that left the station in New York merely taking people to jobs
in Washington was good and in the hands of good, but when it crashed and killed everyone on board in Philadelphia, it became evil, capable of harm, capable of murder, even as an inanimate object, due to velocity, accident, lack of human control, etc.
Deciding whether or not that's true isn't even so important to this conversation, however.
Let's just look at what you can more readily acknowledge to be the case: that these tools exceed their user's grasp. They literally get out of hand.
Re: "Personifying "evil" on an object rather than on the action/policy/neglegence, misdirects attention away from the action that CAN BE changed."
Of course the human agent might be identified as the most readily changeable element of this equation. But the fact is, the tools are pretty malleable, too, once you decide you are going to get over your overawe of them, and stop being fascinated with their "viral" nature and their "bleeding edge" quality and see that they can wreck a society just as well as make one. So you can build in *correctives* and *adaptions* right into the tool itself.
Let's say you got sick and tired of everybody in your "off-the-record" meeting constantly sending out blind copies of emails to all and sundry. You might disabled that blind-copy ability. Or tell employees that email would be spot-checked, let's say. This introduces other problems, of course, but the point is, you can modify the tool to suit some higher goal.
Sometime flight is turned off to make it "fair" in some part of a game. Or sometimes there's a rule you have to turn off cell phones in a RL situation. This is control of the tools. More of it needs to be done.
Following this logic, an evil person tricks a child into... say... delivering a package... that the child has no reason to suspect is destructive. The evil person ceases to guide the kid, and the kid delivers the bomb. By this logic, you'd suggest that the child is evil? The child completed delivery of the bomb without knowing it was a bomb, much as an unthinking plane doesn't know of its state.
What you've done with this example is merely add some human element muddiying the emotional waters and triggering emotions by putting a child in the story.
If we were to keep to the actual analogy, the story here isn't about an accidental and tragic child. The story is about a bomb that got delivered. Perhaps explosives were designed only to blow up old, decrepit buildings, or only used to fight, say, a "just war". Now, explosives aren't only used for evil but they become evil because they follow through and trigger with no consciousness or awareness.
Mechanicality itself, lack of consciousness and purpose itself is the evil. The bomb keeps going. The airplane keeps going. And the social software keeps replicating, linking, infesting. I guess perhaps we need to have a deeper understanding of what evil is, anyway.
It seems to me it doesn't take a huge amount of imagination to see how the social software of Google that enables the most anti-Semitic sites to come up as the no. 1 offering for the "authoritative link" is a social software committing an evil -- commiting it on its own, without human agentry, but also able to commit it because human agents refused to mitigate it, ameliorate it, frame it, understand it.
It's not a confusion to open up the debate about whether the object itself is inherently evil. Indeed, without a *willingness* to really examine whether a thing can be evil inherently, and in fact that unconsciousness or non-being (or whatever word you might like to describe this state) within it a problem for a society, you're not going to get any critical look at these fashionable social tools.
Otherwise, you just have a lot of cheerleaders for the inventions telling everybody that yes, they can be used for ill, or sure, 7 teenage girls are murdered from meeting psychopaths on Myspace.com, but it's not myspace.com itself that is inherently evil, it's just a webspace.
Frankly, all tools are made by humans and are part of humanity. Their characteristics appear often to reflect the most unconscious side of the human, oddly enough, not the most conscious.
You can go on saying til the cows come home that the Myspace.com was merely a neutral agent, or that the plane was merely a neutral agent, and even argue back from there that nobody is ever to blame for anything because they all had unhappy childhoods or were poor. But those affected by those tools and agents run amok will tell you of their evils, firsthand.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 11, 2006 at 22:37
On the one hand, I am intrigued by Prokofy's agrument for the "evil" of stuff; partly because it is very well stated, partly because I haven't heard it put that exact way before. Nice job.
On the other... I very much believe that looking at "things" as evil generally leads towards the same reduced human responsibility that P. fears; atrophied "moral muscles" that we do not exercise, but which are guided by the decisions of others.
