In 1940 Charlie Chaplin directed and starred in The Great Dictator, a satire of Hitler and Nazi Germany (fn1) situated in the fictional country of Tomania. In the real world, there followed a great war and the good guys won. I commented in passing on an important moment - Brass Buttons. Soon democracy flourished, sort of, after a hiccup called the Cold War and a somewhat invisible under-developed world. But no matter. There came this idea known as the "internets" and all sorts of folks invented it. Soon others were envisoning virtual kingdoms and questions of how to govern these places arose. Some were saying it is just a game, others wished another whack at a new, digital, democracy. Yet, surprise, as Cory Doctorow revealed recently (fn2): online games are dictatorships.
While the subject has already been well discussed (fn3) Cory pulled together in a nice reader-friendly package. I do have two Friday night moments, however.
I.
Perhaps we should revisit first principles. Why the implied linkage between (real) virtual property rights and "democracy?" Staring at us in the by-line, for example (emphasis added): "Cory Doctorow wonders if it's possible to create a game that's a democracy, where your in-world property is really yours." Virtual property as a fetish for the self-organization of online spaces? Okay, it is possible I am still just a little tetchy after my "Money and Everything" post.
II.
Cory also seems to have been ensnared in an assumption we just tackled ("Rat atat tat (or why rat food and vodka don't mix)"): one wouldn't do anything in a virtual world unless it were fun and fun = rewarded. If you believe this, then this claim would be true (emphasis added):
...Why not just create a "democratic" game that has a constitution, full citizenship for players, and all the prerequisites for stable wealth? Such a game would be open source (so that other, interoperable "nations" could be established for you to emigrate to if you don't like the will of the majority in one game-world), and run by elected representatives who would instruct the administrators and programmers as to how to run the virtual world. In the real world, the TSA sets the rules for aviation -- in a virtual world, the equivalent agency would determine the physics of flight.
The question is, would this game be any fun? Well, democracy itself is pretty fun -- where "fun" means "engrossing and engaging." Lots of people like to play the democracy game, whether by voting every four years or by moving to K Street and setting up a lobbying operation.
But video games aren't quite the same thing. Gameplay conventions like "grinding" (repeating a task),
However, as I suggested in Lights Will Guide You Home (Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network) perhaps this is too pessimistic. To paraphrase what I said then:
Were you to devise a set of metrics to measure the health of a virtual world, what would they be? High on my list, I suspect, would be the willingness and the commitment of strangers to bring me home.
Dare I suggest it, such a motivator could be a sturdy platform upon which to grow online democratic values.
Sure, there will need to be some reformulation of the broth - but why argue the MMORPG - circa 1997-2007, err 2008... - assumptions?
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fn1. Video: Chaplin as Hitler.
fn2. "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships." Information Week, April 16, 2007.
fn3.
- TN: State of Play (e.g. a CNET round-up)
- TN: "Play of State: Sovereignty and Governance in MMOGs" (Timothy Burke).
- Command Lines: The Emergence of Governance in Global Cyberspace. First Monday, Special Issue #7. 2006.
fn4. Recent TN posts on VATSIM (and related):
- TN: Playing with a manual. - The role of manuals and game world design.
- TN: Lights will guide you home. - Role of altruism in cooperative virtual worlds.
- TN: Mike Fright. - On the fear of microphones in virtual worlds
- TN: Whale Watching. - Inconsistencies in world view: impacts to cooperative versus competitive play.
Despite the plethora of examples with recent MMOs, my favorite example of virtual fascism (is that too strong?) remains this article about the supposed "Model Economy". I have never quite figured out how taking character's money away and forcing them to live in toxic waste parts of your VW is fun.
One question of interest that merits discussion is if we create a distributed virtual democracy with (real) virtual property rights, doesn't a players virtual currency count as property? How is currency created in this environment? Does an operator have the right to create money, thus devaluing players' currency? One possible answer is to create no in world monetary system at all and let the inevitable barter system evolve a currency.
Posted by: Landon McDowell | Apr 21, 2007 at 00:46
Virtual property as a fetish for the self-organization of online spaces? Okay, it is possible I am still just a little tetchy after my "Money and Everything" post.
Nate, for the life of me, just as at SOP II, I can't understand this sneer at private property as a bastion of rights unless you comment about "fetishes" and "tetchiness" is about a certain ideology you are subscribing to. Where else do you think the inviolability of the individual and his rights will be housed? Of course it's only server space blah blah, but it's a bulwark against the state. There's no other place to house it. That is, the Lindens think to house something different -- "creativity" and "IP" in "the avatar" and "the permissions system" but these non-land based systems merely create a very steep pyramid of power, where only the very talented and connected then can share the society's ultimate goods.
If the critique of the first model is that those with less land have less power, and those with no land are powerless (thought they could seek protection from landed through groups, etc.) then the problem of the second model is as I've said, only the 10 percent content-creating class rules.
Really, land is not a fetish. It's really important. There really is a struggle between sandboxers and settlers.
I was also annoyed at Cory's concept of democracy and rights as "those nerdy kids who make student governments and have time to sit around playing Roberts Rule of Order". But there are more rough-and-ready concepts that pertain without hours and days spent in boring government meetings. I mean, the Magna Carta, some restraints on the game-gods, you know, like "nothing about us/without us" sort of participation in the feature sets.
Democratic values will not emerge full-blown anywhere out of the sky unless there is a place to house the individuals and groups of civil society away from the state (the game gods).
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 21, 2007 at 02:13
Prokofy Neva, Democratic values will not emerge full-blown anywhere out of the sky unless there is a place to house the individuals and groups of civil society away from the state (the game gods).
