One of the rocks that players and academics often throw at developers is that their virtual worlds "aren't democratic". Democracy is good; virtual worlds aren't democratic; therefore, virtual worlds are bad.
OK, so players often use "not democratic" as a short-hand for "not a democracy in which I am the president", and academics often use it as a short-hand for "not Utopia", but they do have a point: on the whole, virtual worlds really aren't democratic. Nevertheless, as Ted points out in his book, this is a consequence of players' having no reason to want to be political leaders: they'd get responsibility, but no power.
However, players do organise themselves politically, typically in what have come to be called "guilds". These aren't usually democratic either, but they do represent player self-governance. Furthermore, some of these guilds can get quite big.
So, here's a scenario. Suppose that a guild got large enough that the players in it wanted their own server, for guild members only. They approach the developer, the developer says OK, and sets up a special server that can only be accessed if you have the guild's say-so. This would leave the running of the entire virtual world up to the guild; guild officers could even be given customer service powers if that's what the guild wanted.
It's only hypothetical, but it does raise some interesting questions. Would developers ever want players to run their worlds like this? Would such a guild-operated world address players' and academics' complaints about lack of accountability? Would it wipe out RMT on that server? Would it be sustainable, if the guild had the right critical mass, or would it inevitably fail? What are the legal issues, eg. if someone put in a minimum wage claim for their CSR work, whom would they sue? Would developers still get rocks thrown at them for not being democratic?
Thought experiments: don't you love 'em?
When a player leaves the guild, would they get a character transfer to another server? If they were kicked out? What about existing characters joining the guild?
And who would they PvP against?
Posted by: RickR | Jun 05, 2006 at 07:51
I'll go out on a limb and make two predictions:
(1) This sort of experiment will take place.
(2) It will fail to quiet complaints that the world is not democratic.
What will happen, sooner or later, is that some schism within the guild that has obtained a private server will break out. The faction that wins the dispute will convince the developer to take some action: nerfing an item, banning a few players, deleting some content uploaded by the renegades, etc. The losers will scream bloody murder and claim that what happened wasn't democratic.
Lessons: (1) "Democracy" is used by players (and, unfortunately, by some people, myself included, who really should understand the distinction) as a shorthand for all sorts of rule-by-law virtues. (2) Player-player conflicts cause governance problems just as much as, if not more than player-developer conflicts. (3) Even in a democracy, there are winners and losers.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann | Jun 05, 2006 at 08:02
I could see this possibly working if it were a small group of large guilds.
The thing is large guilds inevitably disintegrate. When this starts to happen you'll need to open the server up to a large influx of outsiders in order to maintain critical mass. After this you'll basically have a regular server.
One guild dominating a VW would probably eliminate RMT, if said guild holds the belief that RMT is evil. However, other types of real world exchanges would take over. E.g., I'll mow your lawn if you craft x widgets for y project.
Posted by: grant | Jun 05, 2006 at 08:26
I don't think most players that say 'democratic' want EVERYTHING to come up to a vote.
Of course, ask the average American what type of government they have - and they'll answer democratic - when what the US really has is a representational form of government.
That is perhaps the best answer for MMOs, either actively listen to your players (on balance) or a player's Senate might not be a bad idea to get a feel for how change is going to impact players from THEIR point of view.
Camelot for example has player representatives. On the whole, it's done far more good than harm (when they get listened to).
MMOs are typically dictatorships. While the word dictator is laced with bad connotations - a benevelent dictator is more akin to a kindly father figure that has his children's best interests at heart (and how most dev's probably view themselves). The problems occur when the player viewpoint is forgotten - or ignored. People then leave your 'country' or agitate for an overthrow.
The lesson that developers might best take away from how governments are run is huge amounts of effort is expended to get the populace to 'buyin' to change. In MMOs - change is most typically dropped into the players lap with no warning, no reasoning, no nothin. As paying customers - they resent that and even good changes can cause totally unnecessary drama and bad changes could have been avoided with all their attendent player attrition and expense.
Posted by: LoH | Jun 05, 2006 at 09:39
In general I think the concept/thought dies off a bit when you examine the motivation behind guilding in the first place. Spawning a seperate server for a single large guild would have some cool factor at first, but ultimately since you're not actually competing with anyone for resources (mobs or other) and in theory everyone on the server is eager/required to group up and get to gether to take on challenging tasks I think it would degenerate fairly quickly after the cool factor wears off.
Now, extending the thought to say a half dozen or so large guilds and setting the world factions to align with those guilds could actually have some interesting game impacts. Ultimately though this idea would depend on providing game mechanics that would motivate the players and their respective guilds to interact with one another rather than just continue the game of one up manship in a PvE environment.
Posted by: Sloejack | Jun 05, 2006 at 09:50
It depends on how great the powers you give the guild could get.
Consider the "free" unofficial servers for Ultima Online that are running rampant around the 'Net. If players were given the chance to create this kind of world with the tools available to them (SimMMORPG, anyone?) the possibilities might be quite interesting.
Actually, on that thought, wouldn't Second Life be counted as one of those games which gives the players that chance to manipulate the world to their liking?
Posted by: Eugene N | Jun 05, 2006 at 10:29
My biggest issue with most virtual worlds isn't that they aren't democratic, but that they don't offer any constitutional protections. I don't really expect to participate in every decision that effects the world, but I would like to know what minimal set of RIGHTS I have, and know that there's some sort of fair and just procedure for how disputes are going to be resolved. I need to know the limits of "government" power, and where I can act with a relative feeling of safety.
Most virtual communities don't want to codify such a document because the people with the power in such communities don't want to get caught in a position where they can't wield it. They want a dictatorship or oligarchy, where they can do anything to anyone they want within their borders. The only recourse virtual citizens have is to leave when they lose confidence in a particular leader or leaders. If they are popular enough themselves, they can set up their own dictatorship with their own virtual borders.
Posted by: Bruce Woodcock | Jun 05, 2006 at 10:29
I'm with James on point #2, at least -- yes, people will still be upset about things under the banner of "democracy" whatever that means to them.
But Richard said particularly:
"They approach the developer, the developer says OK, and sets up a special server that can only be accessed if you have the guild's say-so. This would leave the running of the entire virtual world up to the guild; guild officers could even be given customer service powers if that's what the guild wanted."
What you're posing here seems (to me) like a kind of hazy hybrid of guild & game owner, where the guild is essentially a live team. So here's the rub -- if the guild has CSR powers, can they use these in play? Would that be fun? What are the limits of their powers over the virtual environment. You seem to say that you'll give them whatever they want, but my hunch is that (I may well be wrong) most guild leaders wouldn't want much more control over the game environment and mechanics than they already have. If they take on ALL the powers, how do the senior officers of the guild differ from the current live team (because they all have in-world personae?)
What this question does for me is remind me that when you're dealing with *games* you either need a ref or an imposed ruleset or a very different kind of game.
Btw, this also reminds me of the Facism is Fun thread from 2.5 years ago (which is not a bad thing).
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2003/11/fascism_is_fun.html
Posted by: greglas | Jun 05, 2006 at 10:45
So what happens to the server when 80 or 90% of the guild gets bored and moves on?
Posted by: Scott Jennings | Jun 05, 2006 at 11:35
I dunno -- did the guild lease the hardware for a year? Richard needs to flesh out the hypo somemore.
Posted by: greglas | Jun 05, 2006 at 11:39
Yes, I'd continue to throw rocks, Richard, and guess what, you're providing excellent proof that open source does *not* = open society. All it means is an archipelago of egos, each one a fiefdom warring with the next, or conglomerating the next, each one closing in on itself, each one in fact vulnerable to all kinds of totalitarian memes as it becomes good only at keeping others out, not adjusting and adapting to new people and new impressions all the time, so that the first strong leader who can virally produce a meme to go through all the weakened cells will win, and it will be hard to undo for a long time to come.
Everybody thinks about how Google caved to Chinese hegemony. Everyone imagines that Google just caves in the one place, and retains its freedom and creativity everywhere else. What if caving to Chinese hegemony sticks...and spreads...and becomes the norm just because a future China will have the power and the people to inflict that hegemony? Made possible by that first capitulation.
The forces in SL that most resist the upheavals and losses of the world are those with really rigid and hierarchical social structures arranged around a powerful leader or powerful collective group-think clan. So that's why the Goreans (BDSM with celebration of the slavery of women and men in collars), the Furries (fierce tribal identity politics) or Neualtenberg (old leftie socialism masquerading as social democracy but really just the same old Leninism with the "Scientific Council" serving as the Politburo) are already integral units that would love to have their own servers and run their own worlds.
So the guilds are already forming, calfing off, and Daniel Linden is already explaining to us in the covenants meetings about the reform of the group tools that we will "each be our own Governor Linden" (like *he* is a model of enlightened dictatorship???) and we'll get to control all these things on our sim, able to mass-ban over huge swathes of territory (to whom will we appeal then).
In fact, the Goreans even push the Lindens further and ask that all abuse reports emanating from their domain be ricocheted back by the Lindens, without review, to their Chief Dom to be handled as they'd like to handle things, not by any TOS. Daniel concedes there will be "local culture". No notion of "hey, that's not cultural, it's criminal," will ever prevail.
Envision all these people going indy in their basements with their own servers and merely some kind of light licensing arrangement or open source from LL, and you have a peek into the hell of the Metaverse, a place with more check gates than the Erie Canal, where access will be everything, where people will be barred at a whim, where all the horrid arrogance and hubris of the existing game gods will be multipled a thousandfold. More little game gods doesn't mean more freedom, it means less.
A good example I like to cite is Hamlet nee Linden's blog. While in the Linden domain sitting on secondlife.com, if I post something to his blog that can't possibly be construed as a TOS offense, he can't justify removing it. I'd appeal to a higher authority than him, and I'd appeal to the rule of law within the publicly accessible TOS. As soon as Hamlet nee Linden goes indy himself, however, he can summarily and arbitrarily ban me off his blog, even if I so much as post "great article, Hammie," just because he doesn't like my face -- and that's what he does. And this is the Metaverse for you -- an archipelago of egos, arbitrary ruling their planets, and not half as enlightened as the Little Prince. What will bind them together except fierce tribal loyalties and this elusive concept of "likemindedness" which very much depends on chance first impressions, virtual encounters of the worst kind, etc.
Guilds will collapse upon themselves. First, they will not be able to have anything against which to defind themselves. Where is the enemy? We've met him, and he's us, like Pogo said. Where is the Like Mind? Well...now that it's all just us chickens sitting on the server together, with no external foe, and no interesting quest, we notice that the way that one person type *smiles* all the time like RP-idiots really does grate on our nerves...somebody else disagrees about the house style to build and it gets nasty...so much for the guild. I noticed that a kid brought into a guild of WoW that my son was in summarily ejected another kid just because of some lame halfline of a comment he made. This is not going to make for democracy, or even anarchy, but just authoritarianism of the old style.
I am endlessly puzzled by all these men in tights that want to replicate and reinstitute the Middle Ages. Didn't we get done with the Dark Ages? Why are the Dark Ages so fun? Didn't we go through the Enlightenment? Why are we going through an Endarkenment in Cyberspace now by bringing back the guild system, that little crypto-fascist corporativist tool to ensure comformity, "likemindedness," esprit du corps, animosity, etc. etc. I suppose these little entities are perfect for the shooting games, but they aren't the building blocks of a viable civilization.
The Metaverse should be free to have these corners of authoritarianism and even totalitarianism in them, but their demand for "freedom to be like Governor Linden" shouldn't become my closed society I have to move around through like checkpoints, constantly at risk to be ejected, banned, crashed, muted.
How did these "likeminded" think they were going to find each other?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 05, 2006 at 11:51
>What will happen, sooner or later, is that some schism within the guild that has obtained a private server will break out. The faction that wins the dispute will convince the developer to take some action: nerfing an item, banning a few players, deleting some content uploaded by the renegades, etc. The losers will scream bloody murder and claim that what happened wasn't democratic.
For a good example of this already happening in SL, see the Neualtenberg forums and discussions in the PolySci and Group forums at www.secondlife.com One strong leader refuses to submit to a constitutional amendment that reduces the power of the "scientific council" and makes it allegedly more democratic, or at least subject more to checks and balances by other other branches of government. A war of constitutionalism develops. The founder, even owning the buildings, is ejected and the issue of the IP of the creation of the buildings becomes part of the story. What rights do founders have? The Lindens' current group tools make it impossible to get rid of a fellow officer, because they did the right thing by removing "officer recall," which was only triggered as a griefing and a nuisance by rogue members or officers to try to throw someone off land they had purchased or just paralyze the group to new membership. That function was removed, but then the only way to get rid of a "problem" officer was to call the 1-800 number and ask them to be removed. Wierd, eh?
And this has been done a few times, i.e. Anshe Chung removed me from officer status in Metaverse Justice Watch after I object to her bussing in tenants and packing meetings with loyal subjects during elections, and prematurely closing off nominations of new people, invoking the problem of "griefers" entering an open group. Interestingly, another officer then invited me into the group and I guess as the group then fell into being a political parody and mainly just a staging ground for silly faction fights and goofy group IMs, Anshe didn't bother removing me, but did what most people do, formed another group with more "like-minded". This sort of arrangement just leads to endless factionalism where parliamentary blocs never get properly formed (and the strong executive branch of LL itself likes to keep it that way).
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 05, 2006 at 11:57
I've been a guildleader of a 50-80 person guild for about six years. That's a relatively small guild by some comparisons, but I've learned a lot about VW governance in that time.
My guild governance can be described as enlightened despotism. I make decisions that most of my members don't want to be bothered with - event scheduling, where our player house in Dark Ages was located, and how to dispense group funds.
I choose my officers, and while I frequently consult my officers when I want feedback on how to decide something, ultimately it is entirely my decision. My guildmembers stay in the guild (the majority have been with us for 3-5 years and move to new games with us) because we have a community for which I am the caretaker, and make decisions that enrich the experience of my members.
So to answer Richard's questions... I don't think any guild would ever want a server all to themselves. What they'd really want is a server on which they had preferential treatment. What value would owning a server be if you couldn't lord it over the peons? You already have the ability to experience content with just your chosen guildmembers through grouping, so you have the chance to exclude undesirables built into most games, already.
If you modify your question to be, "Would developers find value in giving expanded abilities to guildleaders/officers?" Well, you've already got games like that today. DAOC, for example, allows guilds to claim keeps/towers and set their "difficulty." Guildleaders decide who in their ranks have the right to burn guild points to upgrade keeps. I'm sure other MMO's have similar features.
Posted by: Axecleaver | Jun 05, 2006 at 12:12
I'd like my corp on EVE to be democratic, but that's impossible.
We're building to be a fleet, and engage in combat. Since we are armed in game all the time, and when running missions, are training for combat, we must stay hierarchical.
I bring this up because you might want to consider "democracy" versus other forms of government in relation to their purpose. Rousseau and Kant don't favor democracy because they think of it as warlike.
Posted by: ashok | Jun 05, 2006 at 12:31
I don't believe that any guild would want their own server to play on. Two of the key motivations for playing multiplayer games (as I believe you had a hand in developing, Mr. Bartle *wink*) are achievement and competition. I can't imagine transferring my guild to a server of our own, simply because...what's the point? We already play with one another several nights a week, but to do it without a community of other people, where we don't have external forces driving us toward end-game achievement, and where we're the only real people that exist in a vast digital landscape - well, it would feel really...boring.
Secondly, one of our guild leaders was a very aggressive, powerful, and confident person. He ran his own business in real life, and when he logged into game, although he was fair about many things, he could also be extremely stubborn and dramatic about other things. His style of guild leadership became more and more dictatorial as time passed, and he ended up kicking people out without any discussion with other members (sometimes even officers). Guild members felt like they were tiptoeing around him. Eventually, due to the fact that he was also very busy in real life, he stepped down and passed leadership to a reliable person.
The result is that now we have become more democratic - we make sure to talk openly to guild members about different issues because the fact is, the members are crucial to the success of guild progression. If you can't get enough people to show up to a raid, then no one can raid. If the membership isn't happy, then they have many other options, including quitting the guild and joining another one.
Point is that in an online world, there is more equality of opportunity, and equality of ACCESS, than in the real world. As a result, people who aren't happy in a guild can go elsewhere, making the quality of leadership a huge factor in the attractiveness of a guild.
That being said, there are many other factors to consider as well, such as the guild make-up, culture, members, goals and direction, leadership, and so on.
Just a few thoughts.
Posted by: Helen Cheng | Jun 05, 2006 at 12:53
Token mention of LambdaMOO:
Players were given full democracy and said it sucked. If I recall my history correctly, the devs took the role of executive and judicial, while the players remained legislative.
Also:
A lot of fantasy stories seem to be about "Oh no, the king died" and ends with "Yay, we got a new king". Usually with some evil ruler during the course of the story that the protagonist(s) is/are pissed at. Actually, that kind of sums up LotR.
Finally:
But my example wasn't a game.
Part of the fundamental problem about doing this to a game world is that the devs take the role of referees. And while it's certainly possible, it's unlikely that a guild or even a group of players would be willing to become (vaguely) impartial and fairly arbitrate. Those who are willing used to just go and do it. Now the budgets are kinda high (not that that seems to be stopping anyone).
A player can be a fairly good referee. But a player also wants to play, and being a referee is tiresome, irksome, generally thankless, and usually a time sink without tangible compensation.
If this experiment is tried, that will be your first source of fallout. "It's not fun." Or, perhaps more accurately, "It's too much like real life."
Posted by: Michael Chui | Jun 05, 2006 at 12:54
the devs took the role of executive and judicial, while the players remained legislative.
There's your problem right there, no independent judiciary.
We don't need players to be referees so much as we need there to be a rule of law -- the law is the standard by which the play is judged. Then you have a Constitutional Court to judge whether the law is constitutional. And an adversarial defense to protect the rights of the defendent against the executive.
It's more fun than you might imagine, or let me say that for some, it will be fun, and in a virtual world with its tools, it will all go much faster. Of course, there are all kinds of problems like the power of IMs to undermine sequestering and segregation of witnesses, etc. but there can be workarounds.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 05, 2006 at 13:10
My answer to most of Dr. Bartle's questions would be "no".
Now, if the guilds were required to incorporate and then sign a contract to lease and operate a server then the chances of "yes" are better.
From a business angle, the implications of providing "guild" packages of services and products would be a better spec of the thought experiment.
A related historical perspective on this thought experiement is the process of colonization. Lots of expedition groups were given broad powers to administer a trading post or a new colony. I don't know enough about the details to offer any details, but do hope that someone with better knowledge of this area of history can enlighten me.
Posted by: magicback (Frank) | Jun 05, 2006 at 13:19
What occurs to me is how guilds in virtual worlds are different from real-world sociopolitical organizations. Game guilds are much "flatter" -- they have far fewer levels of hierarchy than the typical bureaucratic real-world organization.
Imagine Stalin running a guild in WoW. Would the directness of power in a virtual world organization made him even more effective in carrying out purges? Or would he have been less effective because the "code is law" that defines player powers severely limits what players (even players in the same guild) can do to one another?
Similarly, I don't think just putting a guild on a server of its own is enough to guess the likely result. I think we'd also need to know the powers given to each member of the guild, including the guild's leadership, to affect other players.
I'd guess that a guild-only server that was PvP-enabled would turn into "Lord of the Flies" island within a month.
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jun 05, 2006 at 15:06
There's your problem right there, no independent judiciary.
Actually, that's an interesting idea. Set up a GameMaster union.
Posted by: Michael Chui | Jun 05, 2006 at 15:06
As far as the question of guild-based servers, I think that with the exception of very small virtual worlds--probably made by small, independant development groups--such a service won't exist, at least in the sense of the pre-built game-type worlds that tend to dominate these discussions.
I do see the potential for shards for people that build their own worlds (like MUDs) in the future, and I hope that this area will gain some momentum in the near future -- I think for example, the Neverwinter Nights client/server design was promising, although it seemed difficult to design truly persistant worlds with it.
But I could see larger demand for a guild to run and design a shard, rather than just run a copy of the institutional version of the VW.
On the democracy front, in many ways I think Star Wars Galaxies was the most promising player in the AAA camp for a long time, maybe it still is. It had representative democracy built into the Player City mechanics, and as of the NGE patch it's probably better. Unfortunately by the time the NGE patch rolled around, my home city had shriveled to dust, so I don't know what the player-run city is like these days... but I remember the city building aspects as very compelling, although it's tough to remember anything about it except the "rent" parties (where you'd go and do missions for hours to pay the city expenses -- good times, lol).
I'm not sure what else the SWG devs could have put in, democracy-wise without opening innocent players to griefing or other mischef.
For that matter, what sort of democracy do players want? A chance to change the loot tables? There's very little governance in most game based VW's short of CSR-style law enforcement, and since commercial VWs are defacto dictatorships, good luck with any democratic reforms--they'd probably never get past the legal department at the company.
Posted by: illovich | Jun 05, 2006 at 15:30
Now that I'd pay $14.95/month for.
Posted by: illovich | Jun 05, 2006 at 15:31
I also believe the majority of such experiments would be dystopic. It also might not be too far from being tested. Prokofy Neva has hilighted the potential in Second Life terms, but let's not forget about "mulitiverse"
When "multiverse" (www.multiverse.net) was first mentioned on TN , the company stated that developers would essentially be given the assets of their first MMO to modify and use, as part of the toolset. Players/Modders COULD set up a community-governed variant of the main world and experiment.
Last I checked, the early developer "beta" tools are asset-neutral, ready for potential prototyping or creating demo's, but not a rich library of game assets that would allow such flexibility. We'll see how it emerges.
Posted by: Chas | Jun 05, 2006 at 15:35
"Democracy" can be found in guildstructures, certainly. They are not inherently non-democratic. Besides, that even non-democratic guilds can be "democratic" on some levels:
1. Larger alliances.
2. The threshold for leaving is low. (a guild splits if the leader doesn't cater for the majority or a major minority)
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Jun 05, 2006 at 16:08
I'm seeing a strong WoW "bent" in the flava of how we're discussing "guild" here; i.e., a team put together on one side of a two-sided war with the general goal of more efficiently whomping-ass on the other side's teams during PvP. I'm going to assume that Richard meant something more along the lines of what I might call a "meta guild" or an "uber guild" or a "club" or "association" or "union" or sumfin. If I assume wrongly, well... sue me.