In the "bcc" case you site, for example:
Prokofy> Let's say you got sick and tired of everybody in your "off-the-record" meeting constantly sending out blind copies of emails to all and sundry. You might disable that blind-copy ability. Or tell employees that email would be spot-checked...
Well... that will prevent one or two negative consequences, perhaps... but it won't deal, in any healthy way, with the underlying moral/ethical/work dilemna. As a manager myself (concerned for both the productivity and happiness of my group), if I found out that a member or members of my team was consistently sending out bcc's in order to generate drama, unrest, or some kind of political crap... I'd want to deal with the root personnel and management issues, not the tool. I think that, "Let's disable the bcc function" would not occur to me for quite some time (as it is a tool with a legit function). As for "let's spot check everyone's email for bad manners..." I'm just gonna leave that one alone. Censorship and/or some kind of "uber-group" review of communications? Is that really better?
As to the tools that we have now being qualitatively different than anything that has come before... when the printing press was invented, and the Bible came out in the vernacular in many lands for the first time, and began to find widespread readership among the population instead of just the clergy... said clergy was up in arms over "the technicians" having wreaked a havoc that would not only ruin the world, but send souls to eternal damnation. The contention in many rarified circles was that "the common man" did not know enough about matters spiritual, and would do more harm than good to himself if he/she read the Word without instruction from an educated source.
In effect -- they wanted to "turn off" the "automatic copy" function of the Bible that the printing press enabled, unless it was mitigated by a spot-check of the "clergy review."
The Internet was begun as a project by the US Military; ARPANET. If they had taken your advice, Prokofy, and said, "This tech is too dangerous for the masses," and not spun ARPANET off the military net (MILNET) in 1984, universities and government research facilities would never have seen the benefits of interlinked computers; only the military would have it. If, then, the government had kept ARPANET as a tool of non-commercial entities... we might never have had the Web.
Where do you draw the line? And who draws it? The groups that use social networking tools to do things that you say are bad would probably say, no... you are wrong, and tools that limit their intra-group communications are bad.
Are there evil tools... Nuclear bombs? Yeah. That was a bad idea. And the machine gun, too; the first real WMD on the planet. Bio-weapons, manufactured plagues, land-mines... things invented with the sole purpose of killing. Those things are as close to "evil things" as I can bring myself to believe. But email? IM? Group chat? Nope. People can be jerks, yes. But disabling the intercom won't change their nature, and the act itself sniffs of totalitarianism and/or social programming to me... which have been, more often than not, tools for great evil.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 11, 2006 at 23:46
On the one hand, I am intrigued by Prokofy's agrument for the "evil" of stuff; partly because it is very well stated, partly because I haven't heard it put that exact way before. Nice job.
On the other... I very much believe that looking at "things" as evil generally leads towards the same reduced human responsibility that P. fears; atrophied "moral muscles" that we do not exercise, but which are guided by the decisions of others.
In the "bcc" case you site, for example:
Prokofy> Let's say you got sick and tired of everybody in your "off-the-record" meeting constantly sending out blind copies of emails to all and sundry. You might disable that blind-copy ability. Or tell employees that email would be spot-checked...
Well... that will prevent one or two negative consequences, perhaps... but it won't deal, in any healthy way, with the underlying moral/ethical/work dilemna. As a manager myself (concerned for both the productivity and happiness of my group), if I found out that a member or members of my team was consistently sending out bcc's in order to generate drama, unrest, or some kind of political crap... I'd want to deal with the root personnel and management issues, not the tool. I think that, "Let's disable the bcc function" would not occur to me for quite some time (as it is a tool with a legit function). As for "let's spot check everyone's email for bad manners..." I'm just gonna leave that one alone. Censorship and/or some kind of "uber-group" review of communications? Is that really better?