You've probably mentioned this before somewhere, but I can't recall it at the moment. How would you propose this happening (assuming you have some idea)?
Posted by: Michael Chui | Apr 21, 2007 at 06:16
There's a difference between how the players of virtual worlds organise themselves and the relationship between the developers of the virtual worlds and the players. Developers are gods: they control the physics. They can do whatever they want with the virtual world.
If players get to control the physics, that makes them the gods. However, as gods, they can do anything: that includes making other players not be gods. The players who get to be gods this way may enjoy it, but the remaining players really should not want it to happen.
What players can do is self-organise within the context of the physics into governments. This is indeed what they do in the modern game-like worlds, through guilds. Most guilds are not, however, democratic: they're benevolent dictatorships. Players want someone to do all the organising for them, but they don't want to play politics: they prefer to vote with their feet. If the guild goes sour, they leave and join or form another guild. This isn't great news for people in the real world who want to see the democratisation of virtual worlds, but it's what players seem to be most comfortable with. In the real world, we have to have democracy because you can't simply leave a country if you don't like the way the government is headed; in virtual worlds, you can, and this apparently makes all the difference.
If World of Warcraft is a dictatorship, then so is the real world (assuming you believe in God - personally, I don't). As a character in WoW you have no more influence over Blizzard than as a resident of the universe you have over God. All you can do is work within the givernment of the physical system (your guild), appeal to the deity (Blizzard or God), appeal to the government of the deity's world (US government or the government of whatever non-universe God lives in), or appeal to the deity of the deity's world (God or God's god).
I wish the paper I presented a couple of years ago in Milwaukee would finally make it to print so I could just point to it instead of trying to explain it in small blog posts. The basic point is that it's wrong to look at developers as governments, because they're not.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Apr 21, 2007 at 07:31
Um, Richard, it came out last fall. The special issue of First Monday with your paper is here. And Nate, it's an important resource for this discussion that you might want to add to your list.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | Apr 21, 2007 at 08:40
I was interested in this comment:
>Of course it's only server space blah blah, but it's a bulwark against the state.
Given that there is no possible defence of that bulwark, does it exist? How is "land" or any virtual "property" relevant when it can be deleted by fiat?
If one were to imagine a government police force of infinite means, the situation would be similar (by the "bulwark" metaphor.
This may be an illusion that it's comfortable to foster, but it is dangerous because it refuses to accept reality, in the same way the homeopathy may be a comforting illusion but it is still the deliberate drinking of poisons and effectively worthless except as a placebo.
Posted by: Rich Bryant | Apr 21, 2007 at 11:00
Richard,
I understand and appreciate your argument. However I have to disagree somewhat with your conclusions from your paper as they are predicated on an incorrect assertion, developers cannot simultaneously be gods and governments because governments are formed by members of a population. There are lots of examples throughout history where one population is ruled by another, usually through economic and/or military coercion.
Also governments are not necessarily monolithic, so devs and players can participate in various aspects of in-world governance.
In a recent blog post, Gods and Devs, I pointed out that deities don't interact with the inhabitants of the universe, at least there is no evidence of it. For those devoutly religious persons in the audience, God(s) always leave(s) open the possibility that you imagined the whole thing. When developers interact with and impose their will directly on players and characters, i.e. not through the physics, they are acting as governments and not deities.
The physics is in the code. When developers act on the code they are being deities. Players use the physics to create and manipulate the data. When developers act on the data, they are being governments.
Posted by: Landon McDowell | Apr 21, 2007 at 11:16
Thomas Malaby>Um, Richard, it came out last fall.
Hey, thanks for reminding me!
In that case, I'd like to refer to a paper I wrote, which people can find here.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Apr 21, 2007 at 12:53
Landon McDowell>I have to disagree somewhat with your conclusions from your paper as they are predicated on an incorrect assertion, developers cannot simultaneously be gods and governments because governments are formed by members of a population.
Hmm. Perhaps I should have said that governments are formed from members of a population, rather than by. The point I'm trying to make is that governments operate within a physical system defined by gods or nature, and they only get to impose their will using what is available through that system (or appealing to a higher authority). Gods get to change the system.
>Also governments are not necessarily monolithic, so devs and players can participate in various aspects of in-world governance.
Gods who people know are gods can only ever participate as gods. It doesn't matter what developers may say, the players know that it's only by the developers' good graces that they are listened to. If the players started to insist that the developers did things which the developers found unpalatable, then the truth of the matter would be rapidly revealed: the developers are the ones in charge, not the players, even if they do all participate in "in-world governance".
>In a recent blog post, Gods and Devs, I pointed out that deities don't interact with the inhabitants of the universe, at least there is no evidence of it.
The ancient Greeks saw evidence everywhere. With no scientific method available to them, "the gods did it" made a lot more sense than "it works using some system that won't be understood for 2,500 years". If there are enough things not understood and one simple explanation that accounts for them all, well, it deserves to be given some credence. From their point of view (if not ours), there was plenty of evidence for gods, and they planned their lives accordingly.
>For those devoutly religious persons in the audience, God(s) always leave(s) open the possibility that you imagined the whole thing.
Not to the adherents of many ancient religions. They did see gods everywhere. Even to some modern religions, the deities do make appearances (or at least operate through avatars - that's where the word came from, after all).
>When developers interact with and impose their will directly on players and characters, i.e. not through the physics, they are acting as governments and not deities.
No, they're acting as deities. They may be more overt than gods usually are, but in part that's because we share a physical reality with them so know they exist. If you were to take the point of view of a NPC in a virtual world, the evidence of the developers' existence would be far weaker.