No. A typical WoW guild, even a huge one, would have no fun with its own server. There is, as has been pointed out, no fun there. You'd all stand around going... so... who do we fight? Unless you were all REALLY into PvE or hard-core RP, and that was the raison d'etre of the guild/server -- to keep out the light-weights -- it generally wouldn't add up to a reason to play on yer own sphere, I don't think.
But I'm casting back, now, to conversations of recent memory here and on other MMO boards. What about a "meta guild" who was opposed to all forms of RMT, twinking, guild boosting, etc.? Where the point of the sub-guilds was in-game comms only? And no voice chat, either, because not everybody had that? A "we all must be level, or it's not fair" guild. IE, the "cheaters suck" meta-guild. With players, in the case of WoW, from both Alliance and Horde? That would make sense as a server-wide "creed based guild."
What about a highly GLBT-friendly guild world/shard/server? Or a profanity permitted/encouraged server? Or sexuality/erotic dialogue encouraged? Or RMT encouraged? Or pre-teen only? Or a tutorial-server, where old-timers could help larn the younguns on the finer points of how to RP?
I think that if there's a "binding thread" (or two or more), you could end up with some really interesting flavors of a game. To a degree, SL already offers this with "islands" and private areas, and the "teen zone," which is PG only content. I think you could probably have a "meta guild" that also charged extra for the "right" to play on a server where they provided a play experience above-and-beyond that which the publisher provides in the "vanilla" context.
I can see, for example, "social mods" laid on top of WoW, and folks paying extra to be part of and get certified in the "Six Sigma Alliance Model." There's enough complexity in WoW, and in running a guild that you could layer all kinds of hoo-hah on top.
Horde EST anyone?
Posted by: Andy Havens | Jun 05, 2006 at 18:11
Oh, I quite understand that we don't necessarily have to take "guild" literally and it can be "meta-guild" like GLBT or Linux users. And SL doesn't do this only with islands or the teen grid but with groups like Thinkers or Mainlanders or Public Sex Commission that span sims, mainland and island both. These groups are often event-driven literally, i.e. they hold events, people come, and get the group taq to wear on their head.
Raph Koster really said it best this last week in a comment a little bit buried in a somewhat boring discussion about "whither the Internet" based on Pew's survey.
http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/02/imagining-the-internet/#more-516
"# What is your greatest fear for the future of networked technologies?
Humans grew up in tribes where you didn’t get to pick who else was in your tribe. We grew up in situations where we had to learn to get along with people who had opinions that were different from ours, and networked technologies are allowing us to form tribes that are homogenous. They’re allowing us to find groups of people who are just like us. And I think it’s wonderful to be able to find my tribe of people who read the same books I do and like my music and watch the same TV shows and in general share the same view of the world. That’s wonderful, because it makes you feel like you’re not alone any more. But on the other hand I think it’s incredibly important for the human race to be exposed to multiple viewpoints and to get to interact with people that we wouldn’t necessarily interact with if given our choice. One of the real risks in the networked environment is the lessened friction of connecting with people. People will choose to hang out with people they already know. They will choose to read the books they already know they will like, rather than taking a flyer on something new. Statistical analysis shows that this is the case when we look at all of the communities of interest that have formed on the internet. You can graph, for example, what political books people read, on Amazon, and what you find is Democrats won’t read the right-wing books and Republicans won’t read the left-wing books and almost no books cross the divide and are read by both, and that’s a very dangerous thing for our political establishment. That would be my worry about this low-friction information culture. Biology teaches us homogenous cultures are not a good thing – they’re very vulnerable."
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 05, 2006 at 23:33
Actually, as many of you probably know, A Tale In The Desert (now the third version) actually has a pretty orderly democratic system built in. Players propose and vote on laws, which are then enacted... by the Pharaoh, sure, but the players do get to decide by majority consensus.
Posted by: Leigh | Jun 06, 2006 at 03:23
Leigh,
How does ATITD handle misbehavior? I'm aware of the Demi-Pharoah's power, but I find it hard to believe that that's the only recourse when wronged. I'm under the impression that the community itself is rather small, and so maybe everyone knows and stuff...
In other words, is there a judiciary system besides the Demi-Pharaoah's ban power?
Posted by: Michael Chui | Jun 06, 2006 at 03:29
Beyond the Ultima Online free server examples (which someone else noted), another example of Guild MMO "forking" is the obvious example of much of MU* history. How many MU*s were started by a particular group of MU* players from some other MU* who were either able to borrow the original's source code for their own server, or started their own code to be somewhat like that last MU*.
Different economics, obviously, but I think that the precedent does somewhat point to the fact that it is "only a matter of time", really, before we might see something at least somewhat similar.
Probably more interesting is the question: why hasn't it happened yet? When does it become "profitable" for MMO owners to lease servers or other assets to groups that might be interested?
Posted by: WorldMaker | Jun 06, 2006 at 03:41
Bruce Woodcock>My biggest issue with most virtual worlds isn't that they aren't democratic, but that they don't offer any constitutional protections.
Why should they? What is it you want them to protect?
>I would like to know what minimal set of RIGHTS I have
The simple answer is you have the right to stop playing.
Is it that you want to know what the minimal set of rights you have are, or is it that there are particular rights you want?
>and know that there's some sort of fair and just procedure for how disputes are going to be resolved.
This is a reason for choosing one virtual world over another, but it shouldn't be a requirement for virtual worlds in general (which is sort of implied by your use of "rights"). Some virtual worlds in the past have thrived on the basis of their being the domains of completely capricious gods for whom the words "fair and just" are taken as challenges to their authority which must be struck down. If it's part of the game that fairness and justice are ignored, then that should be allowed.
>Most virtual communities don't want to codify such a document because the people with the power in such communities don't want to get caught in a position where they can't wield it.
I don't think they'd necessarily mind codifying it, it's just that there may not be a lot to codify and it wouldn't look all that attractive to people who were hoping for a parliamentary democracy.
>They want a dictatorship or oligarchy, where they can do anything to anyone they want within their borders.
The thing is, they're not governments, they're gods. This is whether they want to be gods or not. They can do anything they want within their borders because they can't not do anything they want there. Any meaningful power they may wish to give away, or to say they'll never use, could under some unfortunate circumstance be the very power they wish to invoke.
>The only recourse virtual citizens have is to leave when they lose confidence in a particular leader or leaders.
This is the constitution you were asking for.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 06, 2006 at 03:50
greglas>What you're posing here seems (to me) like a kind of hazy hybrid of guild & game owner
Yes, that's right. The developers would just hand over a shard and then get on with their usual business of developing content, fixing bugs and so on. The guild could do whatever they liked in the shard they bought, for as long as they rented it.
>where the guild is essentially a live team.
The guild is essentially a live team anyway, isn't it?
>So here's the rub -- if the guild has CSR powers, can they use these in play?
That would be up to the guild. They could request not to have those powers if they wanted. They could request that a few of their number had them - those who like doing CSR stuff - on whatever conditions they wanted. The guild would get to choose. If they decide to do so democratically, fine; they're the ones paying for it.
>You seem to say that you'll give them whatever they want, but my hunch is that (I may well be wrong) most guild leaders wouldn't want much more control over the game environment and mechanics than they already have.
If that's what they want, OK, give them that.
>If they take on ALL the powers, how do the senior officers of the guild differ from the current live team (because they all have in-world personae?)
They differ because the developer doesn't have to pay them.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 06, 2006 at 03:56
greglas>did the guild lease the hardware for a year? Richard needs to flesh out the hypo somemore.
Take it whichever way you want. What would happen if the guild leased hardware for a year and then fell apart? What would happen if they leased it for a month and then fell apart?
It wouldn't matter to the developer either way. They've been paid up front, and when the payment stops they can re-use the hardware. Whether they want to provide some safe passage to another server or not is up to them, although I'd recommend against it because the people on the servers they migrate to will find their social system suddenly taking a whack, especially if the incomers all have epic gear they've picked up from their CSR buddies.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 06, 2006 at 03:59
Helen Cheng>I don't believe that any guild would want their own server to play on.
Some of them seem to spend all their time in instances in WoW. Why not have an entire instance of the whole game to themselves?
>Two of the key motivations for playing multiplayer games (as I believe you had a hand in developing, Mr. Bartle *wink*)
What's with the Mr? You can call me Richard, you know...
>I can't imagine transferring my guild to a server of our own, simply because...what's the point?
Because maybe you don't like how the game is when it's open to all-comers? Maybe you're a strong role-playing guild, or maybe you're vehemently anti-RMT, or maybe you want a world where all the players are RL-female, or maybe you'd like everyone to speak Esperanto. Maybe you want to use access to the server as the goal for recruiting members in other servers, as part of your efforts for virtual world domination? Maybe you just want a world that's more "democratic"? Maybe you want to charge regular players extra to play on your server because of the superior customer service you'll be offering?
There are plenty of reasons why a guild might want a virtual world of its own. Some are more valid than others in terms of "the play is the thing". If your guild doesn't want to have its own server, fine, it doesn't have to have one.
>we don't have external forces driving us toward end-game achievement, and where we're the only real people that exist in a vast digital landscape - well, it would feel really...boring.
End-game achievement is boring almost by definition. If the game is ended, all that goes on is merely there to pass time while players realise it's ended.
>Point is that in an online world, there is more equality of opportunity, and equality of ACCESS, than in the real world. As a result, people who aren't happy in a guild can go elsewhere, making the quality of leadership a huge factor in the attractiveness of a guild.
This is good, but it is in no way incompatible with wanting to run your own guild server. If you kept finding that wherever you went, the other players always wound up spoiling the game for you, maybe you'd come to think that, you know, maybe it's not all that bad an idea to emigrate to a new world and set up your ideal society without intrusion from the unenlightened?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 06, 2006 at 04:15
Andy Havens>I'm going to assume that Richard meant something more along the lines of what I might call a "meta guild" or an "uber guild" or a "club" or "association" or "union" or sumfin.
Yes, sorry. I meant anything that might manifest itself in a virtual world as what we have come to call a "guild" (the quotation marks were deliberate), but whether that's for gameplay or social or accidental reasons isn't particularly important. The main point was that there are social groupings enforced in code (at minimum by inclusion/exclusion abilities of some "leader"), which is the basic form of self-governance that players have for whatever purposes they decide to self-govern.
The question was, at heart, what are the implications of allowing this self-governance model to have its own territory in which there is no external friction?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 06, 2006 at 04:23
>Is it that you want to know what the minimal set
>of rights you have are, or is it that there are
>particular rights you want?
Yes, there are particular rights I'd want. I think that's obvious. Most of the rest of your comments were making fun of the fact the only rights and rules you had were the right to leave, which I already acknowledged as lacking...
Having different communities offer different rights ENABLES the choices people make to be more meaningful. Also, I think it's far easier to get the people in power to agree to a set of basic human virtual rights by appealing to their own sense of right and wrong, and to get them to see the benefits of limiting their power in certain situations, than to get them to essentially cede all power in adpoting a Democractic process.
You see this in the rise of Western Democracy; ordinary people started out with almost no rights, and Lords and Kings slowly began to acknowledge basic rights of the governed long before they were allowed full participation in the political process.
Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Woodcock | Jun 06, 2006 at 05:43
Circle Jerks - don't you love em'?
Of course you miss the point entirely in your premise that said guilds would be PAYING for their own private servers and all power would come down to WHOEVER PAYS THE BILLS.
It seems like this is less a "Thought Experiment" than it is some long boring-ass way to explain why Democracy isn't any good.
Posted by: Stormgaard | Jun 06, 2006 at 08:53
Bruce Woodcock>Yes, there are particular rights I'd want. I think that's obvious.
OK, what are these rights, and are they compatible with what it is you want the rights to protect? Example: you may want freedom of speech as a right, but also want to play on an RP server. If people can say whatever they like on an RP server without sanction, it won't be an RP server for long. Thus, in this case, the right you want would screw over what it is you wanted to use the right for. Are the rights you want like this, or are they independent? If they're independent, why would a developer not want you to have them? If they're dependent, why would you yourself want them?
>Most of the rest of your comments were making fun of the fact the only rights and rules you had were the right to leave, which I already acknowledged as lacking...
That may be the only right you have for certain, but ho boy, is it ever a powerful right! It's better than anything you get in the real world.
>Having different communities offer different rights ENABLES the choices people make to be more meaningful.
I agree, although I thought the point of "rights" was that they apply to everyone, irrespective of community?
>Also, I think it's far easier to get the people in power to agree to a set of basic human virtual rights by appealing to their own sense of right and wrong
I agree, but I can also give you a hypothetical virtual world which would be ruined were the people in power to impose a set of basic virtual rights on it (other than the right to leave it). It's good that virtual worlds can grant their players rights as a means of attracting people to them, but it's bad if all virtual worlds have to adopt these rights whether they want them or not.
>and to get them to see the benefits of limiting their power in certain situations, than to get them to essentially cede all power in adpoting a Democractic process.
I agree that this may be a tactic that we may have to use if they plan on doing something worse!
>Lords and Kings slowly began to acknowledge basic rights of the governed long before they were allowed full participation in the political process.
As I said, though, we're not talking lords and kings here, we're talking deities. If in Reality, some RL Creator suddenly started to take an interest and threw his/her weight around, making old people young again, turning oil to water, stopping TV from broadcasting soap operas, that kind of thing, it would be a real pain and people would squeal like crazy, but ultimately they could do nothing whatsoever about it. Deities are deities. In a virtual world, you can use RL law to make the deities into governors, but then your world has no deities, which ultimately means you have a world with unchanging physics. That's fine for Reality, but Reality is bug-free (leastwise it hasn't crashed yet).
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 06, 2006 at 09:03
Richard: The question was, at heart, what are the implications of allowing this self-governance model to have its own territory in which there is no external friction?
Isn't this answered by the behavior of players on "free" UO servers? Essentially, the admins of these servers have replicated (however questionable it may be legally) the UO experience; the game is in the players' hands. Is the result any differet than when the game was in EA's hands? I may have missed it, but I haven't heard of any renaissance (governance-related or otherwise) arising out of these worlds. They are ultimately still the same kill-monster-get-gold fests that we have in almost every other virtual world, no matter who's running it.
Stormgaard: all power would come down to WHOEVER PAYS THE BILLS.
This is an essential truth of online worlds. If you own the hardware and pay the power/bandwidth bills, you have all ultimate rights to whatever happens in that world. In Richard's terms this makes you a diety of the world (Tolkein referred to this as subcreation, acknowledging in his parlance the part of both God and world-god, if you will). This reality makes discussion of "human rights" as Bruce asked about often seem moot.
Any right a player/inhabitant might be granted inevitably has an asterisk attached: you can do this so long as we don't shut down the server. This is precisely the situation with Second Life, for example (though apparently some residents are surprised to discover this, or do their beest to forget it), and it extends to any other game or virtual world. Players can operate within the world with whatever governance abilities and rights the admins give them, but ultimately there is no argument (and no real-world parallel) to the power to hit the big Off Switch.
All that said, and with full acknowledgement of the Asterisk of Damocles hanging over the heads of anyone in a virtual world, I think there is a useful discussion to be had about what powers people might need to have in a virtual world to govern themselves. Right now in virtually all online worlds those powers (and thus rights) are sparse and ad hoc at best. This is a discussion we've had in the past, but thus far little progress has been made in open implementation.
My point is that turning over a server to a group of players changes nothing. The nature of the world doesn't change, and the players/inhabitants still have no mechanism for deciding who takes the place of the former admins: who covers what, who can change what, etc. Would they evolve some form of consensus or even democratic method of decision-making? I doubt it; those forms are incredibly hard work, especially for people who ultimately just want to play a game ("let someone else worry about it" isn't an effective rallying cry for shared regulation). For any new significant forms of player governance to emerge, the players must be given an array of basic, atomic tools and mechanisms (that do not exist in any mainstream online world today), and they must have sufficient incentive to see such tools as worth their time and effort. Then we might see some interesting things happen... as long as the lights stay on.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jun 06, 2006 at 11:18
Mike> Isn't this answered by the behavior of players on "free" UO servers? Essentially, the admins of these servers have replicated (however questionable it may be legally) the UO experience; the game is in the players' hands. Is the result any differet than when the game was in EA's hands? I may have missed it, but I haven't heard of any renaissance (governance-related or otherwise) arising out of these worlds. They are ultimately still the same kill-monster-get-gold fests that we have in almost every other virtual world, no matter who's running it.
Yeah, I'm basically with Mike (and the prior commentors who pointed out the lack of democratic structure in most guilds) -- if the guilds took over the servers, you'd basically be saying "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Why? Because the trouble with virtual democracy is that it takes up too many evenings.
...
Now, that being said... We can count on conflict between users and controllers and we can count on appeals to the state to intervene and we can count on, during those appeals, rhetoric about popular democracy, essential rights, unlawful exercise of power -- so we haven't solved this. What we've pointed (I think) is that handing over governance to guilds won't take these particular rocks out of our hands.
Posted by: greglas | Jun 06, 2006 at 11:43
Mike said: "Would they evolve some form of consensus or even democratic method of decision-making? I doubt it."
I disagree. With half the statement. Because it doesn't need to be democratic,
I'm not sure why we're worried about democracy when it comes to rule making in games. What I have noticed -- and what we've discussed in previous threads on RMT, use of voice-chat, RP, etc. -- is that we already have a multiplicity of interpretations of "the rules." I ended up, after an enormously long series of comments back-and-forth, being convinced that RMT doesn't count as "against the rules," if the publishers don't put up more than a token resistance to the practice. That is an example of democracy (or unopposed anarchy) in action.
Game rules are not, by definition, democratic. Richard has used the term "god" quite a bit above to refer to what happens "be default" in a game. I think that's a bit deimorphic, as it presents the publishers/programmers with a set of benign and/or evil intentions. Much of what happens in games is (if this is a word) "definitional." Rule-driven. Like they say about gravity; it's not just a good idea -- it's the law. If more than half of the soccer players on the field decide that they don't like gravity, well... that's their perogative. But I don't think Newton is going to reverse his earlier decision.
On the other hand, a bunch of kids playing soccer out in back of the school can decide, on a whim, to make the goals smaller. Or bigger. Or closer together. Or that you can use your hands, but just as fists. Or that Stan needs to play with his hands in his pockets 'cause he's just too damn fast for the rest of us.
That's democracy in action in games, and what we're, I think, talking about in terms of setting up "game shards."
But let's be clear about something -- the democratic process of setting up a game shard (server, world, off-shoot, whatever) in order to have a game with one or more specific rule-sets, environments, flavors, etc., does not in any way assume that *democracy* itself is going to be one of the rules that is grafted into/onto play within that shard.
For example; if I were to lead a band of brave new brothers/sisters into a WoW shard, it would be a HELL of a lot less democratic than the average WoW server. If, by democratic, one means the excersize of a wider variety of play options and behaviors. The "Andy Shard" would be hard-core RP, no RL chat in the open, no RMT, no twinking, no corpse-camping, etc. etc. The point would be to play the game as a character-based RPG. Not a level-fest. Not as a chance to gank newbies. All would be accountable to an authority that could kick you off the server if you broke the rules. Not a democracy; a rule-ocracy. Why? Because anybody who wanted to play that way came to this shard to play that way, and if you break the rules, you're spoiling it for the rest of us, so piss off.
I can imagine the "Anti-Andy Shard," too. All RMT all the time. Level wars. That's fine, too. You stay on your server, I'll stay on mine. The problem I had with WoW when I left was that there was waaaayyy to much "democracy" happening; except it wasn't democracy. It was anarchy. Which, for many people, is fine. It just wasn't my cup o' mixy tea.
Democracy is great for certain things. But games? I don't think so. I don't want to vote and have parliamentary procedures every time a new feature comes out. I just want to play. And if I decide that the rules and system of a game are fun enough for me to spend time and money on, I'd prefer other people to play by those rules, not try to squirm out of them because they think that "game democracy" gives them the "right" to cheat if they can.
If specific game shards/servers provided specific places where folks could play versions of the game that were more to their tastes, I think that's a great idea. And, though I agree with what Prokofy says about exposure to different and new ideas when it comes to politics and science... I don't believe that I should have to indulge in entertainment variations forced on me by others. If there were a "no kids allowed" showing of certain movies, for example, I'd sure as heck pay extra for that.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Jun 06, 2006 at 12:13
>OK, what are these rights, and are they
>compatible with what it is you want the rights
>to protect? Example: you may want freedom of
>speech as a right, but also want to play on an
>RP server. If people can say whatever they like
>on an RP server without sanction, it won't be an
>RP server for long. Thus, in this case, the
>right you want would screw over what it is you
>wanted to use the right for.
The point isn't so much what the right is, but simply that the right is more defined. You suggest, for example, that one is subject to sanction for saying arbitrary things on an RP server. Correct. But many RP communities have no rule that states thus, because you can be sanctioned for what you say even if it's WITHIN RP constraints. They can sanction you for pretty much ANY reason.
>Are the rights you want like this, or are they
>independent? If they're independent, why would a
>developer not want you to have them? If they're
>dependent, why would you yourself want them?
I don't really know what you mean by depdendent/independent here, unless you're asking if they are game or server specific. I'd say the IDEAL of freedom of speech is indepdent; some servers would have this, and some RP servers might have a more limited form of this. A user wants this so they know the limits of protected behavior; a developer is genereally resistant to this because they want to be able to sanction for reasons they can't well-define.
>That may be the only right you have for certain,
>but ho boy, is it ever a powerful right! It's
>better than anything you get in the real world.
Oh, God no. I would disagree 100%. To prove that, just imagine the real world where the only right was the right to move anywhere to someone else's rule. That wouldn't be all that powerful if everyplace was a dictatorship in which you had no other rights. I think I'd much rather have, say, the US constitution and no freedom to emigrate than the freedom to emigrate and no US constitution.