As to the tools that we have now being qualitatively different than anything that has come before... when the printing press was invented, and the Bible came out in the vernacular in many lands for the first time, and began to find widespread readership among the population instead of just the clergy... said clergy was up in arms over "the technicians" having wreaked a havoc that would not only ruin the world, but send souls to eternal damnation. The contention in many rarified circles was that "the common man" did not know enough about matters spiritual, and would do more harm than good to himself if he/she read the Word without instruction from an educated source.
In effect -- they wanted to "turn off" the "automatic copy" function of the Bible that the printing press enabled, unless it was mitigated by a spot-check of the "clergy review."
The Internet was begun as a project by the US Military; ARPANET. If they had taken your advice, Prokofy, and said, "This tech is too dangerous for the masses," and not spun ARPANET off the military net (MILNET) in 1984, universities and government research facilities would never have seen the benefits of interlinked computers; only the military would have it. If, then, the government had kept ARPANET as a tool of non-commercial entities... we might never have had the Web.
Where do you draw the line? And who draws it? The groups that use social networking tools to do things that you say are bad would probably say, no... you are wrong, and tools that limit their intra-group communications are bad.
Are there evil tools... Nuclear bombs? Yeah. That was a bad idea. And the machine gun, too; the first real WMD on the planet. Bio-weapons, manufactured plagues, land-mines... things invented with the sole purpose of killing. Those things are as close to "evil things" as I can bring myself to believe. But email? IM? Group chat? Nope. People can be jerks, yes. But disabling the intercom won't change their nature, and the act itself sniffs of totalitarianism and/or social programming to me... which have been, more often than not, tools for great evil.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 11, 2006 at 23:46
Bart and Chas,
I think you are exactly right to view the powergamer's meta-game interpretation as making a sport out of a world. Publishing stats like XP gained per hour would probably send my wife into ecstasy. :-)
The reason I brought it up in this thread was because it seemed to me that the original post was really about whether players being innovative at optimization, whether through group tactics or OOB communication channels or what have you, was cheating. If one understands that a significant number of a game's most die-hard fans are actually playing a meta-game involving no cheating, but instead the relentless optimization of using the existing rules, game features and OOB tools to go faster, I think it probably would change one's mindset about "powergaming" and yes, "cheating."
Since the "outcome" of the game is known--given enough playtime every WoW player who attempts it will reach level 60--the only way to make it challenging is to optimize the meta-game. Is this really different from the chess master who studies a certain board layout for days trying to find a way to checkmate in 5 moves instead of 6? The rules of chess are easily mastered but to demonstrate true mastery takes much more.
- Keith
Posted by: Keith | Apr 12, 2006 at 02:48
This is a fascinating discussion, and calling Prokovy Neva a troll just demeans it.
Unfortunately, the discussion of evil isn't going to get anywhere as there is no working generally agreed metaethics that could provide an answer. What is worth discussing is, given that people are doing things that others regard as evil using these tools, what can and should be done about it? What are the second-order effects likely to be?
The "disable BCC" example is a good one of how not to do it. Sure, you don't get lots of uncontrolled email flying around. But that doesn't stop the information in the email from being communicated, perhaps by samizdat, and it won't stop people conspiring. It's much more likely to either simply make them leave, or carry on attempting to overthrow whatever power disabled the BCC.
So: what do you propose should be done, and by whom, and to whom? And (crucially) do the people who have their tools taken away by the authorities get a vote in it?
Posted by: Peter Clay | Apr 12, 2006 at 08:49
Nate channeling PN>Namely, that in the virtual age, tools and their driving verbs are harder objects upon which to hang intent, cause-and-effect, and ultimately personal responsibility.<
I don’t think virtuality has much to do with it. Its just the sheer scale of our civilization. Our notions of blame and responsibility evolved on the African veldt, where most actions had close-range, immediate, visible effects. You made a noise and startled the antelope, so you are to blame for us having no supper. In our modern world, virtual or not, many of our actions have long range, indirect, probabilistic effects. Our concept of responsibility just hasn’t caught up.