>Players use the physics to create and manipulate the data. When developers act on the data, they are being governments.
No, they're still being gods, because they can still change the code.
If God were to descend to Earth, perform a few miracles so only the absolutely faithful didn't believe it really was Him, and then get elected to the US Senate, it would merely be His whim that caused Him to seek approval for His policies through the democratic process. Everyone would know that He could miracle things to happen if He wanted. He would remain God, even if He wanted to be part of a government. He'd have to stay his powers, but He could never give them up.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Apr 21, 2007 at 13:18
Prok>
sneer at private property as a bastion of rights... Where else do you think the inviolability of the individual and his rights will be housed?
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In a vague way this argument reminds me of Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, namely one thinks they have invented something new, but in fact they end up importing something old (Becker: enlightenment vs. Christian assumptions. here: property rights => democratic principles vs. a hypothetical internet one). I am saying that I'm not convinced that all that baggage maps into the online - certainly not in the general case. For example, I'm convinced it is possible to construct a democratic-valued system in a non-persistent world. So much for property rights.
Posted by: nate_combs | Apr 21, 2007 at 16:51
The point is, surely, that there is no innately persistant world. The law of conservation of energy does not apply. In real life, the Government can take away your house. The developer (or, as Richard rightly states) the God of a virtual world or apparently persistant gaming environment, can make your house cease to exist.
If necessary, the developer can turn back time (restore from backup) to a point before your house ever existed.
There is no defence against this. You have no rights and no-one to complain to who is guaranteed to act on your complaint. You might just as well pray with the single exception that a Developer may decide to answer a prayer (ticket) whereas any alleged RL God most certainly does not.
Posted by: Rich Bryant | Apr 21, 2007 at 20:03
Yes, game developers are more properly compared to deities, not govenors. However what most players wish for is not to influence the game devs. They want self government to give them some measure of control over the other players. And in a few places, such as Second Life, this is beginning to happen, on a very very simple level.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 21, 2007 at 22:40
Rome wasn't built in a day, and we cannot expect a modern constituional assembly to appear overnight. Virtual Worlds are still struggling with much more basic issues, such as, "please stop shooting everyone, " or "please don't another blizzard of rotating neon genitalia."
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 21, 2007 at 22:43
Perhaps the most basic issue of all, the first priniciple, is association. "Do i have the right to eject or ban folks that i don't like?" Thus the great emphasis on private property. It enables a very fundamental right. The ability to choose who we associate with, and who don't.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 21, 2007 at 22:46
Richard,
The stuff you're dredging about about the usual exit clause of the geek, vote with your feet, get out of the guild, etc. -- well, it belongs to games.
In worlds, I think we can do a lot better, and of course we're going to be demanding a lot more democracy than in some lousy WoW guild.
Re: "Developers are gods: they control the physics."
I think you need to spend some time in SL. The objects all have a box you check off to make the physics work. The players run the physics, too. They can even script elaborate physics stuff. You can turn on the sun or moon yourself, etc. Sure, the Lindens control some basic stuff, like you can't fly out too far over the sea but I think they've put a little bit of game-god in all of us.
nate, if you think you can create a democratic-values aggregation/coalescence online, and not map it to property, well, it's still mapped to...something. An IP address, a URL, somebody's group, your group, *something*. It's a property, somewhere, somehow. The instinct of humans to make homes and declare them property goes pretty deep. Wars are fought over this.
One of the reasons I don't like Edward Castronova's ideal government of NPCs is because I just find it at root a fake idea. It's not that the NPCS, or even some more sophisticated AI, is something that really judges and rules fairly. It's merely the crystallization of a game-god's will. It's a game-god's pet. It comes, it bites or doesn't bite me. It's merely the game god in another guise. It would be more fun and more useful to governance if I could tame that game-god's pets even in ways the game-god can't predict.
Well, isn't that what the story of Jesus Christ is about? He *did* give them up.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 21, 2007 at 23:52
I really need something explained to me: Why does anyone think, for a minute, that democratic principles are even desirable in virtual worlds? What evidence is there that players want them? What evidence is there that they will make games better, for *anyone*?
Fascism is fun. Get over it.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 22, 2007 at 02:41
Dave, thanks for the perfect example of why we want self government. Private property, and the right to ban other players, protects me from having to rub elbows with kneebiters like you. Haha. Just kidding. Maybe.
Posted by: mikyo | Apr 22, 2007 at 02:56
>You've probably mentioned this before somewhere, but I can't recall it at the moment. How would you propose this happening (assuming you have some idea)?
Land and groups. The way it's always been done?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 22, 2007 at 03:06
From the infinite possibilities of virtual worlds, we continually find players gravitating to and creating restrictive environments. Places where anyone can do anything, they immediately start complaining about what someone else is doing. Places where anyone can have anything, and they immediately start complaining about how someone else got something they have too easily.
Even in the statement of "Virtual Land Ownership". What is virtual land? It's a set of numbers representing a deformed plane, maybe with stuff on it that is actually just more numbers defining irregular solids. I could whip up a program in a few hours that would generate an infinite amount of it, you can own it all, for a very negotiable rate. What would that mean? Nothing, of course (although I'd certainly spend the money).
Ownership only has meaning where there is scarcity, and scarcity only has meaning in a virtual world if some fascist says it does. Rights only have meaning where the infinite possibility space of your own imagination accepts restrictions applied by some fascist, restrictions that others have also accepted.