Now, one may say VR is somewhat less analogous, because there's no limit on virtual spaces. You can set up your own kingdom if you like. True enough, but your personal kingdom might not be very fun if it doesn't have the infrastructure of, say, a fully interactive 3D world, a large population engaged in specialization, etc.
>I agree, although I thought the point
>of "rights" was that they apply to everyone,
>irrespective of community?
As an ideal, sure, but it's unrealistic to expect the same rights to be available in every virtual context. If that bothers you, then simply think of the exclusive set of "universal" rights, and another set of "community" rights, much like the difference between constitutional and local law. We don't even have set local laws in most of these places.
>I agree, but I can also give you a hypothetical
>virtual world which would be ruined were the
>people in power to impose a set of basic virtual
>rights on it (other than the right to leave it).
That's a whole different debate, though. I'm not saying, "These are the rights, and every VR world must have them." but rather "These are the ideals, and it would be nice if each VR's controllers address them in some way, and in any case to define some minimal set of rights that apply to their own VR, instead of doing whatever they want whenever they want."
>As I said, though, we're not talking lords and
>kings here, we're talking deities.
I would disagree somewhat here inasmuch those that are have power in communities often do not have deity-level power. A GM may be able to do certain things to a player, but not anything. In a web community, the guy who runs the server may be the ultimate deity, but those who run the forums may have more limited powers. You may be right in that such laws could never apply to the ultimate deity, but such people rarely interfere with the day-to-day goings on within the world. And of course, none of this applies to a bug or a power outage...
I sense you're trying to move the debate down the road to far more fundamental statements about reality and/or virtual reality. I respect that, but to me it doesn't really matter if the ultimate answer is we have no rights, some rights, or all rights. I just want those empowered in virtual communities to advertise and adhere to some set of "rights" they feel are fair and just, rather than playing everything by ear and making decisions on a whim.
Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Woodcock | Jun 06, 2006 at 12:26
I think I was taking the term "guild" too literally earlier... but the conversation is much more interesting now. *g*
Is the notion of "democracy" in a virtual world just silly when programmers can change the laws of reality on a whim? How can you have any right to self-government if the very definition of "you" can be redefined by someone else?
(Note: This road has been traveled here before, as in Avatar Rights from 2003. Worth another look from the point of view of players owning a server, though.)
1. The question of what "rights" are in RL has never been settled. The English Magna Carta and Bill of Rights each state some; the U.S. Declaration of Independence names a few; the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen others; America defined still others in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the American Convention on Human Rights; the United Nations has the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and so on.
Probably the most important distinction is between natural rights, which everyone is held to possess simply by virtue of being human, and legal rights, which are whatever rights a government explicitly grants you (and which may be re-interpreted, modified, or revoked at any time by that government). In the virtual world context, it seems obvious that players (and I mean players, not player characters) have legal rights... but do they have natural rights as users of virtual worlds?
What about player characters? (As in Raph's "A Declaration of the Rights of Avatars".)
What about non-player characters? (As in "Equal Rights for Norns" from the "Creatures" community.)
2. As Mike points out, is it really a "right" if a divinity could simply negate it (and all other rights, and in fact the entire universe) with the flip of a switch?
3. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't read a question like #2 without thinking about the RL parallel. If you believe there exists in our real world a deity or deities who could snuff out our cosmos with a thought, what does that say about our "rights?" Why bother with democracy... or anything else?
4. What if your deity-of-choice is non-interactive? Does self-government suddenly become a viable action if no divine entity ever directly affects the world?
5. As noted, a server with no "deity" (no developer) would be static in terms of the rules of physics, much as in a RL universe with a non-interactive deity. (Bearing in mind that someone has to pay to keep the server running, and that this confers a rather draconian form of divinity on whoever's paying the bills.) Even so, as long as the "deity" is non-interactive while the server's running, and players are able to choose how to organize themselves socially, isn't a democratic form of government theoretically possible?
6. To end on a practical note, self-government is the hardest of all forms. Given the trouble we have with this in RL, what are the odds that it would last for any length of time on a server populated by today's gamers? Isn't it more likely to work (if at all) on some sandbox game, or in a virtual world that's not a game at all, because democracy requires a critical mass of mature, "I'm willing to accept limits to my actions so that the group can prosper" thinking?
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jun 06, 2006 at 14:16
Michael wrote:
How does ATITD handle misbehavior? I'm aware of the Demi-Pharoah's power, but I find it hard to believe that that's the only recourse when wronged. I'm under the impression that the community itself is rather small, and so maybe everyone knows and stuff...
In other words, is there a judiciary system besides the Demi-Pharaoah's ban power?
Leigh wrote:
Unfortunately, I'm new to A Tale In The Desert, but it's my understanding that bans usually come about by majority vote. This would follow the same process as other laws -- first circulate a petition, then vote on the proposed law. I would imagine that the proposed law would have to list the player's offenses, or else it wouldn't pass.
I've heard that the legal system is really slow, and it's hard to pass laws. So I think that this sort of ban is uncommon. But the legal system is used sometimes -- for instance, I heard a story from the first year of ATITD. There was a player with an offensive name that bothered many players. In response, a law was passed to change his name to Flower.
But the ATITD community is very small, so if, for instance, someone was cheating people in trade, it would be mentioned in the chat channel and other people would refuse to trade with that person. If someone spammed the chat channel, then everyone would start ignoring them. Cooperation is a big part of this game and (what I heard is) if someone earns a bad reputation they'll find it difficult to play and will probably leave anyway. In this way, there are community punishments for obnoxious behavior, so that bans are not always necessary.
Posted by: Leigh | Jun 06, 2006 at 14:57
Bart: as long as the "deity" is non-interactive while the server's running, and players are able to choose how to organize themselves socially, isn't a democratic form of government theoretically possible?
Only sorta. If the social ontology of the world (how the world was constructed to support community) includes facilities for shared governance, then this is possible. OTOH, the forms this takes in the best cases are usually still pretty crude: e.g., people standing in one part of the village square or another to indicate their opinion (their "vote") on a particular issue. Few if any worlds now have built in social "physics" for things like, say, holding a hidden vote, determining if you have a quorum for a vote, allowing community ownership of objects or other groups, or maintaining a fundamental governing document (a constitution or set of by-laws). Just as even gravity has to be coded to exist in an online world, there are myriad aspects of social/governance that we simply take for granted but which must be consciously engineered to exist in an online world -- and which the end-users often cannot even simulate much less create on their own (beyond the "stand over here if you agree" level). This is an area that few game developers have explored, and one in which even the theory is often sparse.
So, given a non-interactive "deity" and some assurance that the server will keep running, if sufficient social/community tools and mechanisms are included in the world, then players could come up with all sorts of neat shared governance schemes.
--
I wanted to say something about "democracy." It gets tossed around in discussions like this with a fair amount of ambiguity. Some see it as the ultimate form of distributed governance -- the opposite of the dictatorial autocracy existing in game worlds now. Others use it as a handle for "I get to be involved" without thinking exactly what that might mean. Few, I suspect, understand that as Aristotle said, a pure democracy is the worst (least efficient and least likely to bring about long-terms stable results) form of governance.
I tend to use phrases like "shared governance" or "shared regulation" in discussions like this one. The point here is that many players want to be more involved in regulating what they and others can do, or at least they want to be able to be involved. Imagine if players could set which areas of a game were PvP-enabled and which weren't (or even which allowed goods bought via RMT or not!). They might not be thinking "one player one vote" or even "one player one compulsory vote" but those are both pure democratic systems. What they want instead is a voice. How that voice gets turned into decision-making is a bit more nebulous for most folks.
I don't think democracy is a good match for in-game shred regulation. It's a lot of work, it's often an interminable process, and it has a lot of structural dependencies (who can vote, how often, who can propose votes and how often, what constitutes a quorum, when can decisions be revisited, what constitutes a majority, etc.).
But that is not to say that some form of "shared regulation" is a bad idea. I happen to think it's an excellent idea for all sorts of reasons. The trick, however, is to give the players the tools they need to decide for themselves whether their shared regulation will be anarchic, autocratic, representative, oligarchic, or even democratic. Each (and infinite shades between) has its benefits depending on the context, and I don't think any game developer is wise enough to know in advance which one is best for all situations. As has been said many times, "tools not rules" -- this is true in enabling shared regulation/governance more than anywhere else.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jun 06, 2006 at 15:16
Tibia is an example of self-government by dictatorship. Groups of players form Internet gangs to rule individual servers w/ world populations ranging from 500-1000 players. The limited world size, population, and unregulated griefing allow for these gangs to set their own laws and enforce them by murder and intimidation. It's a lot like Lord of the Flies Online or living in a prison.
Posted by: toben | Jun 06, 2006 at 15:52
Mike> Few if any worlds now have built in social "physics" for things
True enough. Would you say that another minimum condition for democratic organization (as you define it) is that players have the power to create new things?
In other words, do virtual worlds have to look like Second Life to have a shot at democracy, or could one of the more tightly constrained game worlds ever hope to be democratically run?
To put it another way, just how much control must players be able to exercise over each other, or over the world, before they can be fairly said to be exercising a democratic government?
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jun 06, 2006 at 16:54
Bart said: "To put it another way, just how much control must players be able to exercise over each other, or over the world, before they can be fairly said to be exercising a democratic government?"
I would say that, to whatever extent you want to define it, democracy would need to be available, in game terms, not as a system of government, but as a feature or a "meta feature."
Guilds, for example, in many games can be, in fact, democratic, but the features that are guild-implemented are not. In WoW (if I remember correctly), anyone at a certain officer-level or above could kick out or promote other guild members. You could democratically determine -- in a systematic way -- whom to keep in and promote, but the feature itself is, essentially, hierarchical, not democratic. A democratic guild promotion system would involve something like one member pushing a button that says, "I nominate so-and-so for promotion," someone else pushing the "I second the nomination" button, and then everyone getting to vote. Democracy as feature.
All kinds of other "options" in a game world could be "democratized," of course. And you could determine, either democratically or not, which features are to be voted on. Wouldn't it be weird, for example, if levelling was based on a peer review of higher-level players. "You're just not ready for Level 60, Junior..."
You can take it to whatever zany degree you'd like. You could have the "philosophers' zone" where all combat is resolved by democratically voted upon debates. No combat! Just beardy chat! The dwarf wins, so the Tauren must lay down and die! If the publishers will support it with tools... the universe can have democratic gravity, language, gold, blood, etc.
But first y'all gotta vote on whether or not that's more fun... Maybe for some kinds of games. But as a GM and long-time RPG player, I gotta say that once you agree on some pretty basic rules, democracy gets trumped by "God," and the GM is God, and good GMs make "fun" the Co-Deity.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Jun 06, 2006 at 17:35
what about this? a game in which the only rules that are said to exist are the ingame physics and the monetary system (make it a real cash economy) then you let the players determine all the other rules (professions and everything else) then watch what happens? I think that players would band together (like guilds) in a coopertative manner. what i am envisioning is something like Eve online and Eutropia but where the players determine the ingame rules of conduct and give them the power to enforce those rules of conduct. what would those rules be would they be the same game wide or only in those areas in which a particular guild (for lack of a better word) control. It would of course have to allow for PKing (you might even be able to work out an inheritance clause in which if you are killed your next character might be able to inherit some or all of your former toons items and gold. you could also let players and guilds stake out productive tacks of land and defend them from other players or guilds. This is just an idea that I am working on but I think that it would be interesting to see how players create their own rules within a VR and how they enfgorce those rules.
Posted by: Todd | Jun 06, 2006 at 17:36
Bart: do virtual worlds have to look like Second Life to have a shot at democracy, or could one of the more tightly constrained game worlds ever hope to be democratically run?
I don't think that players have to be able to create "things" for shared regulation or a form of democracy to take hold. They need to be able to exchange goods and services (which they can already do), and the more they can do toward controlling physical and social entities (land, objects, sub-groups) the more relevant such shared control is likely to be to their experience in the world.
For example, maybe the players can decide on the tax rate for everyone living in the town -- but if they can also redefine the town's boundaries they have a greater degree of control that is otherwise left with the developers. And if you take this further and they can (with tools supplied by the game) decide that they want one person to decide the tax rate (call him the Mayor) or maybe formally give this responsibility to a council of three Wise Women, then the explorable governance space and relevance increases dramatically.
As another example, Meridian 59 has a limited form of consensus democracy in how its guilds are run: at any time each full guild member can put their support behind someone to be the guild leader; whoever gets 51% support gains the leadership abilities (and the former leader loses them). This game has much less in the way of crafting, etc., than do many newer MMOGs, but the ability to have a smooth change in control and leadership based on consensus (without the paralysis of pure democracy) is a powerful part of the game for many players. OTOH it's just one form, the one that we decided to include, and the players' ability to change it is highly constrained by the feature set itself.
Todd said: what about this? a game in which the only rules that are said to exist are the ingame physics and the monetary system (make it a real cash economy) then you let the players determine all the other rules
Without the RPG overtones, what you're describing is a form of Nomic. With the RPG/physical world overlay you're describing a sort of blank slate game (no, not that blank slate game) that might appeal more to students and academics than most game players.
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jun 06, 2006 at 17:47
I am sorry but I forgot to add that enforcement could be anything from a ban on play for a given period of time to a lack of guild protection for a given period of time to even a guild PK execution with denial to inheritance rights for next character. I am sure others could come up with more creative consequences but they could be developed and I think enforced in the right VR environment.
Posted by: Todd | Jun 06, 2006 at 17:54
Well being an Anthro major it does interest me in that way but with say a sci-fi overlay the PRG element could be incorporated but I see it more along the lines of a mix between Eve, Eutropia, and the Sims. pluss the addition of inheritance right upon PK would help too. The thing that grabs me the most as a player would be to create (or be part of the creation) of a guild that establishes a VR country that grows (or shrinks) with the internal politics of the game. This would allow players to construct their own mythology and history within the game and give them a greater stake in the game. Additionally with the addition of a real cash economy (ala Eutropia) it may appeal to that elusive quest on how to RW support yourself with a VW occupation. (or mabey just to the greed in all of us)
Posted by: Todd | Jun 06, 2006 at 18:02
Mike said "Nomic" -- Mike, if I had a duck with glasses, it would drop from the ceiling at this point. I was thinking when I posted originally up yonder that "someone has got to mention Nomic at some point."
Although, truth be told, I've never played Nomic. Is it any fun?
Posted by: greglas | Jun 06, 2006 at 20:04
I think "guild" run servers would be most useful to allow whatever type of alternate rules servers players wanted. You could have Andy's hardcore RP server, a permadeath server, a server that allows player looting, one that allows RMT, one that offers higher customer service, etc. That's how I think this would find more use, rather than guilds forming servers around ideas. You can have a GLBT friendly guild NOW, why pay for your own server?
Posted by: Rendakor | Jun 07, 2006 at 17:19
The Secret Word! :)
I've never played "official" Nomic (I'm not sure anyone has, except maybe Hofstadter). I've played a few variant rule-changing games though, which can be lots of fun with the right group. Many people include copious amounts of beer as a key ingredient, but I think the game probably goes longer when you're sober. :)
Posted by: Mike Sellers | Jun 07, 2006 at 19:38
I've played Once Upon a Time before, which is kind of like a rule-changing game... if a narrative is a rule of some sort (ugh, what a thought -- sorry, I don't want to discuss that, actually!)
Jeesh! I just looked up Peter Suber's page on it, with eight bazillion variants, and I feel like such a Nomic n00b. Peter Suber + Douglas Hofstadter = I must be missing something. I must play Nomic soon but I definitely want the beer-friendly version...
Posted by: greglas | Jun 07, 2006 at 22:34
Stormgaard>Of course you miss the point entirely in your premise that said guilds would be PAYING for their own private servers and all power would come down to WHOEVER PAYS THE BILLS.
That would be the guild. The guild could get its finances in a number of ways, but one way would be to charge its members a membership fee. That way, everyone pays.
>It seems like this is less a "Thought Experiment" than it is some long boring-ass way to explain why Democracy isn't any good.
A guild could be run on democratic grounds. It could be more democratic than what we have in the real world - every non-trivial decision could be made by referendum rather than by the votes of representatives.
I'm not trying to stick the knife into democracy here. I'm trying to address concerns emerging among academics and players (and, since I posted this article, judges) that players don't have any formal say in how virtual worlds are governed and that maybe virtual worlds developers should be forced through legislation to give them that say. This thought experiment suggests a mechanism by which groups of like-minded players could have pretty well all the say in how their virtual world is governed, with the developers leaving them alone to do their own thing.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 08, 2006 at 03:10
Bruce Woodcock>The point isn't so much what the right is, but simply that the right is more defined.
This sounds simple, but it's not. The more that a right is defined, the more that players have something they can game to try to get themselves an in-world advantage. The developer draws a line, the players come up against it, they cross it here and there and get banned, but sometimes they find ways not to cross it but which still ought to get them banned. They're against the spirit of the law, but not against the letter of it. For example, maybe the developer bans RMT and catches someone selling their in-world currency for Linden dollars. Linden dollars aren't "real money" so the player hasn't broken the rules, except they've broken what the rules were trying to say. The developer now has to change the rules to reflect the new situation. This goes on along the whole frontier of the rule set, like a quadtree getting ever more refined. It starts to look a lot like a real-world legal system, with precedents and case law and (ultimately) lawyers. The players wind up with an idea of what they should and shouldn't do, but it's fuzzy. Yes, I know I shouldn't engage in RMT, but will I be banned for gifting virtual goods to complete strangers?
If virtual world developers start saying "these are your rights" then some players will twist every word of them because they're players. They see nothing wrong with progressing their character in-game using their rights as a player to leverage an advantage - it's "just a game" to them.
What we have at the moment is not a set of rights for players, but a EULA that lists some of the things you'll definitely be banned for and some of the things you probably won't be banned for, and some very few actual rights (eg. the right to be able to connect to the virtual world in return for payment to the developer, and the right not to connect by ceasing payment).
I have some experience in this. In MUD1, some players had the attitude that anything the game didn't code out was acceptable behaviour (as otherwise I'd have coded it out, right?). I drew up a list of things they shouldn't do, and straight away these players began pushing at it. It rapidly grew ad hoc in its coverage - detailed in some places, comparatively vague in others where it hadn't yet been tested - and some of the courses threaded through it were alarming. I eventually concluded that the only way to stop players from deliberately trying to bend the rules was not to tell them what the rules were in the first place. In essence, I resorted to the "anything the game doesn't code out is allowed" rule, with the proviso that players should be aware that the game code allowed me to obliterate their character permanently.
>You suggest, for example, that one is subject to sanction for saying arbitrary things on an RP server. Correct. But many RP communities have no rule that states thus, because you can be sanctioned for what you say even if it's WITHIN RP constraints. They can sanction you for pretty much ANY reason.
OK, well I'm open to persuasion: draw me up a "right" that stops people on an RP server from behaving in an RP-unfriendly manner while guaranteeing that those who behave in an RP-friendly manner know exactly where they stand.
>A user wants this so they know the limits of protected behavior; a developer is genereally resistant to this because they want to be able to sanction for reasons they can't well-define.
Yes, that's exactly it.
As you say, though, developers can't well-define their reasons - that's CAN'T. You're saying that you, as a player, want them to do something they can't do. Well if they can't do it, that's that - they can't do it. You, as a player, can know the general boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, but you can never know the actual boundaries because the developers themselves don't know it. All they know is that when you do something they'd rather you hadn't done, they want to be able to throw you out of their virtual world. The result is a form of self-censorship by the players.
>>That may be the only right you have for certain,
>>but ho boy, is it ever a powerful right! It's
>>better than anything you get in the real world.
>Oh, God no. I would disagree 100%. To prove that, just imagine the real world where the only right was the right to move anywhere to someone else's rule.
No, you need to imagine that if you don't like the real world, you can switch to another reality. Maybe you don't like the way this reality has war and pestilence and death and stuff, so you switch to another reality with a deity more in line with your point of view.
In a virtual world, you can do this. You don't like WoW, so play EQ2 or DAOC or GW or CoH or any of the others out there. If you don't like the real world, what can you do? Kill yourself and hope there's an afterlife?
>That wouldn't be all that powerful if everyplace was a dictatorship in which you had no other rights. I think I'd much rather have, say, the US constitution and no freedom to emigrate than the freedom to emigrate and no US constitution.
Well, here in the UK we have no US constitution and we do have the freedom to emigrate, and it's fine by me. [START RANT]Indeed, I don't LIKE the US constitution! It's written down, which means it's fixed at the time of writing. That makes it very inflexible - all that right to arm bears stuff you can't get rid of. To circumvent this inflexibility, there's the Supreme Court, to which people are appointed not on the basis of how they interpret what the written constitution says, but on the basis of how they would interpret it if it said what they wanted it to say. Give me the UK's constitution-by-structure approach any day.[END RANT]
>True enough, but your personal kingdom might not be very fun if it doesn't have the infrastructure of, say, a fully interactive 3D world, a large population engaged in specialization, etc.
On the other hand, it might be a whole heap of fun.
If virtual worlds want to create detailed frameworks that lay down exactly what is and isn't allowed, then I've no objection to that. Heck, if they're successful at it then their model would be taken up with gratitude by the whole industry! What I would object to, though, is the suggestion that virtual worlds MUST have a constitution that enshrines "rights" beyond those of the right of exit. If having a set of rights attracts players, great! It should be up to the developer whether they want to have any particular set of rights, though, not the player.
>I would disagree somewhat here inasmuch those that are have power in communities often do not have deity-level power. A GM may be able to do certain things to a player, but not anything.
Yes, and this is what I was trying to get at with my original proposition. There are deities (developers) and governments. If you conflate deities with governments, you just get deities. Forcing developers to listen to players just makes the players deities instead of the developers - there's still no government. I was trying to envisage a situation where the deity kept a strictly hands-off approach, leaving the players to govern themselves however they saw fit. They don't get to change the physics, but the developer doesn't get to moderate player behaviour. There's a clear line between deity and government. So: how would the players organise themselves?
>to me it doesn't really matter if the ultimate answer is we have no rights, some rights, or all rights. I just want those empowered in virtual communities to advertise and adhere to some set of "rights" they feel are fair and just, rather than playing everything by ear and making decisions on a whim.