To say “Osama bin Laden is responsible for the destruction of the twin towers in New York”, has some truth in it. He did have a hand in the affair. But at some level its almost dysfunctional as a way of assigning responsibility. A huge array of other actions, omissions, system designs etc. also had a hand in the negative outcome. If your objective in “blaming” is to prevent a re-occurrence, there are other leverage points in the chain beside taking out Osama.
As long as we think of responsibility as a binary condition, and not something of degree, I don’t think we will deal well with the modern complex interconnected world. Either physical or virtual.
Posted by: Hellinar | Apr 12, 2006 at 11:45
I think Hellinar's point addresses the distinction. There are two things I think are being conflated here: Evil and Blame.
Consider Mt. Vesuvius erupting and wiping out Pompei. I would never agree with a statement that Mt. Vesuvius is Evil for having done so. On the other hand, it is quite sensible to say that the Mt. Vesuvius shares a large share of the blame in the ensuing destruction. Someone looking at ways to prevent future destroyed cities would be foolish to discount addressing the issue of the volcanoe-itself just because it didn't act in an evil fashion.
To bring it back to IM, I'd disagree with Profoky that the tools are evil as a result of their use. I would, however, agree that they are to blame for the lynchmobs for the same reason that they can be praised for the smartmobs. As such, it is the responsibility for the implementors to think through both the negative and positive before implementing them.
Joel on Software discussed something similar to this in his Building Communities article:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html
The key takeaway is that more-features != more-better.
Having said this, the question becomes: Who draws the line? This is where Profoky's well written arguments worry me. Profoky, your fears of dictatorship by information control seem more plausible in the world in which this technology has been restricted to a single authority. When the manager can control BCC communication, indeed, when the manager *wants* to control the BCC communication, there is mini-dictatorship being formed. The use of IM and third-party channels are away for people to escape the restrictions of the authority.
I think I can understand your concern about Second Life degenerating into a /kick/ban culture like IRC. That would be sad, as IRC has no shortage of not-fun associated with its culture. I wouldn't call IRC a model of a dictatorship, however, it would be more appropriate to call it a model of anarchy.
Posted by: Brask Mumei | Apr 12, 2006 at 14:53
I find it humorous that a very moral and even zealous tone creeps into those insisting that there can't be morality, can't be a metaethics, and that it's "just plain wrong" if one person or one institution takes up the assertion/enforcement of the rule of law, such as to make it possible for norms and codes of behaviour to hold for all, to make everyone equal before the law.
After all, if it is all constructivist, if it is all endless subjectivity and WETFIFLD, and never even any working-level objectivity-for-the-group, then anybody can always trump anybody else and endlessly commit wrong -- at least in somebody's book.
Why do we have to be chained to such a tyranny of subjectivity in the name of the impossibility of actually finding that objective truth?
Re: Peter Clay's comments. "Disable BCC" is, of course, a crude hack. Yet I find it interesting, in an office where I set up a bunch of terminals, if I don't put the BCC option on automatically as the drop-down, well, people just tend to BCC *less*. I know when I happen to put in a new email program myself and don't put up the BCC option right away, I just tend to use it less! The temptation isn't there.
Disabling BCC isn't going to stop them; but recognitzing the corrosive power of the BCC and doing some small thing to mitigate it might just make the office community that much more amicable. Not putting it out there; talking about its use; having a policy about its use even if not some mechanical obstruction to its use -- these are all viable options, no? It doesn't all have to be code-is-law. People can make law, too, remember? And they can make it flexible enough to accommodate various scenarios.
The idea of whether "the people who get the tools get a vote" gets the answer "of course". Yet, just how much of that endlessly subjectivity are we to endlessly tolerate? This need for ostensibly fighting the tyranny of authority then merely gets flipped to become subordination to the tyranny of the myriad licentious subjectivities. Why is that progress?