Fascism is fun because without fascism, as in without the *deliberate* and calculated restriction of infinite possibilities to a smaller set, you're wandering an infinite space, and it doesn't matter if others are also wandering that space because by definition, the population density is infinitesimal. And if others don't share your illusions, they have no value, even to you.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 22, 2007 at 03:23
@mikyo> Perhaps the most basic issue of all, the first priniciple, is association. "Do i have the right to eject or ban folks that i don't like?" Thus the great emphasis on private property.
------------------------------
"private property" is not the only way of doing this. Yes, it is a handy way of working it in the spatially constructed real world, but the funny thing about the online WWW metaphor is that well, there are lots of other ways of working it.
For example, consider a chat room. Let us say that the founders of a chat room establish a set of rules to govern membership. Let us say that the membership in this chat room can remove members who don't conform. Isn't this capable of insuring that rights of association are asserted (and one can tweak this model further)? Then the question, who owns the chat room? The membership? Is that even the right way of thinking about it?! What if it is an evolving membership? Etc.
My point is that I sense a Second Life perspective at work here. Nothing wrong with that. But we also have to realize that it has a certain view of how to construct its governing structures (to whatever level of sophistication that it actually exists) and that that view (land-based etc) is just one view among what I think is likely to be many.
One might just as easily imagine other approaches that leverage the flexibility of online mechanics. Thus any assertion that online "democratic" values has to look like 2nd Life (et al) is too restrictive to my view.
Posted by: nate_combs | Apr 22, 2007 at 03:27
@nate your claims about all this lovely democracy in online groups would be far more persuasive if the actual appearances of these groups in actual virtual nature were atually democratic. It's not, my God, a lot of it is pretty tyrannical stuff where people are awful to one another.
No, I don't see how they are democratic. Instead, they are run ruthlessly on the "sandbox principle". My channel, my rules, you are trolling, you are permabanned forever, blah blah. This is in fact the principle that the new governance tools in SL are going to enshrine, Tropico-like "you rule" stuff. No sense of the common good. The collective that you imagine as preferable to the tyrannical individual has produced this "masterpiece".
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/04/you_rule_second.html
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/04/21/rule-of-the-sandbox/
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 22, 2007 at 04:24
Nate, most chatrooms are small enough to be ruled by a small group, or perhaps a single owner. SL has about 30,000 people online right now. How expensive would it be to hire enough reps to even enforce the Terms of Service? The Lindens have all but given up trying, and are passing the duty down 'from headquarters to the trenches."
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 22, 2007 at 06:58
Prokofy Neva>In worlds, I think we can do a lot better, and of course we're going to be demanding a lot more democracy than in some lousy WoW guild.
Who's "we"? How many of those 8.5m WoW players are demanding any democracy at all?
Virtual worlds can be designed in many ways. Some of those ways could include democracy. I have no objection to a virtual world designed for democracy to have democracy - that's part of the designer's prerogative. I would object most strongly if some concept of "democracy" were imposed on the virtual world from the outside, though.
When players have been given their own tools for creating social structures, though, they've tended to go not for democracy but for benevolent dictatorships. Why is this? Well, most players just want to play, they don't want to manage. If people want to manage, they can set up guilds and be managers. In the real world, there aren't enough management positions available so we have to have representational democracy to select our managers. In virtual worlds, there are as many management positions as people who want to manage. The ones who are best at it get to manage more, and the ones who aren't so good either improve or realise they're not cut out for it. People get to decide which constituency they're in by signing up to a community (a guild), rather than by the location of their house. This means that good management is rewarded a lot more quickly than in the real world, and likewise bad management is swiftly exposed.
What we in the west regard as democracy isn't actually all that democratic - the ancient Greeks would have regarded it as a form of tyranny. To them, democracy was where the people got to make the big decisions, not those people that some of the people elected.
Calling WoW guilds "lousy" isn't going to win you the argument. To win the argument, you need to come up with a system that's better than the one that has evolved to date. You need to explain why it's "better", and you need to explain why players would choose that approach over the one they have at the moment.
>>Re: "Developers are gods: they control the physics."
>I think you need to spend some time in SL. The objects all have a box you check off to make the physics work. The players run the physics, too.
I'm not talking about analogues of real-world physics, I'm talking about the physics of the virtual world. The physics of SL includes the system that allows for players to check the check boxes and that supports the underlying behaviours. SL may allow players more programming power than most other virtual worlds, but it doesn't let them do things like, oh, switch off the ability of other players to have those programming powers.
The physics of a virtual world are what is embodied in the server code. Players don't get to change this, they merely get to work within the framework it provides. SL gives them a fairly flexible framework in comparison to other virtual worlds, but it doesn't let them change the underlying code.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Apr 22, 2007 at 07:09
A WoW guild is more comparable to a tribe than a government. The difference being that tribes are held together by personal relationships, instead of laws and regulations. They work very well, until the number of members rises above 200 or so. Without rules and regulations, a single leader, or small group, can no longer cope with all the work. So we have guilds controlled by charismatic leaders, instead of laws. But the potential size of such a group has a definite upper ceiling.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 22, 2007 at 07:29
Sorry to quote a large passage from Richard's paper but I think it is important:
"Virtual world developers do rule their respective virtual worlds, but not in the same sense that that real–world states are ruled — even tyrannical dictatorships. They rule not as governments, but as gods. There’s a difference. Gods operate by changing the laws of physics, whereas governments work by the judicious application of the laws of physics that pertain to their world. I have no option but to obey the laws of physics, but I can consider disobeying the laws of the land if I believe I can either avoid detection or evade or defeat whatever force is sent to arrest me for my temerity."