I honestly believe that developers with any experience in the industry would like that, too. They were players too, once, and sympathise with them. They'd love to give players a set of rights; the problem they have is in formulating, drafting and protecting these rights in the face of players who will subvert them using any means at their disposal without actually breaking them.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 08, 2006 at 04:14
wow Richard great post. Have you read F.G. Bailey's Strategems and Spoils if you haven't you should. You pretty much have his non-qualitative game theory down.
Todd
Posted by: Todd | Jun 09, 2006 at 00:52
Todd>Have you read F.G. Bailey's Strategems and Spoils
No, but I've now ordered it.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 09, 2006 at 02:48
Richard, freedom of speech doesn't have to be removed merely to prevent ruining somebody's RP game. Civil and political liberties obviously mesh with property rights. If I buy or rent a server to put an RP game on where people talk like Victorians and only put out steampunk objects (like Caledon) I can just post the rules and bounce those that try to plunk down a Goth castle or speak faux hip-hop. There are rules, and if I signed on to them when leasing or buying in that sim, and I break them, I get ejected by that owner. I can go buy my own sim or part-sim and make my Goth or hip-hop world, after all.
Without property rights and private property to shore them up, most human rights do tend to become merely declaritive.
So where is freedom of speech, then? It's in the public commons, which some federal government still maintains in some reasonable way -- welcome areas, information areas, parks, whatever. It's also -- in theory -- in broadcast media, which is (as yet) absent.
So where's *my* freedom of speech if the government says that intolerance of, say, gays or furries, is not allowed? I guess it's on my own sim where I make my rules...except...will there be a certain basic framework of civil rights, such that even on my own sim, I cannot violate the rights of gays or furries?
I think that isn't too much to ask. Nobody needs to inject hate speech and harassment against gays just to play 19th Century Victorian, an era when there might have been less tolerance.
I believe these issues aren't as hard to work out as people imagine.
>Forcing developers to listen to players just makes the players deities instead of the developers - there's still no government.
I heartily agree. All that we get by enabling lots of people to make their own sims is that they arbitrarily eject people they don't like (see my blog for my adventures in that department) and there is no recourse. Philip Linden is for granting them this "civil redress" against griefers...as they define them -- with no ability to question the arbitrary mass banning of wealthy landlords and feted creators. A griefer might be someone who is Goth to my Victorian...or they might be someone who insists it's ok to bash gays, on my sim open to gays. So...where will the Lindens/federal government intervene? We saw what they did in pre-anticipation of these problems with the ban of the WoW group defending GLBT.
>I was trying to envisage a situation where the deity kept a strictly hands-off approach, leaving the players to govern themselves however they saw fit. They don't get to change the physics, but the developer doesn't get to moderate player behaviour. There's a clear line between deity and government. So: how would the players organise themselves?
I think we have an answer to that: Lord of the Flies.
(Or...Lordfly, i.e. whoever hates yard sales because they injure their aesthetics gets to shut down everybody else's yard sales.)
I don't see why players have to be left to bicker and demand entitlements endlessly in the usual socialist committees or grab and resell in the usual capitalist committees for that matter LOL. What's wrong with the federal government/game gods laying down a few basic constructs to at least give some guidance to the world? What would be wrong with keeping and enforcing a basic Community Standards such as most games have anyway?
What should be evolved out of the CS concept, however, is more of a two-way street, where there is a Magna Carta or rule of law over the game gods, so that they have responsibilities as well as rights, too. And then what's even more important than an enforcement mechanism is a disputes resolution mechanism. Game gods shun disputes resolution as drains on staff resources, but they have to squarely face this especially for social worlds where they are giving a lot of freedom to people -- which means freedom of some people to make others miserable, if there is no recourse.
Basically, we saw this type of dynamic unfold just as you suggest with the "Impeach Bush Guy," Lazarus Divine, the guy who put ugly rotating "impeach Bush" signs all over SL on hundreds of sims and then set the land to sale for outrageous prices to force people to buy their view back. It was widely understood not to be about really getting support to impeach Bush -- not a hard job to do in SL where most people are anti-Bush -- but about just using a hard-to-remove sign, playing on the Lindens' liberal sensibilities, and bilking people who wanted to keep their property value.
What the Lindens did was to leave players to themselves. They sat on their hands. So what happened was:
o quite a few people paid the outrageous prices -- this encouraged the Bush Guy to keep going
o many moved to private island rentals where zoning is enforced against ugly spinning signs; a few quit SL
o some gutted it out, like me, but started petition campaigns, demonstrations, ads in classifieds to petition Philip Linden, etc. -- this had only the effect of building solidarity among people to wait it out, and had nil effect on the Lindens.
o the Lindens steadfastly ignored every call to enforce their existing TOS and CS which had plenty of language to discourage spamming, interference of the enjoyment of SL for another person, verbal harassment, etc.. That is, the rule of law, even their own law, simply wouldn't limit their smug game-god behaviour in ignoring thousands of their customers' anguished pleas in favour of an abstract concept called "I get to do the fuck what I want on my own land". That abstraction was celebrated to the point of insanity, so that one person's fuck-you hedonism impacted on hundreds of others, so they didn't get to do what-the-fuck they wanted on *their* land, but either had to leave it, sell it, or eat the tier on it for months until Bush Guy went away.
Moral: no disputes resolution system existed such as to mitigate the damages of one player against another or to mitigate the game gods' negligence. Had dozens -- hundreds -- of regular customers been able to file suit against this one player on torts grounds, due to his actual devaluation of their land in real USD terms, and to object to his threatening extortionist notices, and had there been a real court to function even to deliver judgements with at least some moral suasion to the Lindens, that could have made a powerful statement.
Even 12 customers who handed the Lindens a writ saying they had suffered hundreds of U.S. dollars in losses to their home and businesses might have gotten these smug and arrogant game gods off their high horse to enforce a basic concept of their TOS: that no one can interfere substantially with the enjoyment of SL by another, and this was occurring.
They were allowing this "freedom" possibly in the name of future big business clients that might want to put billboards all over SL. Or in the name of freedom of advertising for everyone -- or even freedom of political speech. These are values we can understand, but then...develop a policy. Billboards only by roads, not in the middle of the water, not rotating and blocking the view, etc.
Eventually, the Bush Guy gave up paying the tier on all that over-priced junk, or finally did commit enough garden-variety TOS violations to get bounced. He is gone from the list. Meanwhile, the Lindens left mainland owners utterly scarred. They know the federal government will not act to protect their property. They have no recourse, other than to get up petitions or mock courts which will be ignored. Instead of *their* worthwhile lawsuit (putatively) being the first media-saturation event, some other dingbat's utterly frivolous lawsuit designed to cover up his own theft using an exploit is what is getting media attention.
The net effect of the entire exercise for these game gods was that they sold more private islands as people fled this kind of extortion, and they sold more fresh mainland sims as people figured they could ban more effectively controlling the whole sim.
They delivered a mortal blow to ordinary people owning less than a sim, trying to share sims, and a blow to the concept of shared harmonious neighbourhoods of strangers willing to be good neighbours, thereby feeding the "likeminded" concept.
Yes, I'm all for figuring out what kind of regulation could be invoked agaginst such careless, negligent, and destructive game gods. I wouldn't like the U.S. Congress to be the thing that regulates them, or even a gaming commission of California. I'd like their own enlightenment to take place such that they create the tools for dispute resolution even against themselves. They can start by making not only platform features but policies the subjects of votes, and creating the option for "no" votes.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 09, 2006 at 10:28
The simple answer isn't good enough. =P
I don't want a minimal set of rights, I want the full portfolio of rights that I've come to expect as an enfranchised citizen of a Western Liberal Democracy. I want the enshrined (in the US) four freedoms (speech, press, assembly, religion -- why I want religion is another question, but why leave it aside?), I want the right to my virtual property, and the right to some form of arbitration in the event of a dispute with another player or especially a game master. I want the right to self determination (I got yer emergent gameplay right here). Et cetera, ad astra, ad infinitum-- or as the kids say, "whatever."
In my mind, a player shouldn't have to wonder what their "rights" are. You should always be in posession of your rights no matter where you go, whether it's a a store, a mall, a themepark or a virtual world. I understand the need for social controls to ameliorate and limit anti-social behavior, but I believe the blanket approach of the elimination of all individual rights while in a virtual world is inelegant, sloppy and ultimately harmful to democracy (in the sense that it prepares individuals to surrender their rights for comparatively trivial gains).
And plus, it doesn't work. People still call stuff "gay" in chat and curse, they still gank, they still ninja loot, etc. etc. And you wind up with an environment where a game master feels empowered to tell individuals they can't self identify as homosexual, becasue it's against the TOS ( I know I harp on the Oz incident a lot, but for me it's an excellent pointer to a whole host of issues surrounding individual rights colliding with virtual worlds).
Posted by: illovich | Jun 09, 2006 at 13:01
> you have the right to stop playing.
That's not a right, it's a kind of coercion all its own, by an all-powerful state that forces me to emigrate to obtain fundamental, universal human rights that it should not trample upon, and make conditions for.
I'm with illovich on this one.
>You should always be in posession of your rights no matter where you go, whether it's a a store, a mall, a themepark or a virtual world
That's why they call them "inalieble" and that's why they call them truths that are "self-evident".
Game gods are turning all this on its head, of course, and saying code is law, and their ownership of servers trump all private property and all rights. That's wrong. Countries don't get along far with that attitude, and virtual worlds shouldn't, either.
This is why we bother with virtual worlds, because this will spread to RL -- and with lightning speed over vast distances.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 09, 2006 at 15:03
We are, I think, once again confusing "rights," "rules," "governmental laws" and "physical laws."
I'll make a big, bold statement here: publishers should definitely NOT give players as many "rights" in a game as governments give to citizens. Why? Because (if we use the Drucker "Balanced Scorecard" model, just for fun), publishers are not governments, or gods, but companies; corporate organizations with fundamental and balanced duties to three groups -- customers, shareholders and employees. When you neglect your duties to one group or another, you will ultimately fail them all.
In a democracy, there is really only one group of people; the citizen-customers. The government is meant to serve them in many different ways, and there are all kinds of funky overlaps and checks and balances, etc. But, in the end, our government is us, and is not supposed to "profit" at our expense. How can it? We are it. We're the employees, the shareholders and the customers.
A corporation is a very, very different animal. It competes, for one thing, with other, similar corporations. It makes many decisions based on the long-term good of the corporation, NOT the "rights" of any particular employee, customer or shareholder. While many government laws and regulations and internal rules may need to be followed, the only overall "rights" in a corporate environment are those set up by the company itself. Those can certainly be defined as democratic to the employees, customers or shareholders, and there are often mechanisms in place to provide for ownership voting, employee referenda, etc. But there are also often many mechanisms in place which specifically guide corporate activities in very undemocratic, "nonhumanistic," and unfriendly (to individuals) ways. Because, in the end, if the customers are happy... but the company dies... the customers will not be happy. If the employees are happy... but the company dies... the employees will not be happy. If the shareholders are happy... but the company dies... the shareholders will be unhappy.
The first rule of the corporation is survival. The second is health. The third is, usually, growth; of profit or size or both. Under the Balanced Scorecard model, "health" is defined in terms of all three groups. So, yes, for games and virtual worlds, customers/players, will be very important. But so will employees. And so will shareholders.
Long term, you can't have a healthy company without profit (for the shareholders), good employees or happy customers. So great companies work on improving all of these in some kind of balanced measure.
So... What is this talk of "rights?" You want rights from a company? You fall into one of those three categories. Unless they're breaking a contract or some other law, that's the way it is. Companies aren't governments, publishers aren't congresses and coders aren't gods. It FEELS like a "world" because it's getting so cool in there. It FEELS like property because we call it intellectual property and we create stuff and have fun and I love it too, don't get me wrong.
But, right now... the way things are... there's a real world. And in that world, Second Life is more like a restaurant or a bowling alley than a "realm" or another country. And the owners will do whatever they think makes the most sense for the long term health of their joint.
Prokofy -- you say that more people bought islands after Bush Man did his ugly dance? Well... that sounds like a good deal for the Lindens, eh? They said, "Let the market work it out. If you kids can't play nicely in the sandbox, here's a way out... bigger, independent, more expensive sand boxes." I'm not saying that answer is fair, right, good, bad, wrong, or anything. I'm not making a judgement, so please don't bite ; ) ... I'm just saying it IS an arguably sane answer. Many restaurants have private dining rooms that cost extra as opposed to the main hall; is that unfair to those who can "only" afford the main hall? If you say, "Yes," Here's a question for you: what about the people who can't eat in the restaurant at all?
If you say that the act of leaving SL, or any game, isn't the "basic right" that sits at the bottom of the "rights" totem pole for every gamer... in my mind you've implied that everyone does, to some degree, have the right to play the game. What about those people who can't afford it at all? Are you willing to subsidize computers and broadband for all the people who want to play SL but can't afford to? What about people who can pay for the basics, but don't have the skills to do what they want in SL? Will you subsidize their training in Photoshop, Poser, scripting and 3D image creation? What about those people who want to do something that requires more in-game land than they can afford? Will you provide subsidies for them? Where will all this come from? Taxes?
All this talk of "rights." In the real world, all of the rights that are provided by our government and society are balanced with various requirements and responsibilities. We can be called into military service in some cases or for jury duty. We pay taxes. We must obey a host of laws. We must grant others all the rights we enjoy (plurality), at least in this country.
What responsibilities are you willing to afford to "the game gods" in return for these rights you demand? Will you give them of your time? Your talents? Your email buddy lists? Will you give them much, much more of your money? Will you obey even more rules, yea unto the cessation of RMT and un-RP chatter on the open channel?
If all you are willing to give is your monthly $9.95 or $14.95, then all you deserve is your game. Period. If you are willing to start talking about being a CITIZEN of a game world -- of entering into the same kind of relationships we have with our actual countries (on some level, anyway), then we can start talking about rights.
Speaking of which... would you renounce any part of your US (or British, Richard) citizenship to be a Linden?
Me? I just want to play some games. Have some fun. I'm interested in the right to kill gnomes. They creep me out.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Jun 09, 2006 at 16:23
I think I wound up in roughly the same place as Andy.
Prokofy and illovich, I'm with you in spirit. People (IMO) have natural rights; those who inhabit virtual worlds are people; people don't stop being people (with rights) just because they're currently interacting with a virtual world.
And yet, having said this... are there reasonable limits to the expression of these rights (whatever they are) that people should be able to accept by freely choosing to interact with a virtual world?
I'm thinking of online games. Specifically, I'm thinking of games that are designed to create shared roleplaying in a non-real-world context.
If I'm playing an online game with a fantasy setting, part of my enjoyment depends on sustaining the illusion of playing a character within that culture. If some guy starts braying "Impeach Bush!" or "Free Mumia!" or the like, he shatters the suspension of disbelief that the developers and players are trying to sustain.
So: As a theoretical matter, does someone's "right to free speech" trump a contract between developers and players for limited speech?
And as a practical matter, who'll pay to play games that rely on creating a non-modern context when anyone can kill that context because a judge agrees that they have a "right" to do so?
Should human rights be expressible only in sandbox worlds like SL and There -- that is, in virtual worlds expressly designed to be social places rather than roleplaying games? Or is it mandatory that rights also be expressible at any time by anyone in any and all venues of human action, regardless of the impact to others?
Or is that a flawed conception of "rights?"
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jun 09, 2006 at 16:29
As in the United States, where limitations of the First Amendment can be placed by local law as to "time, place, and manner," so in virtual worlds, where relevant, "time, place, and manner" can also be invoked to preserve, say, a theme. You don't get to have the Million Man March run up and down Times Square because you have protected speech; you get to have it somewhere else where it doesn't obstruct traffic.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 09, 2006 at 17:06
But that just moves the question: Does Blizzard have to provide me with a soapbox in WoW?
To follow your analogy, they can place the soapbox when and where they want, but if free speech is a "right," expressible in any venue, then don't they (and all operators of virtual worlds) have to offer some soapbox somewhere, sometime?
If they don't have to, then how is that a "right?"
I'm not trying to disagree with you; I'm just wondering where the boundaries are on rights as players vs. roleplaying as characters inside game worlds.
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jun 09, 2006 at 17:31
I believe we have achieved a democratic gov't of 30+ avatars in the secondlife sim of Neualtenburg. We have a constitution founded on the universal declaration of human rights, we have an independent judicial branch and we have a representative legislative branch. For more information: www.neualtenburg.info
The two main theoretical roadblocks to democracy in SL are that an island sim is owned and billed to a single human, and a single human customer can have multiple (alt) avatar accounts.
This can be solved using a system of escrow and a robotic alternate account whose sole function is to act at the behest of the gov't. It should also be fixed by upcoming group owned land tools in newer versions of the SL client.
The second problem issolved if you simply ignore it by understanding that SL is populated by avatars, not people. To that effect one should use Ralph's universal declaration of avatar rights instead of the UDHR.
Posted by: Pelanor Eldrich | Jun 09, 2006 at 18:07
Pelanor, I think you shouldn't misrepresent Neualtenberg as a "democracy". It's really more accurately termed a "social democracy" or some kind of cooperative. You don't recognize capitalist forms of property and profit-making there, and place restrictions on land ownership and business. That is, it's a democracy in that people participate, but it's learning more toward "people's democracy" that a liberal democracy. I also think that the idea that the judiciary is "independent" in your set-up is seriously open to question, given the restrictions on property ownership, and given the over-reaching role of the Scientific Council. This all came out in the recent "coup" or "restoration of Constitutionality," depending on whose side you are rooting for.
The billing or ownership of a sim by one person shouldn't be a threat to democracy. You don't need robots, you need the Lindens to get over their allergy to groups of people using one omnibus avatar, to make some set of rules for corporate/collective accounts and stop this hounding and harassment of people who open up access to their accounts to others. I realize they have to worry about claims against them of theft when someone steals your inventory and cash, etc. But they are too overzealous in policing this, in ways that are absolutely ridiculous given the free accounts now open for registration without even a credit card -- really silly to go on hounding people who want to have group-use avatars.
I have ownership of sims, but I don't view that my very minimal experiment in governance in Ravenglass Rentals is a dictatorship because I have the rule of law in the lease. The lease binds me to terms just as it binds the tenants to terms. I can't summarily evict them on a whim and they can't expect me to hold their land for them forever without payment. These are very narrowly-construed issues for governance -- prims, tier, building codes. But it's a start. If we get that right, perhaps we can go on. I'm for having these kinds of laws that create the rule of law to which people feel subject, so that you don't have one person, on a whim, coming in and deleting all the buildings just because their socialism-on-a-prim experiment went haywire.
Bart, neither Blizzard nor Linden nor any game dev is obliged to provide free speech, because they are construed as private clubs. It's like the Catholic Church or the Harvard Club or the Boy Scout. They can place certain requirements on their members. Their members join voluntarily. They enforce membership by ex-communicating you or expelling you if you do things they don't like, whether getting a divorce or not wearing a tie. The oft-cited Boy Scouts case regarding gays is an example.
On the other hand, to the extent that these games are common carriers, public spaces, open to the public, etc. they do have obligations to create free speech zones and tolerate free speech -- here it's like the case of the guy wearing the anti-Bush t-shirt who was booted from the mall -- that was found to be a violation of free speech because even though the mall is a private company, the space they create with the mall is a public space.
The space where these games should therefore be most free, and subject only to the common application of the First Amendment, is their forums. After all, the forums are outside of the game itself, and speech there doesn't harm role-play or upset anybody's private home. Yet it's on forums that these companies are *least* free.
I think they'd all benefit from having Hyde Parks, too.
Free speech is a right; a private company isn't obliged to provide it always and everywhere for everyone. But free speech is a negative right, in that you are asking the state to refrain from interference, not supply you with pencil and paper or printing press or Internet connection, like a concept of an economic and social right.
Therefore, I think the way to understand this is that while game gods aren't obliged to provide or ensure free speech for their customers, they shouldnt' be in the business of prosecuting them and even expelling them for their practice of free speech.
Therefore, they should free up their forums and stop net-nannying everyone to death on them with ResMods and a million moved or locked threads. They should also provide free speech zones that are like the safe zones you click on or off, both public ones and private ones you can indicate with a parcel flag the way you do safe or unsafe for gun firing, or M or PG.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 09, 2006 at 18:43
Prokofy Neva>Richard, freedom of speech doesn't have to be removed merely to prevent ruining somebody's RP game.
I agree. Just tell me how you can write down a set of "rights" that embody this without ultimately getting back to "look, it's out world and we'll kick you out if you go to far".
>If I buy or rent a server to put an RP game on where people talk like Victorians and only put out steampunk objects (like Caledon) I can just post the rules and bounce those that try to plunk down a Goth castle or speak faux hip-hop.
OK, what would those rules look like? Would they be enough to satisfy Bruce? We already have rules that say people can't do things, but they don't count as "rights".
>So where's *my* freedom of speech if the government says that intolerance of, say, gays or furries, is not allowed? I guess it's on my own sim where I make my rules...except...will there be a certain basic framework of civil rights, such that even on my own sim, I cannot violate the rights of gays or furries?
>I think that isn't too much to ask.
Furries have rights? So if I create a virtual world without furries, you're going to make me add them, in the same way you'd make me add a ramp to my shop to allow disabled people to access it? OK, probably not, but then what rights DO you want, then? State those rights.
As for violating the rights of gays, again, it sounds easy but it's not. Would it be OK to have a virtual world which restricted its members to people who are GLBT? If so, why not one that restricted its members to non-GLBT? Would you allow a virtual world where gays were routinely abused and mocked and beaten and jailed? What if it were to show what life is like in countries where this happens right now, in real life, so as to raise public opposition to them?
Most commercial virtual worlds make gender cosmetic. Male and female avatars are functionally equivalent. What if you want to set a virtual world in the past, where there were big differences? Or in some science fiction future? What about the actual differences between the genders that these games conveniently ignore, eg. women can have babies and men can't? Are we abusing women's rights to have these games? Are we abusing men's rights if we don't?