This is why third parties on the left never get started and never gain traction LOL. Sooner or later, you have to stop accommodating every little thing, make a platform and work it.
Re: Brask's comment: "Profoky, your fears of dictatorship by information control seem more plausible in the world in which this technology has been restricted to a single authority. When the manager can control BCC communication, indeed, when the manager *wants* to control the BCC communication, there is mini-dictatorship being formed. The use of IM and third-party channels are away for people to escape the restrictions of the authority.
Well, I want to control the corrosive power of BCC, or IMs in a game, and so I might -- together with other like-minded free-thinking and democratically-participating adults, make up a POLICY about, say, shutting off IM-function in a virtual court of law room, or something of the sort. Honestly, it isn't all so cut and dry.
Why do I have to take the dictatorship of the proletariat, then, the endless subjectivities and obstructions of everybody, in order to prevent the dictatorship of the authority? Authority *can* be legitimate. After a while,you do have to take a good long look at all the endless hacks around authority and see whether they were really so effective in freeing us all.
And you know, not all authority has to be illegitimate in the way you appear to imagine. It can be accountable, transparent -- hey, *elected*. I know that's a totally wild concept -- representative government in virtual worlds! Everyone always holds up the cross to ward off *that* evil. But...it works pretty well, actually, in RL...at least, it's the worst...except for all the others.
Most workplaces already have a dictatorship -- the IT guy. He rides roughshod over everybody, with no accountability, making his domain arcane and intimidating all the civilians who have to control its budget and use. Still others might have some authoritarian director or manager that gets everyone furious. But that doesn't mean that authority is necessarily evil. If the tools aren't going to be necessarily evil in your book, the authorities can't be, either.
I don't think these issues are so black and white as to posit that my idea is "scary and totalitarian" and fraught with possibilites of abuse, and the idea of endless overthrowing of every authority by endless rebels and anarchists is ok, too. There's the tyranny of anarchy itself, hobbling virtual worlds like Second Life thoroughly.
There's a new book out:
Who Controls the Internet? : Illusions of a Borderless World Oxford University Press by Jack Goldsmith, Tim Wu. http://www.aei.org/books/bookID.852/book_detail.asp
Let me take this opportunity to say: 1) didn't vote for Bush; 2) registered Democrat; 3) don't agree with much of what AEI puts out; 4) I look at everything, left and right, for ideas I can ponder 5) not a born-again, red-neck etc. 6) not a troll, either.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 25, 2006 at 21:25
Prokofy makes more good points. Especially in terms of games, there is an absolute, complete and objective authority -- the rules. We've argued here about whether IM and chat in games, and elsewhere about whether RMT counts as a rule... but, at the end of the argument... if:
a) Something is against the rules, and;
b) The rules are being enforced, either by "code" or by zero-tolerance for rule-breaking
then rules are the ruler.
As my highschool physics teach used to say, "Gravity isn't just a good idea... it's the law!" You can argue about whether or not the law of gravity is fair all the way down. You can make your case that you didn't mean to transgress and fall out of the airplane. But at the end of the trial, judgement will be swift, sudden and final.
A "good game," IMHO, is one in which the "rules" allow for, first, lots of options. Tic-tac-toe is a sucky game. Once you understand it, there is no winning. I don't much care for Blackjack, either; to be really good at it, you need to count cards, and I don't have a brain for that. Other than counting cards, if you feel like winning as often as possible, every combination of cards has a prescribed action. 17? Don't hit. 15? Hit. You can look at what the dealer has and narrow the choice a bit further... but, to me (and I know there are people who love Blackjack, and that's cool), it's about as much fun as watching fruit turn brown.
Chess has a very few rules, and they are very restrictive... but they can be applied in a thousands of combinations over the course of a game. And that makes it very interesting and, to many people, fun. Chess is too damn hard for me. Not fun, but for the opposite reason that I don't like Blackjack.