I appreciate an attempt to separate gods from government but I'd like to point out that 'gods' are a dangerous metaphor and the distinction is often blurred in (virt)reality.
The paper indirectly indicates a conflict between controlling physics and demanding belief. We don't worship a god or gods because gods control our physics, but our destiny and our post physical existence (the very definition of metaphysics, after physics), or because they are considered paragons of virtue, or knowledge.
Also, traditionally, gods may have limited powers, (Norse mythology), they may descend involuntarily, (such as in Greek mythology or Indian), they can also be controlled by fate (or the fates), they may inherit a system from their ancestors (many many religions) or be trapped (again, many religions), or die out if no one believes in them.
There are also tribes in the real world where the governors (or at least, ruling classes), are assumed to have mystical ie nonphysically constrained powers.
Further, the owner of a MORG may not be the original developer, (Slartibartfast), may not have access to the original code, (Lost), or may not be able or willing to pull the plug on a popular MORG (Frankenstein) . And players are not (unfortunately), purely characters inside a MORG, they can still complain, protest, bully, and attempt to find and exploit bugs and play with easter eggs. If there is such a MORG where a player can only act in character please point me to it!
And some virtual worlds may be a contractual service, not every virtual world is a Palmer Eldritch-style service provider. And what if the world is downloaded locally, can the developer always call it back or make it disappear? Some gods aren't what they used to be..
I did however like the notion of control over persistence and player history.
On another note (and post):
I still don't understand the fuss over virtual land and housing property, I personally find it an outmoded and clumsy concept in the virtual worlds I have seen and too simplistic to be an interesting simulation or a singular expression of individuality.Where complex and individual, housing (as interstitial experiential threshold) is not intelligently and charismatically related to the meaningful interaction in the outside (still virtual) world. In other words it is seldom displays Vitruvian firmness, commodity, and delight; let alone make a compelling reason that it is an interactively experienced virtual necessity.
Posted by: | Apr 22, 2007 at 09:56
Apologies, the above unnamed post with gratuitous Hitchhiker Guide references was mine.
Posted by: ErikC | Apr 22, 2007 at 09:59
But power is experienced and shared by those who participate. The divinity of Kings lasted only as long as everyone played along, and it's now a dim memory for most people in the West.
The divinity of developers is the same way. They are divine as long as they are granted such status. I would argue that it has been demonstrated on several occasion that the divinity of the developer has been throttled by mortal discontent - usually in a small way (i.e. rollbacks of rules changes or mechanics) the strongest in my mind is the total destruction of Star Wars Galaxies that began during the first days of the beta, before playable systems were even in yet and only finished in the NGE released.
Players already push developers around, and this has mostly been in the form of forum bitching and in-game "protest" actions like everyone showing up naked at some specific location.
What I see are the rumblings of the true end of developer divinity, governmental regulation. Most of the attention gets paid to the trivial questions, like will virtual property ever be taxed (answer: once a government can generate significant revenue from it, of course it will be), but in the distance are small data points represented best in my mind by the diffused Lambda Legal v. Blizzard case, or perhaps now by China's decision to begin limiting the amount of time citizens can play games, which developers or internet cafes will be forced to implement in game - eventually there will regulation of virtual space.
At any rate, this is why the "developers=gods" argument is fairly unconvincing to me. I think it will eventually be more like "developers=chucky cheese" at best. It's worth noting that I'm not sure this will make games better, it's just where I see things going.
And I also think Corey is wrong here too - online games and even most of the internet aren't like dictatorships, it's more like a mall: Anyone is welcome to come in and do whatever they want as long as they don't upset anyone - but if they do they'll be kicked out with no recourse.
But they also aren't really out anything except for the ability to have a good time at the mall, whatever that's worth.
Posted by: illovich | Apr 22, 2007 at 11:32
"This was once also firmly believed (and thus true) by most (all?) people who lived inside the rigid hierarchy of divine kingship. The King was sovereign, and there was no changing it or fighting it."
I'm sorry, either I have failed to explain correctly or you have failed utterly to grasp the concept of "unmaking". A King may lose control but what a King controls can only be abandoned or usurped, it cannot be unmade.
Posted by: Rich Bryant | Apr 22, 2007 at 12:09
Personally I'm waiting for NPCs to rise up. They are the ones that really deserve some rights. I'm waiting for the day when every rabbit, squirrel, cat and deer in Elwynn Forest has had enough and en-mass swarm squirrel killers in a fury of furry ferocity and have the last laugh.
Posted by: Catfoot | Apr 22, 2007 at 12:16
(On godly powers)
Prok (as usual)
> Well, isn't that what the story of Jesus Christ is about? He *did* give them up.
No, he broke almost every law of physics, from the resurrection of Lazarus to the feeding of the Five Thousand. If you believe it. He neither married, nor (apparently) copulated, nor are his bowel-movements recorded. The only human thing he ever did which can be proven (Roman Fascist records 4tw!) was die. And even then, he had to go and break that law, too.
If he existed, he was either a God who acted like a God and broke all the rules, or this World's greatest ever exploiting Goon.
Jesus would have been a W-Hat. Ask any Pharisee. You read it here first, folks.
Posted by: Rich Bryant | Apr 22, 2007 at 18:17
@prok, mikyo> chatrooms, tyrannical.
--------------------------
Chatrooms are tools. Private property in some systems is a tool. Whatever democratic values emerge ultimately must derive from the rules and principles that the participants adopt in respect to the system of relationships they build based on their their tools.
To recap where this all started from my POV: democratic values (online) does not imply private virtual property rights. I would also agree that chatrooms do not necessarily imply democratic values (online). Both may faciliate such in some virtual system, but neither is sufficient, IMO.