Draw up a constitution that enshrines those rights you want in virtual worlds. Whatever you decide on, you'll cut out swathes of virtual worlds that would otherwise be perfectly legitimate and harmless, but you've decided have no right to exist.
>I believe these issues aren't as hard to work out as people imagine.
So figure them out and tell us what you want them to be. You'll be feted by the entire industry if you succeed.
>A griefer might be someone who is Goth to my Victorian...or they might be someone who insists it's ok to bash gays, on my sim open to gays.
So you ban them. You can ban them if they say anything you disapprove of if it's your server. If it's not your server, stop playing.
>What's wrong with the federal government/game gods laying down a few basic constructs to at least give some guidance to the world?
They try to do this. However, they don't enshrine any of them as "rights", because then a small percentage of players will game those "rights". If the virtual world says players are allowed to do X, and someone finds a way to do X that is intensely disruptive, then the developers should be able to ask them to stop, and, if they don't, ban them - even though they themselves said X was allowed.
>What would be wrong with keeping and enforcing a basic Community Standards such as most games have anyway?
Nothing at all. What I object to is people from the outside demanding "rights" that may be inappropriate within the context of the virtual world, and people from the inside demanding that every rule be carved in stone.
>What should be evolved out of the CS concept, however, is more of a two-way street, where there is a Magna Carta or rule of law over the game gods, so that they have responsibilities as well as rights, too.
We already have some things like this. If I know you have a heart condition and I deliberately kill your avatar in a stressful situation, using my godly powers, thus causing you to have a heart attack, I'm going to jail for murder. All we're really arguing over is where to draw the lines. I want anything done in the virtual-world context to be real-world legal (given suitable entrance requirements eg. to keep out minors, and warnings if content may offend, eg. it's racistly anti-English).
>Game gods shun disputes resolution as drains on staff resources, but they have to squarely face this especially for social worlds where they are giving a lot of freedom to people -- which means freedom of some people to make others miserable, if there is no recourse.
Dispute resolution is something any sensible developer should have anyway. However, it's not something they should be forced to have. 10 years from now, you may have your own, personal virtual world in the same way you currently have your own web site. Do you want ill-judged laws that force all virtual worlds to have dispute resolutions in place putting a financial burden on you for your 20-room mock-up of your home and childhood haunts?
>o some gutted it out, like me, but started petition campaigns, demonstrations, ads in classifieds to petition Philip Linden, etc.
Just an aside, but isn't SL up to creating invisibility screens? You put up the screen, and it lets through the light for everything behind it except that which is within 20m?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 10, 2006 at 08:07
Illovich>I don't want a minimal set of rights, I want the full portfolio of rights that I've come to expect as an enfranchised citizen of a Western Liberal Democracy.
OK, so where would someone go to play if they didn't want those rights, because they beliueved that by temporarily giving some of them up they gained freedoms they might otherwise not have had?
If people want to set up virtual worlds that impose the US constitution to the letter, that's fine, I'm sure many people who think like you would flock to it. However, games are all about giving up real-world freedoms in order to gain new ones. I could win chess as white just by taking your king with my queen in the first move, however I don't do that because the rules forbid it. I'm willingly giving up my real-world ability to remove your king and put my queen there in order to have a fun game. Some people may wish to give up their real-world rights in order to have an interesting game. After all, the rights are given up willingly and temporarily.
Example: I have the right to a fair trial. I may decide I want to play some kind of cold war spy game in which justice was meted out ruthlessly and arbitrarily. Part of the fun of the game might be knowing that I could lose my entire character, all its contacts, all its work, all its social and in-game capital, instantly and without legal recourse if I made a mistake, or even if I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm giving up a whole bunch of real-world rights here because I view the return I get for giving them up to be greater than the return I'd get for having them.
I'd guess that a good many players would be intensely angry if they were forced to play only games where their full set of constitutional rights were rigorously imposed. Is the home team losing the ball game? All they have to do is take hold of the ball and not give it to the opposing players - after all, it's their ball, and property rights are paramount. Those contracts between teams and the league are worthless if they can be overruled by appeals to the constitution.
>I want the enshrined (in the US) four freedoms (speech, press, assembly, religion -- why I want religion is another question, but why leave it aside?), I want the right to my virtual property, and the right to some form of arbitration in the event of a dispute with another player or especially a game master.
OK, well play games that have those rights. Don't play games that don't. What does it matter to you if other virtual worlds don't allowe those freedoms? No-one is making you play them!
>In my mind, a player shouldn't have to wonder what their "rights" are.
They don't. They know they have one, indisputable right: not to play.
>And plus, it doesn't work. People still call stuff "gay" in chat and curse, they still gank, they still ninja loot, etc. etc.
This is a failure of policing, not of the legal system.
>And you wind up with an environment where a game master feels empowered to tell individuals they can't self identify as homosexual, becasue it's against the TOS
This would make perfect sense in a strong role-playing game. Saying that a character can't self-identify as homosexual is not the same as saying that a player can't. If the context of the virtual world is such that no character can be homosexual (eg. all characters are toddlers, or all characters are robots) then telling someone "you can't be a gay toddler" or "you can't be a gay robot" is fine. Even telling them they can't be gay in real life might conceivably be fine, if this were, say, a virtual world set up by some tiny proportion of people who had some kind of psychological trauma as a result of encounters with predatory homosexuals (possible, as there there are already virtual worlds in existence that are women-only, set up because they were sexually abused by men in real life).
In the real world, you have rights because we all have to live together and get along. In a virtual world, you can still have rights, but you don't have to have the same rights, because you can always simply not play. Play is entirely voluntary. No-one is being exploited; they're there because they want to be there. If they didn't want to be there, why are they there?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 10, 2006 at 08:28
Richard, I'm not liking the sound of this because it seems as if you are impishly saying "play trumps law," that if a player wants to play, there need not be any objective rule of law, it's entirely elastic, and therefore the game gods making the game's code and rules win. This is the Red Queen, saying a thing means something because she says so. This is all very well and good for games...but games spread. They become virtual worlds. They become Serious Games. They become intertwined with RL. We can't have this injustice.
I've already answered your concern about whether this insistence on rights is intrusive or "takes away the right to have no right" in the name of play (sounds like a back-door justification for anarchy and nihilism, but let's take it at face value). You supply a free forums and free public commons (welcome area, safe havens, Hyde Park, customer service inworld areas, whatever). Then whoever buys land or buys a server then has their RP if they wish -- but there is still some kind of clearing-house where rights are upheld. For one, everyone who comes in to do a RP should be aware of the consequences. The creator of "Eve Online" famous said at SOP III, "Fraud is fun" with a twinkle in his eye -- but there should be a way for the newbie who comes in to decide -- do I want to be defrauded even of my RL wealth over this game? Is there a way to play this game where fraud doesn't have to be the way I get my fun?
You shouldn't have to be driven into emigration to get your rights. They should be right there at home.
Free forums are the other place where rights should obtain. They need to be far freer than they are -- games forums are notoriously restrictive and arbitrary.
In a game where people RP having women be slaves and have both men and women treated violently and put in all kinds of situations of humiliation and torture -- and this is all tolerated in the name of play, just as you wish -- no Linden should be getting on the forums and handing me an "informal warning" over an alleged sexist comment because I told someone to eat Easter chocolate since they were cranky and pre-menstrual. Please. You either uniformly suspend rights or you don't uniformly suspend rights, but you don't get to be arbitrary in this fashion, allowing some people inworld outrageous sexism as part of their voluntary RP, and punishing others inworld or on the forums for the same offenses.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 10, 2006 at 16:12
One clarification first.
Richard said: "I want anything done in the virtual-world context to be real-world legal." I assume, Richard, that you meant you want the RL consequences of what happens in a VW context to be real-world legal. 'Cause... er... just about everything my characters do in WoW and SL would get my yass thrown in the brig in a Vulcan second.
I'm not sure I agree with that statement, anyhoo... it will take thinking, and I'm going to do that before replying. You've got the whole, "Shared responsibility of the Magic Circle," thing going on. IE, "Hockey players get hit with sticks but don't sue each other for battery," example we love so much. That's an example of something being legal in a VW that's not in the RL. Or is it, because there's a shared acknowledgement of "rules-trump-law"? If that's the case, then OK. The example in a more virtual/virtual case I'd go for is that of the use of highly explicit language in an "adult's only" section of a VW sim. If I, an adult, am given reasonable assurance by a publisher that an R or NC-17 area is kept off-limits to children, and engage in adult conversation with another player, only to find out much later, after much talk of any kind of grown-up nature, that he/she is 14... I will have probably engaged in some kind of real-world law breaking. This is the opposite of trolling for minors in MySpace, etc; accidentally engaging in inappropriate "adult-to-minor" adult communication. If I believe the publisher has taken adequate precautions, am I liable? Does "rules-as-INDTENDED-trump-law?" That would be the equivalent (I suppose) of a non professional getting out onto the hockey rink in disguise and getting hisself sticked up by unsuspecting players.
So... do rules-trump-law? Do rules-as-intended?
Posted by: Andy Havens | Jun 10, 2006 at 16:30
On to "rights" vs. "laws."
It boils down, as Richard points out again with his examples, and as I'm always harping on about, to a question of goals: what is the goal of the game. The chess example is a good one. If the goal is to learn and improve the tactical prowess of the players, than anything that impedes that is "bad." If, let's say, you had a game where the stated goal was to teach art students how to create better black-and-white, pen-and-ink drawings... the "right" to use any other colors would not be a "right..." it would be (sorry) a "wrong." It would be a breaking of the rules to the determinent of the game as a whole.
And, often times, what seems to be "bad" from the point of view of one player, or even many... is simply the fact that they don't see the whole field. I'm sure that from the point of view of the pawns, chess is an entirely sucky game. The king and queen, though, prolly enjoy it more, eh? Well... should we petition for all the pawns to be changed to kings and queens?
In many, large-scale marketing activities that I've been involved in, you get to see some interesting results played out over long periods of time. And what you find is that there are often "shapes" that are similar to the classic "Bell Curve." Not exactly like it, but similar. For most activities, there are people that, no matter what you do, they will not be "satisfied," or they will not buy, or they will not "do the thing" you want them to do or stop doing the thing you want them to stop, etc. They're down near the origin, the X=0 Y=0 on the graph. Then the graph goes humpin' up, up, up... and you get that big, happy hill in the middle that represents just about everybody underneath it's area. The people who have 2.3 kids. The people who buy a new car every 5ish years. The "average" folks. Then there's the people on the right side of the curve, who will always "do the thing" that you're imagining. The early adopters or the late adopters or the preachers or the bleeding edgers... the opposite of the X=0 Y=0 people. They approach X=infinity Y=0; ie., they wanted to do what you wanted 'em to before you even asked.
Good companies (and game publishers are, I say again, companies) will always ALWAYS try their best to shift the middle of that curve. Why? Because that's where the results lie. The folks on the two ends -- the 10% who "never" and the 10% who "always" -- are almost impossible to shift. They came into the discussion convinced. But the folks in the middle? The guy at 43 on a scale of 1-to-100 can be moved to 53 with a 15% price drop. The gal at 61 can be brought back if she leaves if you just add a new feature. These are people not with agendas, but with requirements.
And remember -- the AREA under the curve is what those people are worth to the company, not the value on the Y axis. So even if you have a couple very vocal folks whose score on the "Y" is off the charts... you can really forget about them.
Why this aside on graphs? What's it got to do with "rights and rules and wrongs?" Because even in the REAL world, where rights determine who gets to use the land, drive cars, own businesses, get married to whom, vote, have abortions, be killed in the electric chair... the discussion of rights only engages the 10-and-10ers. More people voted on "American Idol" than in ANY US election. Ever. More people play state lotteries on a regular basis than are involved in any kind of local activism.
So... in games? Rights? I'm telling you... I, as someone who counts myself among the bearded (literally), long-winded minority... but one who has come up against the reality of the market again and again and again and again... a 10% price premium or marginally better game function will BEAT THE FRACKIN' CRAP out of any kind of "the rights in this game are better" issue.
Unless... the "rights" are built in as a "function" of the game. Part of the fun. If it's some kind of social/economic sim (which is part of the whole SL dealio), then, yeah... rights have a place. But a main place? I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure that if the Lindens gave all the players in SL a vote and said, "We have US $2 million to spend on R&D. We can either spend it on coming up with better modeling of democratic, social institutions... or much, much better simulations of sexual contact."
10-10 vs. 80. My money's on the boom-chicka-boom-boom. And if I was on the board-of-directors of Linden Labs, I wouldn't even allow it to go to the players for a vote.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Jun 10, 2006 at 16:58
Re: Neualtenburg clarifications.
I don't really want to debate or argue of Prok, because I'm somewhat unarmed, but I will make a few points about our republic.
The formal name of the sim is the Democratic Republic of Neualtenburg. We recognize private property ownership in the same way Western liberal democracies do. The land is owned by the individual citizen, but the citizen is not controlling a sovereign nation on his land. The land itself is part of the larger nation. We have zoning, so it is essentially no different than say owning a townhouse in Foster City, California.
While the constitution was written by a faction of social democrats, they are not in power now. Currently we are governed by the DPU (Democratic Pragmatic Union) who a libertarian technocrats, and the MPP (Moderate People's Party) who are centrists. A conservative party is dormant and a Republican party will be formed during the next election. In the meantime the left is reorganizing.
We have no restrictions nor taxes on business. Business *optionally* may either register or incorporate which allows them the legal framework of the nation. Most businesses are traditional retail artisans and are not registed. Registration allows moneylending and other service and contractual transactions which are *absolutely unthinkable* without a legal structure. I actually joined N'Burg to open a private bank and we have a nascent financial district. So capitalism is alive and well.
Here are the facts regarding the so-called coup. Founder #1 acting as chief justice (Dean of the SC) left/abdicated and returned after a lengthy period and destroyed objects. A lengthy hearing determined she should be refused citizenship for a period of 6 months. Compensation claims for her past work were negociated with no settlement reached. At this point founder #2 voluntarily left and founder #1 destroyed more infrastructure and was summarily banned pending full deliberation by the legal system. In no case was there a coup, which implies a head of state or system of gov't is overthrown. This didn't happen, in fact rule of law has prevailed and we have shown that not even the founders who penned the constitution are above the law.
Posted by: Pelanor Eldrich | Jun 10, 2006 at 18:06
>> Some people may wish to give up their real-world rights in order to have an interesting game. After all, the rights are given up willingly and temporarily.
Richard Bartle's comments in this thread are, to my mind, utterly convincing and correct.
Games are different. This difference should not be ignored because it is sometimes blurry.
Different kinds of experiences can make use of persistent, shared, simulated spaces. Corralling these different experiences into a single cultural category called "Virtual Worlds" is a mistake because it over-emphasises a shared formal attribute and under-emphasises more important distinctions of purpose and meaning. This is the same mistake made during the '90s when people thought that "CD-ROM" was a cultural category - that "Bad Day on the Midway" and "The Voyager Guide to Wine" shared some important, essential properties based on their storage media.
Don't let "Virtual World" become the "CD-ROM" of the '00s.
Posted by: Frank Lantz | Jun 10, 2006 at 19:58
Yeah, I'm all for the notion that games and virtual worlds are opt-in spaces where some participants willingly give up some rights in the game context in exchange for entertainment. What I don't like is giving up nearly ALL my rights in doing so, particularly rights that don't seem necessary to give up for the game to work (like the right to have an openly pro-LGBT guild in WoW). Moreover, what I don't like is the rather arbitrary nature of justice within virtual worlds; it would be refreshing, and influence my decision-making on which virtual worlds to frequent, if there were ones that granted certain rights to me within their game and outlined a fair system of enforcing its rules beyond "We will kick you for any reason that suits us."
Posted by: Bruce Woodcock | Jun 10, 2006 at 21:45
Interesting, Bruce. I feel exactly the opposite; I want developers of virtual worlds to have absolute power to decide the rules ("physical" and social) within the worlds they create, including the power to boot anyone who tries to import inappropriate RL stuff into the world.
My enjoyment of a gameworld/storyworld is absolutely dependent on the developer being able to create a shared fiction. But that's not possible if developers may be forced to permit within the fictional world the expression of some RL rights. That is guaranteed to destroy the fiction in many worlds.
As a RL player I have RL rights which I negotiate with the RL developer.
As a character in a fictional-setting virtual world, I have whatever rights are appropriately expressible in that world, possibly meaning none at all.
Where's the harm here?
When I agree to a world-creator's request that my character in that shared fiction will not express some of of my real (player) rights, I give up absolutely none of the rights I enjoy as a real person. So why must I be "protected" (by forcing all developers to permit the expression of some RL rights in all virtual worlds) if I suffer no RL damages?
As consumers we should be free to shop around for the world(s) we like. You're free to find a world in which RL rights are expressible, and I should be similarly free to find a world in which players agree not to express those rights as characters. If no such world exists, I can do without or create my own (subject to law that says some worlds are not acceptable).
Requiring virtual world developers to allow characters to express RL rights would be to impose content on an artist -- essentially no different from telling a novelist (who creates a shared fiction) what must be included in every novel.
That's not really where we want to go, is it?
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jun 11, 2006 at 02:48
>Richard, I'm not liking the sound of this because it seems as if you are impishly saying "play trumps law," that if a player wants to play, there need not be any objective rule of law, it's entirely elastic, and therefore the game gods making the game's code and rules win.
Pretty well, yes. If there is no harmful impact on wider society of people consensually playing a game with their own rules, then what business does wider society have trying to regulate games?
>This is the Red Queen, saying a thing means something because she says so.
Isn't this same justification used for the validity of the US constitution?
The difference is, in the US constitution the government has the ability to send in the army to enforce its views. Ultimately, they can use force to make the constitution stick.
Games, on the other hand, have no such sanction. People obey the rules because they want to - because they feel that by obeying the rules, they're getting a worthwhile experience. There's no force involved, it's consensual.
Which is the purer? The set of rules people obey because there's "legitimate force" waiting in the background to make sure they do? Or the set of rules people obey because they want to obey them?
>This is all very well and good for games...but games spread. They become virtual worlds. They become Serious Games. They become intertwined with RL. We can't have this injustice.
We do in sports. I don't like being hit, and if anyone hits me then I want to take them to court. If I sign up to a boxing match, I do so in th eknowledge I'm going to get hit. Apply your logic, and that's immaterial: I can still take my opponent to court for hitting me. Of course, in RL this isn't the case - boxing is an example of an area protected from the general right to personal safety. If we can go that far for boxing, why can't we go less far for other games?
>The creator of "Eve Online" famous said at SOP III, "Fraud is fun" with a twinkle in his eye -- but there should be a way for the newbie who comes in to decide -- do I want to be defrauded even of my RL wealth over this game? Is there a way to play this game where fraud doesn't have to be the way I get my fun?
What there should be is a description of the virtual world that you get to read before playing which makes clear the kind of thing that might go on in the game (not necessarily all of it, because "finding out" could be part of the game). Then, would-be players would be able to make an informed decision as to whether they play or not. Having made that decision, if they play and are defrauded, why should they be able to cry foul? That's like crying because you lost money at poker: yes, it's upsetting, but you knew before you played it could happen. So long as it happened within the context of the game rules, tough luck.
>You shouldn't have to be driven into emigration to get your rights. They should be right there at home.
You emigrated from the real world to a place without the rights. If you want to have the rights, you should have emigrated to somewhere that had them, not somewhere that didn't.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 11, 2006 at 05:58
Andy Havens>I assume, Richard, that you meant you want the RL consequences of what happens in a VW context to be real-world legal.
What I meant was that if I as a player (not character) do something in a virtual world to adversely affect another person in the real world, then they should have some redress. If they waived their right ro redress when they signed up to the game, whether or not that sticks depends on the real world. I'd argue that some few of these should not stick (Russian Roulette should still probably be illegal even if everyone signed waivers) but others should stick (you lost money playing poker). The question is where to draw the line, and the answer is to do with the effect on wider society.
>If I, an adult, am given reasonable assurance by a publisher that an R or NC-17 area is kept off-limits to children, and engage in adult conversation with another player, only to find out much later, after much talk of any kind of grown-up nature, that he/she is 14... I will have probably engaged in some kind of real-world law breaking.
Yes, albeit not knowingly. Similarly, if unbeknown to you your sword has been hooked up virtually to a real-life torture device, and every time you hit someone with it a torture victim gets a jolt of electricity, you'd be guilty of torture ... except you wouldn't know anything about it. I'd hope in such cases that he law would pursue someone else, rather than you...
>So... do rules-trump-law? Do rules-as-intended?
Ah, the magic circle versus the golden rule!
I'd go with rules trump law, except where in so trumping they break the golden rule (don't do to anyone else what you wouldn't want done to yourself). If the secondary effects of the virtual world are so severe as to affect society in general, society in general should have a say as to whether it wants to sanction the rules or not. Given what society already sanctions in the sports and gambling arenas, virtual worlds should have nothing to fear. However, although law-makers understand sports and gambling, they don't yet understand virtual worlds, so we may get some repressive laws coming in if they figure they're vote-winners...
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 11, 2006 at 06:15
Bruce Woodcock>Yeah, I'm all for the notion that games and virtual worlds are opt-in spaces where some participants willingly give up some rights in the game context in exchange for entertainment. What I don't like is giving up nearly ALL my rights in doing so
OK, well I'm sorry to repeat myself here, but if you don't want that DON'T PLAY THE GAME.
>particularly rights that don't seem necessary to give up for the game to work (like the right to have an openly pro-LGBT guild in WoW).
What about the right to have an openly anti-GLBT guild? What about "dating" guilds that are for same-sex hetrosexuals who hook up with other same-but-opposite-sex hetrosexual dating guilds for fun and frolicks?
The fiction is that guilds are associations of characters, not of players. If characters can have a sexuality, then guilds that select based on character sexuality make sense. If they select on real-world criteria, whether that be gender, race, language, age, support for Manchester United or whatever, that doesn't make sense in the virtual world context and the developers can feel free to sanction those guilds. Whether they do or not is mainly a marketing decision: do they want to alienate all their GLBT players or do they want to alienate all their rabidly anti-GLBT players? And, having set the precedent, what happens when the next guild comes along that is closer to being morally ambiguous?