Where we seem to get in trouble is when one person is playing by one set of rules, and someone else is playing by others. We're seeing this in the "Serenity Now" discussion. We see it in concerns of RMT and moving avatars/skills/stuff from game-to-game.
"I thought we were playing chess!"
"I thought we were playing badminton!"
There's bound to be trouble.
There have to be *some* rules, or it's not a game. It's chaos. It's art. It's life. It's plazotz. It's something else. I like to play that way, too. It's fun. But it's not "gaming." Not by any definition I'd accept as even moderately close.
"Let's play a game! OK? Here's how we play; you do whatever you want. I do whatever I want. First person to quit wins..."
Prokofy makes the excellent point that the "tyranny of the proletariat" is no better than the tyranny of tyrants. Well, I might disagree a bit... since there are more proles than kings, and, generally, the proles tend to look out for each other a bit more than the kings do. But, in essence, I'll agree; the wisdom of crowds is often well articulated as, "Baaaaah."
But the balance point between crowd-noise and the pinpoint will of a one-person expert can give you a nice system where experts (call them politicians, teachers, designers) can propose rules, and the crowd (call them voters, students, gamers) can decide which ones they support.
But... once you decide to play a game, you should play by the rules you've agreed to. That is, again, one of the definitions of "gaming." If I agree to play chess with you, I shouldn't hit you with a boxing glove. That would be... unsporting. When an expert or experts propose a system of rules, and the crowd agrees with them to some extent, you have problems when they bump into each other, yelling, "They said this game was about the middle ages!" "Yeah... Ages 35-50. What's your beef?"
Rules need to be well crafted towards specific purposes, and they need to be crafted transparently, and players need to buy into them with their eyes open. If we find (as I did when playing WoW) that too many folks aren't playing with the same intent as implied by some of the "rules..." you do what I did. Takes your money elsewhere.
BTW... I am a troll. I eat little girls and goats for lunch and I'm tired of anti-troll biggotry. You'll be hearing from my lawyer. Who is an orc.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 25, 2006 at 23:06
I recall Will Wright discussing frankly about how there was a class of gamers who would always try to break the game. That *was* the game. They'd pick it up and shake it and knock it until it broke. These weren't always "griefers," I think it was any of us in SimArts even who would try to figure out all the wierd little things about The Sims Online, what made your sim go off into the void, what would make the sim do odd, unpredictable things. I remember how pleased I was when I could hand Will Wright's avatar (or so it was claimed, and it seemed to be true) the "never-die, never-water magic orchid" I created by accident that defied the game's usual rules that made the expensive orchids die if you didn't water them -- somehow I figured out an exploit that made them come back alive, never die, and never require watering. A little thing, but you'd feel pleased as punch that you found something in their game that *even they didn't know about*.
There is probably a sizeable population of people who play that way -- they range from people who like to find the Easter Eggs and find the exploits and find the unexpected exceptions to the rules, to the people who really try in fun, or in prankster mode, to break it or crack it, and those who enjoy maliciously crashing the grid. In fact, those who do crash the grid often plead that they were only the Easter Eggy, prankstery kind of people, not malicious.
And the Lindens, for example, create an enabling environment for breaking their own game's rules, or TOS, by winking and nodding and finding it kind of fun to chase shooters out of sandboxes, it's a never-ending fun cops and robbers game, Wily Sandbox Shooter 1, Young Linden Liasons 2 or whatever.
Proof of their jovial attitude towards things that violate the TOS like something that the "Bush Guy" (Lazarus Divine, he of the Impeach Bush signs that extorted land sales) did, or something like nimrod yaffle, who did some kind of reverse-engineering. On the forums now, the Lindens are explaining to one irate banned person who *didn't* get to see the Cornfield of media fame when she was banned for forums speech violations (another biased, selective prosecution case BTW for which they're infamous). Torley Linden explained to her that in fact what she had heard about the Cornfield is correct: it's for "white collar crime".