To go off and detail-in on Mikyo's chatroom / scaling argument. I think one way to look at this example is not in terms of few chatrooms but many chat channels. These could be seen as forming in some cases a social structure that is different from an individual's social network but reify a sort of relationships and structure among large groups of people online.
The best example I can think of is with Eve-Online. To my experience players may easily have a dozen channels they monitor (even outside of combat situations) with varying degrees of interest. Channels may correspond to their tribe (corporations, alliances), as well as social groups (folks hanging out in a certain area) and interest groups (markets, mining), as well as functional groups (military matters), as well as just plain old social groups.
The point is that each one of these channels has its own set of protocol and rules (e.g. subject matter and what you can and cannot talk about) that may for most cases be loosely enforced but can sometimes be strictly monitored/enforced by the participants. Furthermore these are player devices - any player can set one up and define basic parameters on membership and so forth.
Could a democratic system of interaction be built upon such a system of chat channels? I don't see why not. Likewise, I can imagine other ways of doing it. The point is, in the above example, where do property rights enter into the equation? I see membership and participation rights, but no need for property rights.
Posted by: nate_combs | Apr 22, 2007 at 19:13
Like the discussions we've had about the SL economy, I'd like to make the point that a system can have features of "a thing" without becoming wholly a function of that thing. For SL, I keep making the point that it can have some "economic features" without expressing a particularly robust "economy" that can be compared to fully functional, RL economies like that of large, successful nation-states. A VW/MMO with a few/some economic features is (imo) no more "an economy" than a car with a horn is a musical instrument.
The same, I would say, holds true for government, whether we want to classify a particular world/game as a dictatorship, democracy, theocracy or deocracy.
This was the problem I had with Corey's article; games are meant to approximate many, many things. They exaggerate some aspects of their material, understate others, and ignore entirely other categories of activity when it makes sense (to the devs). So the idea of a game/world in which RL "government" was somehow ported jot-for-jot into the game... that's just odd. We don't do that with almost any other aspect of life-to-game creation; why the hell would we do it for government?
What makes sense to me -- same as for economics -- is to examine governmental issues as *features* and ask which ones would enhance the experience of the game for those involved.
If "democratic features" make sense for a particular space... cool. Build 'em in. The US isn't, as has been pointed out, a pure democracy. It is a partially representative democratic republic with varying degrees of socialism thrown in. Lots of features!
Would it make sense, for example, in SL, to allow for a democratic feature that allowed, on a daily or weekly basis, for people to vote on programmatic issues that could, potentially, shut down the entire space? For example (and I'm out of my league here, making schtuff up, so forgive me if this is a bad example), if everyone voted that avatars should have 10 times as many polygons or something... some issue that would cause the servers to crash and everyone to not be able to use the system until, well... until everyone voted to stop doing the thing they initially voted for. That would be a "bad" feature, I think.
I don't think game devs are gods, or like gods. I think it's a flawed analogy that encourages lazy thinking. I think game devs are designers, writers, artists, coders, etc -- content creators, essentially. Which is fantastic. I love 'em. Some days, I get to be something like that in my own job. But there's this continued "Looking Glass" phenomenon about MMOs/VWs that says "Because this looks like kinda worldy, and because I control a character thing, and because it does stuff that is kinda like stuff I might do in my world, therefore analogies to the real world are more apt than ones made in other arenas."
No. Stop. You're making my brain hurt.
Why should VWs/MMOs get democracy any more than customers as Barnes & Noble or Disney or students at a university? Ah, yes! you cry. But students have student government! Sure. You go peddle that story to the board of governors. That's a "feature," my pretties, if ever I heard one. There's some limited stuff that student government gets to do, but it's less powerful than the spin that most people can put on their billiard shot. It's not "government" with the three branches and balance of powers, etc. etc. It's some kids who get to vote on the few things that the real power brokers let 'em.
Why should game designers be "gods" any more than teachers? I've never once heard that analogy used, but teachers have far more power to influence RL environments and situations than many devs. The ways they set up their classes, lessons, projects, groupings and social interactions for their students is much more god-like, on a truly human level than anything that will happen to most people in an MMO. Teachers can turn your crap life to gold, or they can truly f**k you up. But we don't ever compare them to gods.
They are virtual worlds... maybe. It's the term of art, of course. But though SL may be more "worldy" than WoW, it is no more a world. It is not a place. I really like it, and defend it regularly in various forums, so don't get up in my grill. But these "spaces" we share... we will improve them more quickly and enjoy them much more, I think, if our metaphors for describing them are more accurate, and our expectations for how RL systems can impact them are more reasonable.
God created the RL world (if you believe that). Government is how we rule spaces in RL. Economies are how we move money. Right. But VW's aren't actually worlds... so calling the creators gods, systems of rules governments and exchanges of value economies just muddies things.
Figure out what you want to accomplish. If democratic tools help you get there, fantastic. If they don't, then lamenting their lack in comparisons between VW spaces and RL spaces is a waste of time.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 22, 2007 at 23:38
@Rich
re: No, he broke almost every law of physics, from the resurrection of Lazarus to the feeding of the Five Thousand
That seems rather facile and you're missing the point. Sure, Jesus broke the law of physics. Or...perhaps fulfilled the laws of nature, if look at it in a different way. Maybe we only use one-tenth of their power at our level, and He had leveled up and could use other spells.
But my point was that when He died, he gave up his powers. He died. Then He was resurrected. Now, did he raise Himself from the dead or did God, the Father raise him? In any event, He did at least temporarily give up the special powers, voluntarily, and then either was able to re-possess them or was re-endowed with them.