>Moreover, what I don't like is the rather arbitrary nature of justice within virtual worlds
Me neither. Then again, if it gets intolerable I can always just STOP PLAYING.
>it would be refreshing, and influence my decision-making on which virtual worlds to frequent, if there were ones that granted certain rights to me within their game and outlined a fair system of enforcing its rules beyond "We will kick you for any reason that suits us."
I agree that sensible virtual world developers ought to make themselves more attractive by explaining such things. Where I object is that I don't believe they should be FORCED to do so. Also, the sad fact is that unless you want to saddle every virtual world with a set of laws the size of a real-world country's, it's always going to come down to "oh, and by the way, we can still kick you for any reason that suits us".
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 11, 2006 at 06:28
Oh, I never meant to suggest they should be FORCED to do anything. Certainly not by legislation. Maybe by pressure from players.
FYI, I support the right for anti-LGBT groups to exist, too. :)
Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Woodcock | Jun 11, 2006 at 19:57
There's this old philosophical quandry. Well, it's a "saw," actually. A sophomoric, theological doodad: "If God is almighty, can he create a boulder so huge that he cannot lift it?" It is, of course, a semantic paradox, not a real one. What we're asking ourselves is, "Does our definition or understand of God allow Him/Her/It to contradict Him/Her/Itself?"
Well, if game publishers are the "Gods" of their games, let me ask this... can the publishers create rocks that are so big that even they cannot lift them; ie, can they create rules that they even they cannot (or should not) be bound by?
I will go back to my old (above) definition of "they aint' countries, they're companies." I will say that the publishers can change the definition of "rock," "lift" and "big" as often as makes sense for their corporate goals, one of which should be to please their player base.
As far as "voting" goes, in the marketplace, we vote with our dollars and our feet. Everytime you take your biz to Wendy's instead of McD's, you're voting. And lots more effectively than you do through a representative bureau-democracy in many cases. So let's not imagine that capitalism isn't demorcratic, just because it's not about raising hands or casting ballots. It's a very, very dumb CEO that doesn't listen to the votes of the cash register.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Jun 11, 2006 at 21:11
Most of these discussions assume a democracy is just something you arbitrarily declare, and that if it fails, it is the fault of democracy itself, not the hollowness of your declaration.
For a democratic society to function and sustain itself and thrive, it needs an infrastructure. It needs mechanisms and affordances and an entire governmental, technical and cultural construct.
Of course, if you take a server for a game that is entirely constructed and constricted around complete developer dictatorship (not to mention gameplay rewarding violent conflict resolution), where even the limited player aggregations accomodated (guilds) are themselves optimized for nondemocratic structure, and say, "here, make a democracy", it will fail.
That's not democracy, that is anarchy. Democracy is not absence of rules and structure, it is a different set of them.
Developers spend enormous efforts creating mod tools that allow tweaking of bitmaps and physics and levels and weapons -- but where are the mod tools for constructive social organization?
If developers devoted the same energy and thought into empowering player self-governance as they do into combat and particle effects, if developers provided robust tools for sustaining democratic society--then, perhaps, players would make the same choice they would freely make in their "real" lives - choose to be free and self-governing. And, they might have fun doing it.
If the common argument is that games give us the power to do things we are powerless to do in "real life", then is it possible that, for some players at least, the power to influence society might be a fun fantasy?
Time and time again, leading developers argue that the only stable society is one where the developers outgun /outpolice the players. That is not a sustainable position (let's not get into the moral argument for a moment, it's simply impractical). Even the most ardent hawk would agree that, eventually, it would be cheaper and better for Iraqis to govern themselves than for the US military to continue to police them forever.
Why, then, do we insist that a police-state approach to MMO service is superior to developing a stable self-governing player-society? There is no rational argument to support that position--certainly not an economic business argument. Police state MMO management is fucking expensive. Exhausting, discouraging, and extremely resource intensive.
On the contrary, as I have argued for years, democracy is less expensive, in every sense of the word, as a mechanism for sustaining very-large-scale virtual world games.
In a healthy, colllaborative, sustainable player society with strong constructive cultural norms (i.e. the basic needs for any functioning civilization), there will be lower customer service costs, less churn, less security expenses, less headaches. Players handle more things themselves.
Pertubations in the system will tend to be dampened naturally by cultural-norm-motivated activists.
More developer resources will be devoted to enhancing the player's experiences, rather than battling against them -- and more of the responsibilities developers must now assume will be assumed by motivated players -- particularly the 10% or so who get off on playing politics. Why not empower them?
Democracy, properly supported, is simply more cost-effective than authoritarianism in MMOs--and, in particular, it scales better.
It also happens to fit in with the general value system of free societies. Perhaps one of the lessons players might learn in our games is that they can make a difference and influence society, and perhaps they might learn a little bit of the mechanics of how to act as citizens, rather than just learning that all problems can be resolved at the edge of a sword, and that every win has to be accompanied by someone else's loss, and that individual accumulation of lucre is more important than contribution to society--but I know, discussion of values other than stock values turns developers skin purple, so let's just call all that a nice side-effect. And, it might generate some good PR for an industry that could use it. But, most of all, democracy's just cheaper. Not necessarily easier to design, quite an interesting challenge, in fact, but ultimately cost-effective.
Posted by: galiel | Jun 12, 2006 at 00:28
Bruce Woodcock>Oh, I never meant to suggest they should be FORCED to do anything. Certainly not by legislation. Maybe by pressure from players.
It sounds as if we're basically in agreement, then. If sufficient numbers of players want a certain set of rights, then developers will create virtual worlds in which they grant those players such rights. Virtual worlds which don't offer those rights will then suffer, because the one right they do offer (that of exit) will be exercised.
Personally, I think that even with the best of intentions, developers who grant their players the full gamut of rights will find themselves unable to run their virtual world. That's another story, though!
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 12, 2006 at 10:26
Andy, Ouspensky put the God/boulder concept like this: "Even the Lord God of hosts can't trump the Ace of Spades". Or as I would put it, He can't beat a royal flush on the boards in Texas Hold 'Em. That is...He could, of course, but then there would no longer be a game of bridge or poker anymore. In order for the game to preserve its essence, the rules can't be broken even by the Creator. Rules are rules. Are we saying that the essence of a created thing actually successfulyl challenges the Creator? Perhaps. That's why Dostoyevsky wrote, "Without God, anything is possible". Or, as I would translate it, "Without God, anything goes."
Everything depends on your belief system. If you believe there is something Higher, then other things fall into place. If you don't believe there is, then you put yourself higher or some other temporal thing. But then why should I be imprisoned by your temporal thing?
>If there is no harmful impact on wider society of people consensually playing a game with their own rules, then what business does wider society have trying to regulate games?
Who will make that determination? Just the people playing the game? What if they are wrong? What if their game destroys all their RL marriages, makes them neglect their children, and makes them enslaved to tyrants? Are we never to care?
>Isn't this same justification used for the validity of the US constitution?
This is why these conversations are sometimes better to have over coffee or beer than on the blog. I can't know whether you're making a question like this out of Ludic (Ludite?) anarchy or whimsy, or out of cultural determination ensuing from your citizenship in a country that has no written Constitution as such (though it has Constitutionality), or whether it's some animus to the US over some current bad action by the current US administration -- who knows? But I would certainly make a distinction between the Red Queen "meaning a thing because I say so" and the US Constitution. The Red Queen's "say so" is just hers, and is as arbitrary as the day is long. The U.S. Constitution has centuries of use, a Supreme Court to interpret it, and so on. There is a consensus and a social contract built up around it in ways that Alice could never make a social contract with the Red Queen. Who would want to, given how contrary and arbitary she is? There can't be a Constitution unless first you have a consensus -- and you had that, whatever your lack of faith in that consensus.
The difference is, in the US constitution the government has the ability to send in the army to enforce its views.
Well, wait a second, let's not be silly. To take what you're saying literally, no, the US Constitution can't be enforced overseas, and the army is sent places to wage war or protect interests or protect civilians or whatever, but the army as such isn't sent to "enforce views" inside the country. The National Guard or the police or the FBI would be sent in. And...is every instance of such sending-in a bad thing? Wouldn't you rather have the National Guard enforcing the right of African American children to go to school with whites than not? Wouldn't you want the National Guard or the police to stop looters during hurricanes?
And...are these views so onerous, so contrary that the "army" or the police have to be sent in to enforce them always and everywhere? Of course not. Again, there is a social contract, a voluntary consensus, and frankly, one that hundreds of millions of people came to join over the centuries and came...from your shores among others.
Right...don't like a game. Leave it. Go to another game. And so they did. Now...who is sending in armies and enforcing views???
>Ultimately, they can use force to make the constitution stick.
Sure, but I'm suggesting that isn't the center of gravity of our Constitution or anybody's for that matter. If only force made it stick, you'd get the Soviet Union or North Korea, and that's not Constitutionality, but simply tyrany.
There's a lot more complexity to the enforcement of law and the rule of law than what you suggest. Sure, law is law because it has force to back it up. If theft is made a crime, it's the state's force in the form of a policeman arresting you that makes the law stick. But there's also a good deal of social contract surrounding that implication of force, and a good deal more voluntary consent that you seem to imply by invoking what surely seems to you the ugly side of American force in situations you hate about America, no doubt, like Iraq.
>Games, on the other hand, have no such sanction. People obey the rules because they want to - because they feel that by obeying the rules, they're getting a worthwhile experience.
I think that's actually what most of the game of America's about, and what's driven most of the people who came to join the game of America, too.
>There's no force involved, it's consensual.
And that's my point, too. Your implication that hundreds of millions of people over the centuries have been held in thrall by force is an absurdity. Look closer to home for some better examples of such force and its implications, please.
>Which is the purer? The set of rules people obey because there's "legitimate force" waiting in the background to make sure they do? Or the set of rules people obey because they want to obey them?
Why so black and white? Both are true. People obey laws because they see the value in it, the good of it, and they wish to be good neighbours and to participate in the social contract. There are rewards to working and earning money and paying for groceries instead of stealing them, and they aren't just staying out of jail.
>Of course, in RL this isn't the case - boxing is an example of an area protected from the general right to personal safety. If we can go that far for boxing, why can't we go less far for other games?
This has been occasionally tried in the European Court of Human Rights. Someone will get up a case in which they attempt to show that consensual BDSM, bondage and violence between consenting adults, should be permitted by law and not be sanctioned. And they fail in this effort periodically because courts of law will not entertain a case involving the state's sanction of deliberate infliction of bodily harm. That would render the laws about such injury null and void. And if boxing went so far as to deal a death blow, the boxer would face charges at least for negligent manslaughter or some such charge, and couldn't just invoke "boxing".
>So long as it happened within the context of the game rules, tough luck.
OK, fair enough, good enough for games but -- not good enough for more complex open-ended social worlds.
>You emigrated from the real world to a place without the rights. If you want to have the rights, you should have emigrated to somewhere that had them, not somewhere that didn't.
No, I didn't emigrate from squat. I'm sitting right here in the real world still requiring shelter from the elements, food, light, trips to the bathroom, and all the rest. You can't upload yourself to virtuality yet! No, the entity I call myself has different aspects or parts or faculties, and some element here perhaps emigrated, but I think it would be more accurate to say that the avatar is *born*. He is born in a game or a virtual world. His rights should accrue to him instantly at birth, as his citizenship accrues to him at birth in the real world. He shouldn't have to go fleeing *the place of his birth* in search of rights.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 12, 2006 at 21:00
Are there any MMO's out there that are run by players in a democractic fashion? I would think that a MMO would be the perfect place to game an Athenian style particpartory democracy.
My interest in this topic lies around the future of MMOs, if an MMO community faced closure by the publishing company, what possible models could they choose for governance if the players attempted to run the game themselves?
Perhaps players could pool resources and buy the right to host and run the game after the publisher deems it no longer worth their while. How would the game thereafter be administered? It seems to me that there are plenty of real world community/social/commercial models that could be applied to such a situation. Whether this be a co-operative, a player association, or even some sort of elected trust?
Posted by: Juan Incognito | Jun 13, 2006 at 00:17
Prokofy Neva>The Red Queen's "say so" is just hers, and is as arbitrary as the day is long. The U.S. Constitution has centuries of use, a Supreme Court to interpret it, and so on.
Nevertheless, it asserts that its truths are self-evident, which is pretty well the basis of the Red Queen's claim to authority. All you're saying is that the US Constitution has more support; if the Red Queen was wise, benign and more able to adapt to changing cultural norms than a written constitution, she might be the better choice.
As for "interpreting" the Constitution - ha! If it were all about interpreting, you'd ask your Supreme Court nominees "do you believe that the Constitution supports the right of women to have abortion?", not "do you support the right of women to have abortions?".
Plenty of people regard the Old Testament as a written constitution for Christianity, but it's so patently out of its time that now it has to be understood in terms of metaphor, rather than literal fact. Even among the most strident fundamentalists, few people would suggest that because the Bible says they can have slaves, that means they should be allowed to have them. The Supreme Court seems to have this function for the US Constitution, "we know what the Constitution says, we know what it should say, and it's our job to find ways to transform the former into the latter".
>no, the US Constitution can't be enforced overseas, and the army is sent places to wage war or protect interests or protect civilians or whatever, but the army as such isn't sent to "enforce views" inside the country.
It was when the South tried to secede, wasn't it?
>Wouldn't you rather have the National Guard enforcing the right of African American children to go to school with whites than not?
Yes, I would. The point I was making is that the constitution, right or wrong, is backed up by the legitimate use of force. If I get a parking ticket and refuse to pay, I'll be summoned to appear before a court. If I refuse, a police officer will be sent to arrest me. If I beat off the police office, more police officers will be sent. If I rally my friends and we beat off those officers, armed units will be sent in. If I've organised resistance because I and thousands like me dislike the unfair penalties of the parcking ticket system, we'll beat off the armed units. If people hear about my campaign and it turns into a general uprising against a corrupt government only in power because of a crooked electoral system, and National Guard units switch sides and join me, then the government will have to send the army in if they want to get their parking ticket money out of me.
Ultimately, the ability of any government to uphold their system of law is dependent on their ability to use force to get wrongdoers and potential wrongdoers to fall into line. I'm not against this - far from it - but the point I'm making is that constitutions get to be upheld because there's force to back them up.
>there is a social contract, a voluntary consensus, and frankly, one that hundreds of millions of people came to join over the centuries and came...from your shores among others.
I know. The point I'm making is that games have the same consensual element to them, and some of them have been played by more people than have ever lived under the US constitution. The difference is that if someone breaks the rule of law, they're going to have to deal with law enforcement agencies; if they break the rules of a game, then there's no pysical force that can be used against them. Once the consensuality collapses, the game collapses.
>Right...don't like a game. Leave it. Go to another game. And so they did. Now...who is sending in armies and enforcing views???
If you don't want to play the game, don't play it. If you want to play the game but other people are spoiling it, then either you stop playing at all or you stop playing with those other people. If you've a way of physically excluding them from the game, great, take your ball home with you. You don't get to leap on them and lock them in a shed until your game is over, though.
>If only force made it stick, you'd get the Soviet Union or North Korea, and that's not Constitutionality, but simply tyrany.
It's not only force, but without force it wouldn't stick. Games, on the other hand, stick without force.
>There's a lot more complexity to the enforcement of law and the rule of law than what you suggest.
Well yes, this is just a blog, not an LLD thesis.
>and a good deal more voluntary consent that you seem to imply by invoking what surely seems to you the ugly side of American force in situations you hate about America, no doubt, like Iraq.
You're putting words in my mouth now. I'm not anti-America, and I wasn't talking at all about ill-advised overseas adventures (we have much more experience of those in Britain, thank you very much). I was talking generally about the way that any government, no matter how great and glorious, nevertheless needs to have force as its last-ditch weapon against those who would disturb the consensus that gives it its legitimacy. Games, on the other hand, have no such last-ditch defence. If people join in a game and then refuse to play by the rules, there's no way to make them play by the rules "or else" because it's "or else what?". Or else we throw you out of the game (never give you the ball) or we stop playing (my deal? I don't think I'll bother).
In virtual worlds, barring someone from entering is akin to not giving them the ball. It's not akin to giving them the ball but promising violence if they don't use it properly.
>And that's my point, too. Your implication that hundreds of millions of people over the centuries have been held in thrall by force is an absurdity.
Worldwise, hundreds of millions doubtless have. However, perhaps a thousand times that number haven't. Force is only there to use against people who don't share the consensus; if sufficient numbers don't share it, there's a revolution and the victors either install a new consensus or affirm the existing one. This use of force is only wrong when the purported consensus is no such thing.
>And they fail in this effort periodically because courts of law will not entertain a case involving the state's sanction of deliberate infliction of bodily harm.
They do sanction them, it depends on the individual country's laws. In the UK, we had a famous case in the 1990s where a group of about 11 men who had been getting together every few years for about 20 years for fun weekends of hammering nails through their penises etc. were arrested as a result of a police investigation into a burglary or something. The police didn't want to arrest them, but had to; the judge didn't want to punish them, but had to; they appealed to higher courts, and eventually (I believe) one of them quashed the verdict. New laws were drafted as a result.
>And if boxing went so far as to deal a death blow, the boxer would face charges at least for negligent manslaughter or some such charge, and couldn't just invoke "boxing".
No, they could if it was within the rules of boxing.
I read in the paper this morning that 200 Russians were arrested for a violent brawl over the weekend. It turned out to be a rugby match (plus spectators), so they were released without charge.
>OK, fair enough, good enough for games but -- not good enough for more complex open-ended social worlds.
Why not? What makes them special?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 13, 2006 at 04:35
Juan Incognito>Perhaps players could pool resources and buy the right to host and run the game after the publisher deems it no longer worth their while. How would the game thereafter be administered?
This sort of happened with Meridian 59. The answer is, it's administered by those players who bought the rights.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 13, 2006 at 04:42
I guess I must be pretty dumb, but I don't see how this is different from Diku, LPMud etc.
What Richard is saying about having no rights isn't true as consumers are protected by law in most civilized countries... Thus in my country you would be protected by what is common practice in the field of electronic entertainment. If a producer wants to deviate from this practice he has to state so up front before the purchase is made, AFAIK.
(And yes, you would go to jail of you hit the shit out of someone in the boxing ring in my country. I can't recall any exceptions to personal safety of others in our laws and if there was it would be explicitly stated in federal law...)
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Jun 13, 2006 at 08:31
Ola Fosheim Grøstad>What Richard is saying about having no rights isn't true as consumers are protected by law in most civilized countries...
The clash comes where consumers consent not to have some of these laws apply to them (eg. by signing a EULA). Some people decide they didn't want to consent to to having some of those laws apply to them after all, hence the resort to "rights" (these being things you can't sign away even if you want to, eg. you can't sign yourself into slavery).
>you would go to jail of you hit the shit out of someone in the boxing ring in my country.
You would in mine if it was against the rules of boxing, eg. your opponent was on the floor at the time. You could conceivably be punished even if it was within the laws, eg. if you saw blood coming out of your opponent's eye sockets and hit your opponent anyway, even though you knew the referee would stop the fight half a second later. You wouldn't, however, be punished for delivering a blow that you couldn't have known had a high chance of being fatal.
Don't Greg and Dan cite the case of some 1920s baseball player who deliberately threw a "beanie" ball at another player during a match, hoping to hit him on the temple and kill him, and succeeded in doing just that? He got away with it because it was part of the game.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 13, 2006 at 13:22
Richard> The Supreme Court seems to have this function for the US Constitution, "we know what the Constitution says, we know what it should say, and it's our job to find ways to transform the former into the latter".
This actually isn't settled. There's been a reasonably healthy debate here on this subject for at least a generation, possibly two.
There certainly are some who prefer that the U.S. Constitution be regarded as a "living document" from which rights and restrictions (but mostly rights) can be inferred. And yes, there have been times when the Supreme Court held more justices who felt this way than otherwise. (I would also claim that most journalists prefer this approach and give it both more and more favorable coverage than alternative models, creating a false picture of the debate as settled.)
But there are also serious Constitutional scholars and jurists who favor a "strict construction" of the Constitution -- it says what it says; if you think something else has become worth saying, you follow the process provided for amending the Constitution legislatively. That's not an easy process, but it's not meant to be easy.
So the U.S. Senate (following its constitutional obligation to "advise and consent" on Supreme Court nominations) most certainly does ask nominees whether they think the Constitution does or does not permit or require this or that perceived right. And they ask because they want to know where the nominee stands on "living document" versus "strict construction," because that's going to determine whether the rights and restrictions desired by the people can be interpreted into existence by the Court, or whether they must be legislated into existence through the U.S. Congress and the states.
I'm curious to hear whether anyone thinks there is or ought to be some parallel between either of these two RL approaches to changing the social controls on a society, and the absolute power of developers to make such changes in virtual worlds.
Ola> What Richard is saying about having no rights isn't true as consumers are protected by law in most civilized countries...
The consumer may be protected in dealing with the developer, but when I'm character inside a created fictional world, "I" am no longer a consumer. (Unless that's the role created for me, as in The Sims.)
As a character, I have only whatever rights inhere to me through that world's physics... and that's exactly as it must be if I-the-player am to have any chance of experiencing the fiction created for me-the-character by the developers. That argument is weaker for social worlds, where the distinction between player and avatar is much more blurred.
But even social worlds are only inhabited through a consumer's choice. When I have the complete freedom as a consumer to choose whether or not to play a type of character provided for me in a particular world, where is the damage to me-the-player that merits legal redress?
Doesn't this question of whether social worlds must enforce some RL "rights" really boil down to the legal question of implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose? If a developer doesn't permit some RL rights, are they violating a warranty of fitness generally expected by consumers?
--Bart
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Jun 13, 2006 at 13:23
Prokofy said: "I think it would be more accurate to say that the avatar is *born*. He is born in a game or a virtual world. His rights should accrue to him instantly at birth, as his citizenship accrues to him at birth in the real world. He shouldn't have to go fleeing *the place of his birth* in search of rights."
Holy crap.