In Lindenworld, white-collar crime is fun stuff and cool stuff that might actually be a 3-d resume, not a crime: reverse engineering, thinking of some really cool, scripty thing that crashes the sim -- but oh, well, it was cool! Etc. Then "blue-collar" or "pink-collar" crime is calling someone a bully on the forums -- when they are.
In the Cornfield, you still get to log on and noodle around in the game, watch some silly 1950s movie about a wayward youth, ride on a tractor, etc. If you aren't cool Cornfield material, you get bupkus and can't even log on, period.
So this making of rules, uber-meta-breaking of rules by the Lindens by poor enforcement of the TOS letting some have fun when they violate the TOS and others gnash their teeth -- not to mention the selective prosecutions of the forums -- this is one of the fascinating rules studies and studies of law and communities that are to be had in abundance in Second Life. In fact, I often wonder why you all fool around killing orc NPCs when you could have all the real-life sort of orcs to battle in Second Life, in the forums and in the world.
Notice I said TOS: but wait. Those are different rules. There are rules like gravity -- and that might mean something like "you can never make your own content and upload your own content in The Sims Online." It's like a law of physics. Except...somebody figures out how to make some folders of the game work with the 'nude patch' they sell and turn TOS into a cybering haven.
So there are rules and rules. There are what I would call desk policies. Lindens make them up as they go along. Some wish they'd make more, some less. For example, they might decide that yes, aggressive security scripts that bounce avatars to kingdom come, even killing or crashing their game, and that provide no warning, are illegal. But...they don't deprecate the script. Because...that would mean taking out some push function in an elevator script. So they develop a kind of jurisprudence on the police blotter. But of course, without a really good application to handle the RSS feed from the police blotter to make a histogram, which nobody has ever tried to do (and really shood), it's hard to know what the precents really are. Every once in a while, you'll be surprised at some oddity of enforcement. They might let go 100 bounce scripts. Then prosecute one...just becase. You have to ask, of course -- the entire system is built on this evil abuse-report system that makes the whole thing have the undertow of a KGB-style police state.
Or suddenly, there will be a police blotter for an offense called "peeping". What?? There's a million peeping Toms in SL, spying on others cybersexing. How did THIS one get caught, and why???
The SL platform is a scene where there is a mixture of game-like mechanical rules, like you can't walk off a sim into the void, or you can't put more than 117 prims on 512 m2 plot of land, but it also has the rules of a non-mechanical, policy nature, like "you can't swear in PG". The mixture of these two is fascinating. They're always trying to figure out how to make something more mechanical. Rather than have hundreds of trouble tickets with people complaining about peeping toms or prim bombers, they'll want to figure out how to granulate the ban tools to make them go up higher in the air, etc.
At some point, rules do break down and people just don't buy into them. They rebel. There's a limit for that and a tolerance for it. An example is that iconic moment in the Lindens' revolutionary past to which they always point with pride that they "let happen" and that "changed their minds," good liberals that they are: the prim tax revolt.
But even with AS many if not MORE people revolting and hopping mad about the Bush Guy, they remained unmoved. And even features of the world that seem like the immobile rules of gravity today, like "only 117 prims per 512" or "tails never wag" will change -- in the next patch, they *will* wag and 10 patches from now, they might double up the prims, etc.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 26, 2006 at 00:03
Once you decide to play a game, you should play by the rules you've agreed to. That is, again, one of the definitions of "gaming." If I agree to play chess with you, I shouldn't hit you with a boxing glove. That would be... unsporting. When an expert or experts propose a system of rules, and the crowd agrees with them to some extent, you have problems when they bump into each other, yelling, "They said this game was about the middle ages!" "Yeah... Ages 35-50. What's your beef?"
Rules need to be well crafted towards specific purposes, and they need to be crafted transparently, and players need to buy into them with their eyes open. If we find (as I did when playing runescape) that too many folks aren't playing with the same intent as implied by some of the "rules..." you do what I did. Takes your runescape money elsewhere.
Posted by: Robert | Sep 16, 2006 at 23:06