Jesus wasn't a goon, because He didn't bring destruction. The "breaking of the laws" was done to bring about healing, miracles, raising people from the dead, etc.
@Andy, why reach for wild concepts like "let's enable so many prims to be placed for our prim hair and dinette set that the sims will crash" and boo-hoo we can't have that because democracy will make things self-destruct.
Why always these all-or-nothing extremes? What you can have is much simpler things that could help break some of the Lindens' most belligerent ideological precepts, which are bolstered by the anarcho-capitalist lobby (increasing these days). And that means like ending the ad farms, the griefing, extortionist, ugly spinning signs set to ridiculous prices. If people vote on things like that, policies for the mainland, and it becomes an actionable offense, then they can begin to roll back that scourge that devalues property.
I don't understand why we get to call game-gods gods in games, but in virtual worlds where we are ostensibly "co-creators", we can't call them game gods or VW gods anymore. Of course they are gods, and our co-creation is a bit of a sham.
@nate, um, so you're saying gathering loot, owning and kitting out ships, and taking over planets plays no role in Eve Online, and is not important? There is no property, and it's all just um disembodied intelligences convening online?
@ilovich re: "But power is experienced and shared by those who participate. The divinity of Kings lasted only as long as everyone played along, and it's now a dim memory for most people in the West."
Thank you!
>Ownership only has meaning where there is scarcity, and scarcity only has meaning in a virtual world if some fascist says it does. Rights only have meaning where the infinite possibility space of your own imagination accepts restrictions applied by some fascist, restrictions that others have also accepted.
>Fascism is fun because without fascism, as in without the *deliberate* and calculated restriction of infinite possibilities to a smaller set, you're wandering an infinite space, and it doesn't matter if others are also wandering that space because by definition, the population density is infinitesimal. And if others don't share your illusions, they have no value, even to you.
This is pretty dreadful stuff, and reason enough to show why you can't let people like this take over the Metaverse.
Ownership isn't defined by scarcity, that's silly. Ownership is ownership. It's what adds value.
The space isn't infinite. There are only so many servers and so many subscriptions.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 23, 2007 at 01:04
So what is a player who figure out methods of exploiting through the laws of physics which according to the Gods supposedly should not be available to the population?
Is that some type of devil or angel? Or maybe just a spl0iter...
Like when this group of players figured out how to bring their level capped characters back to character creation where the ability to adjust all types of skills and appearances were available. It feels more like a devils work, but the only thing you can be sure about is that its a good lot of fun. ^^
Posted by: Wolfe | Apr 23, 2007 at 05:29
Again, I enjoy private property because of the 'privacy,' i don't expect to really own it. I just rent it from the server. A virtual space (partly) under my own control, even if very small, is something that i really miss in WoW.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 23, 2007 at 13:13
And once more, the effects of scale should not be underestimated. A single leader, or small clique, may rule over a few dozen, or even a few hundred. But I don't know of any WoW guilds with membership approaching the thousand man mark.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 23, 2007 at 13:16
All the below to point out that my point about users voting for too many prims was hyperbole. So... here's the long-form version.
Questions for Prok: Do SL users with free accounts get the same vote(s) as paying users and land owners? Are there citizenship requirements beyond those issues? Does Linden get to decide what issues count as "extreme" or will the voters? Will there be a Constitution with some rights that can't be taken away by democratic process (ie, will this be a Republic as well as a Democracy), so that I have some reason to believe that my experience won't be hijacked by the "tyranny of the majority?" Will there be multiple jurisdictions (ie, "big rules/laws" for all of SL that everyone votes on, and certain rules/laws for zones/islands that just local residents vote on)? Could the voters vote to end democracy (ie, vote for a king or for anarchy)? Will violations of law/rules be enforced by the publisher or by players/citizens? How will you enforce violations? Will there be levels of violations (misdemeanor vs. felony)? Will the democratic process be direct (via polling, maybe) or by representation? Who decides what issues get voted on? Do you need a certain number of "signatures" to get on a ballot? On and on we could go...
I don't really want answers to all those questions. I mean... long-term, I do. It's interesting stuff. But not here. Not now. I ask because it points out, in my mind, a substantial question you need to ask before you begin down the path of any kind of "player governance;" what's the point?
In the case of my country, the US, there's all kinds of neat historic reasons we don't need to get into as to why America split off from Britain; mostly, one might say, because they wanted to be full British citizens, but weren't given that option. Taxation without representation, etc. etc. Government (of some kind) and democracy (as one kind) in the real world are more necessary because "you can't get there from here" without either building a road, or deciding to not build a road, and people can hike. There's no third choice.
In a VW/MMO, you can decide to teleport. Or to be a space (e.g., chat room) where geography is meaningless, so "road" doesn't matter. Or you can have a "road-ed" server and an "un-roaded" server. There is, to varying degrees, no "there there" in all kinds of neat ways. Hence the "virtual" in VWs, and the "game" in MMOG.
No producer, no matter how little they listen to user input directly, is immune from consumer response; the ultimate vote is in sales dollars. Their is, in capitalist systems, a democracy of dollars.
Many companies have realized that it is much cheaper to listen to their customers than to piss them off after-the-fact and try to win them back. It's also often more fun and less litigious. Yea for customer-focused marketing! A truly robust system that takes into account something like Kaplan's "Balanced Scorecard" begins to approximate (in a capitalistic kind of way) a kind of tripartite government. You attempt to balance the desires of customers, the internal requirements of the company and the external (shareholder or owner profits) economic necessities of running a business. Without balancing those three priorities (Kaplan says), you'll fail.