I can't even begin to describe how much I disagree with the fundamental natures of this statement; the philosophical underpinnings, the ways in which it might be handled from a legal perspective, what it means in terms of gameplay, and how it sounds just to say it out loud. I'm just... er... well, it sounds vaguely 19th century and hyperbolic, but "flabbergasted" comes to mind.
Let me get this straight. A software construct of some sort, which is partially controlled by me, and partly by sofware residing on my computer, and partly by software residing on a remote computer, should be considered to have been "born," to be a citizen of... something... and to have rights. Legal rights. I can't type fast enough to pound out the questions that arrise from this statement in my mind...
Do I get to choose which of these "rights" I might want my avatar to have? Do any of them accrue regardless of my knowledge of them? Or do I need to take a course in avatar civics before creating my avatar? Do any of them trump any rights of any truly living creatures, human or otherwise? Are these rights universal to the real world, or just to the virtual world (in which case, they're not "rights," but just more "rules," in which case, I don't care and this discussion is over)? Can these rights be passed from one avatar to another? Can they be transferred from the virtual world to the real world? Must individual real world countries have individual "treaties" with each virtual world? Can I, a real human being with long established rights of a wide variety, trample the rights of my own avatar, but not another person's? All of them? Some of them? Can I have more then one avatar with the same set of rights, or do all my avatars share "one set" of rights?
It boggles the mind.
Maybe I need help visualizing the concept.
Players have rights. All kinds of rights. All of the ones existing for people in the countries they live in. Those rights extend to the playing of games. As Richard keeps saying, and as I keep agreeing, one of those rights is the right to not play any particular game.
It seems as if, Prokofy, you want a "right" for your character/avatar beyond what is included in your rights as a player/citizen. If you've been cheated or defrauded -- as a player -- there is redress. If you (player) have been a victim of harassment, your rights have been violated. That could have happened through the visage of your avatar, yes. But not TO your avatar. Your avatar can't be harassed. Because it is not male, female, black, white, old, young, etc. It's not a person. You can't harass a thing. But you can use it to harass a person. I can use a phone, a brick, a board, a piece of paper or a crayon to harass someone. Or an avatar. But I can't sue someone for harassing my phone. I can sue them for destroying it, though. And you could sue someone for destroying your avatar, if that happened, and you could prove damages, etc. etc.
But the THING ITSELF has no rights, beyond it's value TO YOU as your property. It is a thing. To start ascribing rights to a software construct as if it were anything at all like a person crosses a very, very dangerous line. If you want to assign specific rights to specific acts and actions within a game -- as Second Life has done by allowing players to retain certain copyrights -- that's great. That is, in essence, saying, "Here's another rule. It gives you, the player, a different, more specific right that in other games." Which is wonderful. If you, as a player, want to ask for even more rights, and ones that relate specifically to how your avatar functions... rock on.
But even talking about ascribing them to the avatar itself... very, very scary. How about this for a situation:
You spend a couple years developing DJing in SL, using a very specific avatar. You build up a great rep, and work in a couple very specific clubs that pay you good dough for your work. There's no contract, but it's clear that folks come to the clubs to hear you spin, not for the club atmo. Now... you decide to open your own club and leave off DJing for other folks. When one of your old clubs hears about this, they offer you a really sweet sum of money to sell them your avie, and to keep mum; one of the club regulars (whom you respect) has said she'll do the gig. It's a free avie, so all she needs is the name/password to do the deal, and you get a tidy sum. You want to do this...
But the "Bill of Rights of Avatars" states that an avatar must not be sold. That it belongs only to one player, and that it violates the rights of avatars and players to transfer the name/password and any "fundamental character and characteristics of an avatar, developed by a particular player to another player." Whoops.
Also: "rights" imply that something/someone has choices, free will, etc. Avatars do not. My avatar is an extension of me. A tool. A toy. If I break the law with it, I should pay the price, not it. Because... how would I care if my avie spent time in SL jail?
If I'm not getting it... please help me understand what you mean by avatar rights beyond either "rules of the game, enforced by the publisher" or "laws of the land, as applied to the game players, as enforced by the government."
Posted by: Andy Havens | Jun 13, 2006 at 17:14
Hmm, curious that it's supposed to be a discussion about games, but it degenerates to a claim of European exceptionalism, eh?
>Nevertheless, it asserts that its truths are self-evident, which is pretty well the basis of the Red Queen's claim to authority. All you're saying is that the US Constitution has more support; if the Red Queen was wise, benign and more able to adapt to changing cultural norms than a written constitution, she might be the better choice.
I don't see that as the "exceptionalist sin" that youi seem to think it is. Self-evident is self-evident, and to more than one person, to more than even several hundred, but pretty evident to a pretty big bunch of people. "All men are created equal." If you don't believe anything about their equality at all, you'd have to concede that all men die. So they are all equal in that sense, and that is a self-evident truth.
"endowed by their Creator with certain inalieable rights" -- well, most people even in other lands with other constitutions don't have an issue with this, either. Nowhere near the nihilism you assert prevails. As Kofi Annan put it very succinctly, even an uneducated mother in Africa knows when her son is tortured -- she knows that torture is wrong, she knows that it is a right, not to be tortured. To the degree we can criticize Bush, America, the war in Iraq, it's because of this very evident and very clear truth: no one should be tortured.
>As for "interpreting" the Constitution - ha! If it were all about interpreting, you'd ask your Supreme Court nominees "do you believe that the Constitution supports the right of women to have abortion?", not "do you support the right of women to have abortions?".
I think it's important to point out, Richard, that the right to abortion is still intact, whatever this or that nominee says. They're only nominees. Roe v. Wade stands. The U.S. Supreme Court decisions are the law of the land. Undoing them would take quite some effort. Nominees, or even this or that justice, is not in a position to overthrow something like this.
>Plenty of people regard the Old Testament as a written constitution for Christianity, but it's so patently out of its time that now it has to be understood in terms of metaphor, rather than literal fact. Even among the most strident fundamentalists, few people would suggest that because the Bible says they can have slaves, that means they should be allowed to have them. The Supreme Court seems to have this function for the US Constitution, "we know what the Constitution says, we know what it should say, and it's our job to find ways to transform the former into the latter".
That sounds pretty silly to me. A lot of civil rights law stands, and continues to be interpreted today. To the extend that the human rights community can mount a critique of Bush on the war against terrorism and its excessives and assault of rights, it's by affirming this body of decision.
>no, the US Constitution can't be enforced overseas, and the army is sent places to wage war or protect interests or protect civilians or whatever, but the army as such isn't sent to "enforce views" inside the country.
>It was when the South tried to secede, wasn't it?
Um, was the South overseas, Richard? I guess I'm a product of American geography lessons, and missed that one.
>Prokofy Neva: Wouldn't you rather have the National Guard enforcing the right of African American children to go to school with whites than not?
>Richard Bartle: Yes, I would. The point I was making is that the constitution, right or wrong, is backed up by the legitimate use of force. If I get a parking ticket and refuse to pay, I'll be summoned to appear before a court. If I refuse, a police officer will be sent to arrest me. If I beat off the police office, more police officers will be sent. If I rally my friends and we beat off those officers, armed units will be sent in. If I've organised resistance because I and thousands like me dislike the unfair penalties of the parcking ticket system, we'll beat off the armed units. If people hear about my campaign and it turns into a general uprising against a corrupt government only in power because of a crooked electoral system, and National Guard units switch sides and join me, then the government will have to send the army in if they want to get their parking ticket money out of me.
Force has to be legitimate, and held up itself by consent, and a social contract. Absent that consent, which is prior to force and provides civilian oversigh of that force, force cannot last. It cannot stand. It doesn't stand. Look at all the countries around the world that tried to run military dictatorships and ultimately failed.
It's precisely because in places like Ukraine or Chile, the police sent in switched sides, it's precidely at that moment that the state's force can no longer be deployed, that soldiers or police see their mothers, wives, children, neighbours in the crowds, that demonstrators see their brothers, fathers, neighbours in the police, that the revolution succeeds. Force alone does not sustain law.
>Ultimately, the ability of any government to uphold their system of law is dependent on their ability to use force to get wrongdoers and potential wrongdoers to fall into line. I'm not against this - far from it - but the point I'm making is that constitutions get to be upheld because there's force to back them up.
No, ultimately, a government can prevail with the use of force if it has consent of the governed.
>I know. The point I'm making is that games have the same consensual element to them, and some of them have been played by more people than have ever lived under the US constitution. The difference is that if someone breaks the rule of law, they're going to have to deal with law enforcement agencies; if they break the rules of a game, then there's no pysical force that can be used against them. Once the consensuality collapses, the game collapses.
Actually, I think it's a pretty nasty use of force to ban me from even physically reading "General" on the forums, or posting to any threads except "land for sale" and a few other classifieds on the forums. These game gods use force. They ban, eject, kick, restrain, boot, seize. They are as bad as any authoritarian state.
>If you don't want to play the game, don't play it. If you want to play the game but other people are spoiling it, then either you stop playing at all or you stop playing with those other people. If you've a way of physically excluding them from the game, great, take your ball home with you. You don't get to leap on them and lock them in a shed until your game is over, though.
I'm still having trouble understanding why I can't have a gay guild in WoW, or that I couldn't have an out-of-character conversation in WoW and make a friend or even find a romantic partner or start a business or do some other thing outside of the actual rules of gameplay and the killing of all those dumb monsters -- why can't I? Who says? And why can't the law uphold me?
>It's not only force, but without force it wouldn't stick. Games, on the other hand, stick without force.
If you're going to say that games stick without force, then you have to concede that countries and constitutions stick without force, too. Because many countries of the world, including their own, generally prevail through the consent of the governed, and the invisible complex relationships of the social contract, that precede the use of force, and condition the use of force.
>Well yes, this is just a blog, not an LLD thesis.
I think there are various legal scholars who are on this blog, though, and they or any of us could attempt to rise to the occasion.
>Prokofy Neva: and a good deal more voluntary consent that you seem to imply by invoking what surely seems to you the ugly side of American force in situations you hate about America, no doubt, like Iraq.
>Richard Bartle: You're putting words in my mouth now. I'm not anti-America, and I wasn't talking at all about ill-advised overseas adventures (we have much more experience of those in Britain, thank you very much). I was talking generally about the way that any government, no matter how great and glorious, nevertheless needs to have force as its last-ditch weapon against those who would disturb the consensus that gives it its legitimacy. Games, on the other hand, have no such last-ditch defence. If people join in a game and then refuse to play by the rules, there's no way to make them play by the rules "or else" because it's "or else what?". Or else we throw you out of the game (never give you the ball) or we stop playing (my deal? I don't think I'll bother).
I dunno, you were batting at the U.S. Constitution pretty quick, and then implying there are all these Christian nutters who use the Old Testament as their law, illogically (obviously they use inches instead of cubits as a measurement system, for example).
But throwing them out of the game *is* force. and it's arbitrary, unjust force. You keep taking this discussion into the vein of literally picturing how somebody ruins the rules of a role-playing-game with being out-of-theme or out-of-character, bringing their hocket stick to the basketball game and waving it around. But those literalist examples aren't really what we want when we want rights for avatars, democracy for worlds, and good governance and accountable governance from game gods. We want fair play. Remember fair play? This concept is so little discussed, really, in the world of cheats, hacks, exploits. You aren't raising your sceptre against all those ill creatures, you're batting at the U.S. Constitution.
But I do want to have a working concept here that could apply flexibly enough to game worlds as well as social worlds or open-ended virtual worlds (that's how I could define them -- closed and open, because one has no custom content and depends on a rigid story and set of rules and the other has custom content and no story or rules but what you make).
And I think that the concepts of due process and dispute adjudication is what's missing most. No fair trial. Utter arbitrariness about who gets booted. So basic concepts like "a jury of one's peers," the right to discovery, to gather evidence in one's defense, the right to interview witnesses, the right to plea one's case, etc.
>In virtual worlds, barring someone from entering is akin to not giving them the ball. It's not akin to giving them the ball but promising violence if they don't use it properly.
Well, here we disagree. The ball is just the ball. All games have balls, just like all countries have air. That's just part of their feature set. Booting some is indeed the equivalent of violence -- indeed, it's the death penalty of the most draconian type. Gah, these game gods, really, they need to be fought hard.
>Prokofy Neva: And that's my point, too. Your implication that hundreds of millions of people over the centuries have been held in thrall by force is an absurdity.
>Worldwise, hundreds of millions doubtless have.
I realize that if you have an interlocutor who has it in his head that the greatest evil of all times is America and its docket of deaths at home and worldwide, and can't see reason that it is regimes like the Soviet Union or China that have far, far, FAR more deaths at home and abroad, then it's a hopeless argument. If you are trying to credit hundreds of millions "being in thrall" due to America's behaviour in the world, this isn't a reasonable discussion. It's not true, on the face of it, and only a hugely hobbled and sectarian worldview could generate such a notion. Since I don't believe you have such a worldview, then I don't know what you mean by this statement.
>However, perhaps a thousand times that number haven't. Force is only there to use against people who don't share the consensus; if sufficient numbers don't share it, there's a revolution and the victors either install a new consensus or affirm the existing one. This use of force is only wrong when the purported consensus is no such thing.
Look over the world, look over the use of force, the times it is used, the deaths that ensue, and then get back to me with a verdict. Are we going to match King Leopold and George Bush up against Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot? Honestly, this discussion becomes ridiculous.
>They do sanction them, it depends on the individual country's laws. In the UK, we had a famous case in the 1990s where a group of about 11 men who had been getting together every few years for about 20 years for fun weekends of hammering nails through their penises etc. were arrested as a result of a police investigation into a burglary or something. The police didn't want to arrest them, but had to; the judge didn't want to punish them, but had to; they appealed to higher courts, and eventually (I believe) one of them quashed the verdict. New laws were drafted as a result.
If I'm not mistaken, this is precisely the case (or principle of law) that was then overturned by the ECHR, however. I'd love to see chapter and verse of this. I don't believe it to be the case.
>And if boxing went so far as to deal a death blow, the boxer would face charges at least for negligent manslaughter or some such charge, and couldn't just invoke "boxing".
>No, they could if it was within the rules of boxing.
Huh? Could you cite a case of a boxing death where the boxer as absolved? Or rules of a "death match" of this type that actually prevail?
>I read in the paper this morning that 200 Russians were arrested for a violent brawl over the weekend. It turned out to be a rugby match (plus spectators), so they were released without charge.
Well, that's Russia. They should have been arrested and charged and prosecuted. But it's Russia, where there isn't the rule of law, but the kind of arbitrariness I'm discussing. The Russians have a saying, "The law is a bridle, you can turn it every which way." Vyshinsky infamously said, "Give me a man, I'll find an article in the criminal code to try him." And so on. Just because somebody isn't properly prosecuted in Russia for soccer violence doesn't mean it's right. They should be, and they are in other countries -- and frankly even in Russia at times.
>PN: OK, fair enough, good enough for games but -- not good enough for more complex open-ended social worlds.
>RB: Why not? What makes them special?
A game is a limited, rote routine. Whether pinball or PacMan or Project Entropia, it's a set of routines. Open-ended social worlds are more spontaneous, organic, unpredictable, and not as filled with so many set routines.
Of course, we have all been remarking lately at how rigidly put into a lock-step we are in SL by these game patches. We don't get to decide, do we want or need flexible tails such as to suffer the 12 other things that break down while they are put in? so sure, just by virtue of the fact that they are coded means that social worlds are restricted, too. But we try to overcome them. And we do!
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 13, 2006 at 17:59
>Prokofy said: "I think it would be more accurate to say that the avatar is *born*. He is born in a game or a virtual world. His rights should accrue to him instantly at birth, as his citizenship accrues to him at birth in the real world. He shouldn't have to go fleeing *the place of his birth* in search of rights."
>Holy crap.
>I can't even begin to describe how much I disagree with the fundamental natures of this statement; the philosophical underpinnings, the ways in which it might be handled from a legal perspective, what it means in terms of gameplay, and how it sounds just to say it out loud. I'm just... er... well, it sounds vaguely 19th century and hyperbolic, but "flabbergasted" comes to mind.
Well, Andy, yes, boggle away and disagree away, it doesn't make you "right". Virtual worlds create new opportunities and freedoms and problems -- and especially for you programmers, and especially for the literal tekkie mind that can't accept that yes, an avatar is born. Like a real person is born into a world, like a character is born into a novel. A virtual world is like the real world in some ways, and like a novel in some ways. You're like a printer staring at a sheet of paper and a roll of ink and a set of typeface and yammering about how typeface has no personality and ink has no rights and paper is just paper, and WTF. But a novel has characters, real people read about them, spend time with them, interact with them in a sense, are influenced by them, have their own real characters shaped by them -- the play between real life and imagination that takes place in a work of fiction is something we can all understand, and all we have to do to understand the power and effect of a virtual world is to accept that yes, the same kind of interplay is taking place between real and imagined, only more so -- and the pulp factory and printer have only a limited role to play in a novel, so the coders and designers have a limited role to play in a virtual world. The problem we have now is one of outrageous hubris -- pulp-manufacturers and printers are imagining that they can have a say about the fiction, the characters, their interplay, when they need to know their place. They are the technical means and the technicians. They aren't the essence of the world. So yes, Andy, avatars are born and have certain inaliable rights.
>Let me get this straight. A software construct of some sort, which is partially controlled by me, and partly by sofware residing on my computer, and partly by software residing on a remote computer, should be considered to have been "born," to be a citizen of... something... and to have rights. Legal rights. I can't type fast enough to pound out the questions that arrise from this statement in my mind...
Well, read a novel. That might help. OK, start with a comic book.
>Do I get to choose which of these "rights" I might want my avatar to have? '
Yes, and that's why we're all here, having this discussion, sure.
>Do any of them accrue regardless of my knowledge of them? Or do I need to take a course in avatar civics before creating my avatar?
Inaliable means inaliable. Inherent. Can't be taken away. Of course, they're taken away all the time. So it's an exploratory mission here -- we're trying to determine what we really can pare down as inaliable, and what could be fairly taken away in some circumstances.
No, no civics needed, any more than a 2 day old baby needs a course in civics in order to enjoy the state's protection of his right to life.
>Do any of them trump any rights of any truly living creatures, human or otherwise?
Apparently avatars can persist after a person dies, so their property rights might indeed want to be protected and their property be able to be assigned to heirs, so that the game companies can't invoke this concept of not being able to transfer accounts.
>Are these rights universal to the real world, or just to the virtual world (in which case, they're not "rights," but just more "rules," in which case, I don't care and this discussion is over)?
What would convince you that rules became rights? When avatars are everywhere? They will be. Then will you concede this?
>Can these rights be passed from one avatar to another? Can they be transferred from the virtual world to the real world?
I should think so! I don't want to have to lose all my skills and property and loot and stuff. I want a say in how it survives me.
>Must individual real world countries have individual "treaties" with each virtual world?
Now that seems excessive, no? First there has to be a broader discussion of who or what rules the Internet and the servers. Then we can get down to talking turkey about who can rule the countries on them.
>Can I, a real human being with long established rights of a wide variety, trample the rights of my own avatar, but not another person's? All of them? Some of them? Can I have more then one avatar with the same set of rights, or do all my avatars share "one set" of rights?
Well, how can they if they are in different games? I'm sure ultimately we'll see a Unified Code of Avatar Rights, however.
>It boggles the mind.
Yes, it once boggled the mind that gays could have rights to hold jobs and not be discriminated against, that blacks could live in the same apartment building as rights, and that women could file suit against a spouse for domestic abuse -- and yet here we all are, all these rights that didn't exist 25 years ago, let alone 2500 years ago, are enshrined in the more progressive countries' legislatures, and becoming a norm. So it's the same kind of trajectory.
>Maybe I need help visualizing the concept.
>Players have rights. All kinds of rights. All of the ones existing for people in the countries they live in. Those rights extend to the playing of games. As Richard keeps saying, and as I keep agreeing, one of those rights is the right to not play any particular game.
>It seems as if, Prokofy, you want a "right" for your character/avatar beyond what is included in your rights as a player/citizen. If you've been cheated or defrauded -- as a player -- there is redress. If you (player) have been a victim of harassment, your rights have been violated. That could have happened through the visage of your avatar, yes. But not TO your avatar. Your avatar can't be harassed. Because it is not male, female, black, white, old, young, etc. It's not a person. You can't harass a thing. But you can use it to harass a person. I can use a phone, a brick, a board, a piece of paper or a crayon to harass someone. Or an avatar. But I can't sue someone for harassing my phone. I can sue them for destroying it, though. And you could sue someone for destroying your avatar, if that happened, and you could prove damages, etc. etc.
But my avatar has been harassed. He's routinely harassed for being a different gender than my RL self. He's had all kinds of nasty signs put on his lawn, nasty comments made, RL pictures disseminated and ridiculed. So yes, I want rights and respect for my avatar, I sure do.
>But the THING ITSELF has no rights, beyond it's value TO YOU as your property. It is a thing. To start ascribing rights to a software construct as if it were anything at all like a person crosses a very, very dangerous line. If you want to assign specific rights to specific acts and actions within a game -- as Second Life has done by allowing players to retain certain copyrights -- that's great. That is, in essence, saying, "Here's another rule. It gives you, the player, a different, more specific right that in other games." Which is wonderful. If you, as a player, want to ask for even more rights, and ones that relate specifically to how your avatar functions... rock on.
>But even talking about ascribing them to the avatar itself... very, very scary.
Why? My avatar isn't a thing, he isn't chattle, and he isn't just a closet or a hammer. He's a part of a human self. He should have rights! He has them! They need merely to be discovered, affirmed, protected!
>How about this for a situation:
>You spend a couple years developing DJing in SL, using a very specific avatar. You build up a great rep, and work in a couple very specific clubs that pay you good dough for your work. There's no contract, but it's clear that folks come to the clubs to hear you spin, not for the club atmo. Now... you decide to open your own club and leave off DJing for other folks. When one of your old clubs hears about this, they offer you a really sweet sum of money to sell them your avie, and to keep mum; one of the club regulars (whom you respect) has said she'll do the gig. It's a free avie, so all she needs is the name/password to do the deal, and you get a tidy sum. You want to do this...
>But the "Bill of Rights of Avatars" states that an avatar must not be sold. That it belongs only to one player, and that it violates the rights of avatars and players to transfer the name/password and any "fundamental character and characteristics of an avatar, developed by a particular player to another player." Whoops.
Well, you're just thinking like a game god there, dude. It's game companies that think up this dumb rule that you can't sell accounts or even hand over accounts for free, they don't want the liability.
It so happens that the avatar, that part of myself that I can dress, skill up, give property to, etc. etc. is something like a pet. I can sell him. I have sold him. It's sad, but there it is. Someone else will take this avatar, part body, part soul, and put a new soul in him of sorts, still making use of those parts of my soul that clung to him, i.e. my DJing skills if you want to use that example or my set of platters to spin.
So? Why shouldn't such an entity have rights? Of course it should have rights!
>Also: "rights" imply that something/someone has choices, free will, etc. Avatars do not. My avatar is an extension of me. A tool. A toy. If I break the law with it, I should pay the price, not it. Because... how would I care if my avie spent time in SL jail?
An avatar is an ensouled body. His identity depends on me, but he is not exclusively only me -- that self that is the avatar exists with my agency but is something amalgated of my agency, my imagination, and the skill of other avatars (in making clothes, vehicles, etc.). I think the avatar in fact is a new kind of being.He has no agency without me. But another's agency could be applied to him. And my agency applied to him is of a different order -- a higher order -- than what I have available to me as the set of results I can achieve with my agency in RL.
Quick example: flying.
>If I'm not getting it... please help me understand what you mean by avatar rights beyond either "rules of the game, enforced by the publisher" or "laws of the land, as applied to the game players, as enforced by the government."
We could try to cast it all in terms of everyday people's rights, insisting that the boundless Internet isn't a place where we have to shed our right to freedom of speech or right to be free of cruel and inhumane punishment. But I think it is worthwhile to follow in the footsteps of Raph Koster's Avatar's Bill of Rights which casts the avatar as the possessor of rights. I do believe the avatar is a new kind of creature, yes.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 13, 2006 at 18:19
Prokofy: Just to be clear -- I never said that avatars, virtual worlds, creativity, the harassment of players through their avatars, etc. weren't important. I wouldn't spend all the time here (and elsewhere) on these topics if I didn't believe there were very important. I find virtual worlds fascinating, fun, worthwhile, etc. Both the more "game" related ones, and the more "free form" ones such as SL.
Firstly, I'm not a programmer, but I am a writer (as well as a yammerer). Though I've never written a comic book. And I don't think your analogy of printers, ink, paper, etc. is particularly apt, especially since we have the "technicians" of the printing press era and those who came afterward (Aldus Manutius, for one) to thank for the fact that most of the Western World got a chance to read the Bible, and eventually lots of other stuff. Without the technology, you don't get to experience the medium. You also are also confusing/grouping the "creatives" and the "technicians" together to a great degree, and thus doing both groups a disservice. While SL does allow much of the end-user creativity to be manufactured by the players, there is still a whole lot of "creation" going on at the design and interface level, and for that you have to be very grateful for the work that the folks at Linden Labs do. To imply otherwise shows disserve and disrespect. What, I ask, is *wrong* with "the technicians?" Without them, there is no space to play in? Without the printers, the inkmakers, the paper manufacturers, the ragmen, the lead-press, the rollers, the cutters, the die-makers, etc.... there is no Shakespeare, there is no King James Bible, there is no Oxford Dictionary. There is no Renaissance. Without the techies, there is no Internet. I am a Priest of the Cult of the User, too. I a marketer who believes that, above all else, you must listen to your customers. But you should not ever forget that somebody must bake the bread, too.
Now... as to avatars having rights. If what you say is true, I have a very simple question for you. Explain to me how my avatar is any different than my car. How my car is not an "ensouled vehicle." I can take a standard piece of Detroit, American-made heavy-metal and spend as much time personalizing it as anybody has ever spent on his/her avatar. I can name it. I can love it. I can make love in it, either alone or with friends. I can go to drive-in movies in it, eat in it, sleep in it, and, if it's a station wagon, play Risk in the way-back. My car can do things that no human being can; it can go 120mph in the straight-away. I can change it. I can accessorize it. I can share it or not. I can make it clear that it's mine, or I can loan it out. I can use it to make money.
For the last 100 years, America (and much of the world) has had a love affair with cars that has driven (by some estimates) 30-50% of our economy depending on the decade. They are an incredibly important part of our lives; we go to wars over the oil we need to fuel them. Driving them is, for many people, the right-of-passage into adulthood. They are, for most of us, the 2nd most expensive item on the budget after housing.
Yet nobody has ever seriously suggested that cars have rights. Why? Because cars don't look like people. They generally don't have faces, aren't cute and cuddly, walk about, talk, dress, cuddle, dance, etc.
You are anthropomorphizing very complicated game tokens. If you create fantastic avatars, those are YOUR accomplishments. All of them. If you play them well, those are YOUR deeds and actions. If you give them great looks, costumes, animations... those are the results of YOUR skills. If you spend time and/or money making them beautiful, that is a reflection of YOUR talent and investment. If you create a fantastic "residence" for them, that is the result of YOUR 3D rendering prowess. If you develop multitudes of in-game relationships through the auspices of those avatars, that is due to YOUR social skills. Nothing that is done is done without the investment of a human author, period. It's either you, another player from whom you have bought/borrowed/stolen/been gifted content, or the authors of the game itself.
And if avatars are like characters in a book, well... those don't have rights. They are owned by their creators. When they killed off Colonel Blake on M.A.S.H., thousands of viewers called and wrote in to the show's producers to complain. Would you argue that the character had a "right" to live beyond what the writers decided? That the viewers should get to vote? Heck, if you want to do a fan-fic site where Col. Blake's plane actually crashes on Easter Island and he lives... knock yourself out. But is that a "right" of the character? No... that's your right as a writer, as long as you don't infringe on that of the show's owners.
And and...
Have you read Ralph's "Avatar's Bill of Rights?" I don't believe that Ralph is talking about rights for the actual "code" of the avatar per se, but the person behind the code. If you go to:
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/playerrights.shtml
And start with the URL itself, and then go to this phrase in the document:
"That avatars are the manifestation of actual people in an online medium..."
And then read the whole shebangabang, you'll get a sense that what he's talking about is players' rights, as expressed in virtual settings. Not the rights of avatars-sans-players. He ends with:
"So in the end, all the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars is, is a useful tool for players and admins alike... I'm not seriously proposing that we declare the rights of avatars...It's a hypothetical exercise.... For now."
That "for now..." sure is creepy and all foreshadowing and all that, yeah... but until you can prove that an avatar has an independent soul, brain, worth, etc. that even borders on what people -- or even animals -- have... nope. No rights for avatars.
So insult away and hyperbolize away and anthropomorphize away... it doesn't make you right.
And, guess what? This is one case where we can disagree -- and I enjoy our disagreements, because they are interesting. But there's no way that, short of an avatar developing Azimovian I-Robot style intelligence, any court will ever grant "rights" to a non-human "actor." And, you know what else? If your avatar ever did get those rights... you wouldn't be able to "play" it any more, or probably not the way you'd really like to, because it's pursuit of happiness just might not line up with yours. What are you gonna do when you want to go dancing at the Angry Ant, and your avatar says... "No." ?
Posted by: Andy Havens | Jun 13, 2006 at 22:30
Good God, Prok, the word is "inalienable," not "inalieble" or "inaliable."
Posted by: Webster | Jun 14, 2006 at 02:04
Prokofy Neva>Hmm, curious that it's supposed to be a discussion about games, but it degenerates to a claim of European exceptionalism, eh?
I think maybe you're reading venom in my replies where at most there was mischievousness.
>"All men are created equal." If you don't believe anything about their equality at all, you'd have to concede that all men die. So they are all equal in that sense, and that is a self-evident truth.
I might argue with the word "created"...
>As Kofi Annan put it very succinctly, even an uneducated mother in Africa knows when her son is tortured
Are we torturing anyone with our virtual worlds?
Give me a right you want players in virtual worlds to have that an uneducated mother in Africa would recognise as a right.
>>>no, the US Constitution can't be enforced overseas, and the army is sent places to wage war or protect interests or protect civilians or whatever, but the army as such isn't sent to "enforce views" inside the country.
>>It was when the South tried to secede, wasn't it?
>Um, was the South overseas, Richard?
I am aware that the South isn't overseas. The army was sent to wage war "inside the country" (ie. inside the USA). That's precisely why I chose that example.
>Force has to be legitimate, and held up itself by consent, and a social contract.
Yes, I agree. My point, as I keep saying, is that nevertheless games have a social contract which holds without force. Although you could argue that you were obeying an unjust law because you'd get arrested if you didn't, you can't argue that you were obeying an unjust game rule that reason.
>Look at all the countries around the world that tried to run military dictatorships and ultimately failed.
Many of them failed only when the dictators died.
>Force alone does not sustain law.
No, but without force there's no law. Without force, there are games. That's all I was saying here.
>Actually, I think it's a pretty nasty use of force to ban me from even physically reading "General" on the forums
I wouldn't classify that as within the magic circle. If they stop you reading a forum, that's a real-world thing happening because of real-world laws.
>These game gods use force. They ban, eject, kick, restrain, boot, seize. They are as bad as any authoritarian state.
They're as bad as any deity that actually does anything?
>I'm still having trouble understanding why I can't have a gay guild in WoW
Is this a guild of gay characters or of gay people? The answer is probably the same in either case (ie. you can), but the rationale is different.
>why can't I?
In the general case, because it's against the rules.
>Who says?
The people who made the rules.
>And why can't the law uphold me?
Because you agreed to play by the rules, and can stop playing at any moment.
>If you're going to say that games stick without force, then you have to concede that countries and constitutions stick without force, too.
No I'm not. If there were no police forces or armed forces of any kind under the control of the country's government, then that country and its constitution would not stick.
>I think there are various legal scholars who are on this blog, though, and they or any of us could attempt to rise to the occasion.
Yes, but they probably realise we're waaay off topic here, and are advisedly staying away.
>I dunno, you were batting at the U.S. Constitution pretty quick
Because it was being used to bat me!
>and then implying there are all these Christian nutters who use the Old Testament as their law
All I implied was that there were some people who believe in the literal truth of the Old Testament. Are you saying there are no such people? Two seconds in Google found me this.
>But throwing them out of the game *is* force.
No it's not. They locked the door, they didn't pick you up by your collar and hurl you into the night.
>and it's arbitrary, unjust force.
[Temporarily accepting your argument that access rules are game rules]
Look, if you don't like the game's rules, don't play the game. If you do like the game's rules, well, those rules say you shouldn't play, so you don't play the game. Either way, you end up not playing.Or are you asking for the right to be readmitted to it so you can exercise your right to quit? A "you can't fire me, I resign!" approach?
[/Temporarily accepting your argument that access rules are game rules]
>But those literalist examples aren't really what we want when we want rights for avatars
You want rights for Avatars?! What next, rights for photographs or melons?
>democracy for worlds, and good governance and accountable governance from game gods.
OK, well in the case don't play anywhere you don't get those rights. Or, alterantively, go back to the beginning of this thread and discuss the possibility that if players could band together and have their own server, the gods could pretty well stay out of it and the players could implement democracy, good governance and accountability themselves.
>We want fair play. Remember fair play?
It's what I've been blathering on about the whole time!
>And I think that the concepts of due process and dispute adjudication is what's missing most. No fair trial. Utter arbitrariness about who gets booted.
Again, if there's any demand whatsoever for virtual worlds that follow your precepts, whoever grasps the nettle and implements one will be looking at a fortune in profits as people flock to it (assuming they figure out a way of having it not subvert the gameplay). Now the question is, would that make you happy? Would you be pleased that you could play in a democratic virtual world, and anyone who foolishly wants to play in an undemocratic one deserves all they get? Or do you want to impose your views of how virtual worlds should be run on all the virtual worlds run along the lines of fascist dictatorships? Even though some people prefer them that way?
I personally feel that virtual worlds could do more in their customer service, allowing appeals for bannings and listening to evidence, although I'm acutely aware that these will be gamed by some players and used as a weapon by others. It's also prohibatively expensive and time-consuming: Blizzard recently zapped another 30K or so accounts for RMT cheating, which, if everyone had a right to a fair trial from a jury of their peers, would take years to clear up.
>I realize that if you have an interlocutor who has it in his head that the greatest evil of all times is America and its docket of deaths at home and worldwide, and can't see reason that it is regimes like the Soviet Union or China that have far, far, FAR more deaths at home and abroad, then it's a hopeless argument.
Likewise, if you have an interlocutor who has the paranoid belief that everyone is anti-American, to the extent that they fail to read what is said before attacking it on false premises, then it's also a hopeless argument. Re-read what I said, in response to what you said.
You said: "Your implication that hundreds of millions of people over the centuries have been held in thrall by force is an absurdity"
I said: "Worldwise, hundreds of millions doubtless have. However, perhaps a thousand times that number haven't."
Now you say I "can't see reason that it is regimes like the Soviet Union or China that have far, far, FAR more deaths at home and abroad".
Yes I can - that's exactly the kind of thing to which I was alluding! How you get from that to some kind of view that I'm anti-American simply beggars belief.
>If you are trying to credit hundreds of millions "being in thrall" due to America's behaviour in the world, this isn't a reasonable discussion.
If you're trying to credit me with thinking that, you really, really must re-read what I said, because you're (again) putting words in my mouth.
>Huh? Could you cite a case of a boxing death where the boxer as absolved? Or rules of a "death match" of this type that actually prevail?
I already did, in a reply to one of your earlier posts. I'll list the URL in full this time, instead of just linking to it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/other_sports/1074469.stm
>A game is a limited, rote routine. Whether pinball or PacMan or Project Entropia, it's a set of routines. Open-ended social worlds are more spontaneous, organic, unpredictable, and not as filled with so many set routines.
And this makes a difference to how their rules should be enforced because why?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 14, 2006 at 05:22
Richard Bartle> The clash comes where consumers consent not to have some of these laws apply to them (eg. by signing a EULA).
Ah, well, but this have to happen (the EULA) before the user makes the purchase. Say, if I was thirsty and bought a Coke and then when I was about to open the bottle it said that I had to pay rent for the bottle if I opened it... Well, then I could happily ignore what it said because I had already obtained the right that usually comes with buying a bottle. I doubt many EULAs would stick very well unless the user actually did sign it prior to purchase.
Veryveryvery few online services secure a signed copy of the EULA before they let the user obtain rights to use the service.
Richard Bartle> Some people decide they didn't want to consent to to having some of those laws apply to them after all, hence the resort to "rights"
Well, I guess they could claim some "rights" if they could claim that what the software did was so unexpected that it should have been taken more care to inform the users of the consequences. I also believe that they can contest the EULA if what it states is in conflict with what the software clearly invites the users to do or if it cripples the purpose it was marketed as a "tool" for. E.g. if the software makes it easy to "kill" then the EULA will be weak if it states that "playerkilling" is forbidden?
I also believe that there are some rights covered by copyright law (the right to the authorship for your (fictional) character). I would certainly claim artistic rights under norwegian law. Then you have personal information law and electronic communication laws which could be applied to online games.
All in all, yes artist and developers should have relatively free hands when creating the games, but I think there are limits. Say, what if your game is design around the purchase of characters and have "playerdeath". Then the designer deliberately makes it very easy to die after say a month, or makes it so you have to purchase (for real money) medicine to survive. The EULA may state this, but the player couldn't easily have forseen the consequences when signing it the way EULAs tend to be written. He may have thought he could purchase a character and have it for a long time unless he did something really stupid.
The baseball example as you present it is disturbing, and hopefully a badly judged case, but then again the U.S. are quite happy to sentence people to death... Not all countries think that real playerdeath is insignificant... In Norway it isn't possible sentence people to death even in relation to war crimes. Quite ironic considering the vikings and Quisling... or maybe that's the reason.
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Jun 16, 2006 at 13:27
>Good God, Prok, the word is "inalienable," not "inalieble" or "inaliable."
I know. I can type faster than I can think and spell (though that is very rare, I'm an excellent speller). I think we can safely invoke "Webster's Law" now, which, like Godwin's Law, is a signal of an end of a good discussion as it deteriorates into people picking on spelling.
Richard,
1. Access rules *are* game rules. Why wouldn't they be? They are part and parcel of the game. If you don't want to learn to skill up properly and kill, if you don't want to pay the freight, then you can't be in WoW, that is, you could just sit there I suppose deteriorating but there's no game without the access first to the log-on and the access to the game's action via skilling (I include skilling in access rules).
2. I'm not a civil war expert but I believe 2 armies fought the civil war, and regardless of whether you think invading the south was a good thing or was compromised, the U.S. doesn't make a habit of using the army to put down rebellion in the way that say, Russia or China does. But why are we having this debate? It's not pertinent.
3. I don't see why I'm always being pushed and shoved to go to other games or worlds. I don't play those games where I don't think I can skill up and sustain the RP -- I'd be just dangling around in the way. I go in an open-ended world and try to push the envelope there, that's all. So I expect more from the open-ended world; that doesn't mean I'd impose open-endedness on all the closed worlds like WoW, which I don't play.
4. I think forums on a site like SL's are indeed part of the magic circle. The magic circle (I know this isn't the usual ludic use of the term) is everything in that game company's domain.
5. If you don't think there can be torture avatars in psychological terms (and sometimes even projections into RL harm by such things as loss of income) well...look who says they're immersed even in just a textual MUD? Have never cried over a MUD?
6. Open-ended worlds are not going to have the same limited set of rote rules, and because they have more flexible and evolving rules, that means the people in them have to have polices overlaying the world more than the code-is-law approach.
7. If you're not anti-American, great! But come on, surely as outraged at Bush, and criticial of American insularity and tastelessness as the next Brit. Aren't we all? By we, I mean the Euro-Atlantic Intelligentsia. Americans are insular and tasteless. You're free to be anti that. Why deny it? As for this statement, ""Worldwise, hundreds of millions doubtless have. However, perhaps a thousand times that number haven't." -- I read it, even several times, as I do all your posts, but they are flat, without music and much colour, of course. I couldn't tell if you meant that *America* had the responsibility for all those hundreds of millions in thrall (it seemed readily to admit that reading), and whether "a thousand times that number haven't" was a reference to the U.S. population plus the West. Oh, I don't know, what we were arguing about again?
I think we just have fundamentally different worldviews. You have a problem even with the word "created". I can only say: well, where did you think all this stuff came from, including human beings? They had to come from somewhere.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Jun 19, 2006 at 14:25
Prokofy Neva>1. Access rules *are* game rules. Why wouldn't they be?
So it's a rule of Monopoly whether or not you are allowed to play?
No: it's a decision based on whose Monopoly set is and the attitude of the other players. If it's my set and I don't mind your playing and the other players are OK with it, you get to play. If I don't want you to play (maybe because you're too good a player, say) or the other players don't want you to play (maybe because you took the last cheese roll at a party once) then either you don't play or they don't play. None of those rules of access are rules of the game.
>3. I don't see why I'm always being pushed and shoved to go to other games or worlds.
Because you want to change the game world to suit you; the people who operate it want to change you to suit the game world. Only one of you can win, and they own the set so it's they who come out on top.
>I go in an open-ended world and try to push the envelope there, that's all. So I expect more from the open-ended world; that doesn't mean I'd impose open-endedness on all the closed worlds like WoW, which I don't play.
The people who run the game think you push too far. Irrespective of whether this is true or not, it's their game (well, virtual world, as we're talking SL here I guess). Either you play by their rules or you go find some other VW with rules you like. If there are no such VWs, you either start your own (unrealistic at the moment, but give it 5 or 10 years), or you play the VW with a ruleset you can live with, or you stop playing altogether.
>4. I think forums on a site like SL's are indeed part of the magic circle. The magic circle (I know this isn't the usual ludic use of the term) is everything in that game company's domain.
That's not the magic circle. You can call it the "domain of the company" if you like, that's fine, just don't call it the magic circle because it isn't part of the game.
>5. If you don't think there can be torture avatars in psychological terms (and sometimes even projections into RL harm by such things as loss of income) well...look who says they're immersed even in just a textual MUD? Have never cried over a MUD?
Players can be tortured through the vehicle of their avatars, but avatars can't be tortured.
>6. Open-ended worlds are not going to have the same limited set of rote rules, and because they have more flexible and evolving rules, that means the people in them have to have polices overlaying the world more than the code-is-law approach.
I disagree. "Open-ended" doesn't mean "open-ended in the rule set", just "open-ended in what you can achieve". Although there may be some virtual worlds that chop and change their rules around the whole time, it's quite possible - probable, even - that you could have an open-ended world with a fixed set of rules.
>7. Americans are insular and tasteless. You're free to be anti that. Why deny it?
Because it's not true. SOME Americans are, yes, but others are among the kindest, gentlest, nicest people I've ever met. Why would I condemn an entire population just because I don't like how some of them behave?
>I couldn't tell if you meant that *America* had the responsibility for all those hundreds of millions in thrall (it seemed readily to admit that reading), and whether "a thousand times that number haven't" was a reference to the U.S. population plus the West.
I've no idea where your idea came from that I was talking about America.
You were saying that government is by the consent of the governed. I was saying that in some cases it wasn't - it was through force. You said that my "implication that hundreds of millions of people over the centuries have been held in thrall by force is an absurdity". I said that it wasn't - I meant they have indeed been held in thrall, by various despots across the globe. I also added that this isn't the case for most people. I think you took my reply to be suggesting that the evil American empire was responsible for this rule-by-force, but that wasn't what I was saying at all. My only point was that rule by force is not as rare as you think.
>I think we just have fundamentally different worldviews.
It would be a boring place if everyone was the same!
>You have a problem even with the word "created". I can only say: well, where did you think all this stuff came from, including human beings? They had to come from somewhere.
"Coming from" isn't the same as "created". The latter implies a creator, whereas the former doesn't. The latter also merely pushes the question one level back: who created the creator?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 22, 2006 at 09:37