Customers want good stuff cheap. Workers want high pay and fulfilling jobs. Shareholders want a good return on investment. All these things are, essentially, at odds. If management can't balance them -- if one leg of the tripod gets too short -- the system will fall. Give customers too much control, and they might vote themselves a product that isn't sustainable from a profitability standpoint, or that is unmanageable from an employee standpoint.
Which begs the question: rather than the SL players, why don't the other stakeholders get to vote the rules? Why shouldn't the Linden employees and the owners be the ones who decide everything?
Oh, wait. They do. Each to a certain extent.
The investors get to vote by granting Linden new rounds of capital... or not. The actual employees spend all their work-time doing their jobs -- being Linden employees -- and trying to make the venture a success. They vote with their professional efforts. As opposed to many players, who might spend as little as a few minutes a week or (yes) hours and hours a day.
So... There already is a system of representative voting going on. By three different "branches" of SL; customers, investors (owners), employees. There is a balance. Whether or not it works will be determined, as it is for all companies, by the market.
I'm not saying that adding government/democratic features to SL is a bad idea. But, to a certain extent, I'm saying that I think they're already there. I sense that they are not the features you want, Prok. And you are a diligent, well-spoken voice for many of the things that SL could be that it isn't.
Last question for you: if the "market version of democracy" that I outline above isn't providing Linden with the incentive to do some (many?) of the things that you think would improve SL, what evidence do you have that more direct, in-world democratic features would do so? I really don't mean this as snarky, but as an honest question. My experience has been that when people are allowed to vote on stuff (which is a privilege, of course), but the vote isn't tied to some kind of responsibility, you end up with some ganking of the votes. IE, voting with your dollars provides (usually) a balance, in that if I really, really want to support my "candidate features" (or space)... I pay for it.
This is the same reason I support some kind of more rigorous control on political advertising spending. It's the same issue in reverse. I don't mind chocolate in my peanut-butter, but democracy in my capitalism and vice-versa... not necessarily a good idea.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 23, 2007 at 13:57
How many guilds can muster up a thousand, or ten thousand? If we ever want to see epic battles. If we ever want to see 'braveheart online', or replay the invasion of normandy. Then we have to change, from juntas and warlords, into negotiators and statesmen.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 23, 2007 at 14:55
Wolfe says, So what is a player who figure out methods of exploiting through the laws of physics which according to the Gods supposedly should not be available to the population?
Is that some type of devil or angel? Or maybe just a spl0iter...
No, you're thinking Judeo-Christian, which doesn't hold the analogy. Try the Greek mythos. Such players are demigods (*cackles*) in whose veins the blood of gods runs, but they are still mortal. And thoroughly smite-able.
I'll actually read this thread um... later.
Posted by: Michael Chui | Apr 23, 2007 at 15:15
@Prokofy Neva
This is pretty dreadful stuff, and reason enough to show why you can't let people like this take over the Metaverse.
Ownership isn't defined by scarcity, that's silly. Ownership is ownership. It's what adds value.
The space isn't infinite. There are only so many servers and so many subscriptions.
Which is just another way of defining scarcity, in this case a scarcity of CPU cycles and paying customers.
But I'm not saying ownership is defined by scarcity, *value* is defined by scarcity, if you own something that's abundant and omnipresent, it has no value, you probably won't even be aware you own it. You own the air inside your house if you own the house, did you ever give it a second thought?
Again, we come back to my original question: What *gain* comes from democratic principles in a virtual environment? Why should they be enforced into a virtual world of any kind? What evidence is there that people *want* them there? Examine your assumptions, explain them to me. So far all I've seen is dismissal, if I don't already agree with you, I must be a cretin. For those of us not blessed with the proper indoctrination, what is so special about democracy? And what definition of "democracy" are you using? I don't think it means what you think it means.
On the scale of social organizations: Before DAoC RvR became a bad joke, there were formal alliances of thousands of players on most servers. In Eve right now, there are dozens of formal Alliances on the 800-1500 player scale (most, but not all of which are made up of multiple "corporations" which are equivalent to guilds). There's also a war underway with two major powerblocks of multiple alliances against a third, tens of thousands of players involved. There are routinely discrete battles with 1000 participants in one element or another of the action, and there's been one battle that involved in excess of 3000.
Oh, and most of those are not in any way, shape, or form democratic beyond the "vote with your feet" level. Cults of personality, strongman dictatorships, communistic cooperatives, capitalistic oligarchies, but democracies are pretty rare.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 23, 2007 at 18:27
Andy>
responsibility...
voting with your dollars provides (usually) a balance, in that if I really, really want to support my "candidate features" (or space)... I pay for it.
...
I don't mind chocolate in my peanut-butter, but democracy in my capitalism and vice-versa... not necessarily a good idea.
---------------------------------------
I agree with both of these statements, but unless I'm missing something, they seem to contradict. Non?
---------------------------------------
Dave>
Again, we come back to my original question: What *gain* comes from democratic principles in a virtual environment? Why should they be enforced into a virtual world of any kind? What evidence is there that people *want* them there?
----------------------------------------
Dave, I dunno, this sounds a little harsh. Let me put it this way. Yes, the idea of "democratic virtues" in a contemporary MMORPG (note the "G") sounds tongue-in-cheek in current systems (I admit it). Unless we're limiting the scope to just good guild management.
Nonetheless, I do think it is a useful exercise to think about for the future - yes, even for the "G"s. It might open up new horizons in design. Or at the very least it sounds brutish to me to deny it outright at this point. ;-)
BTW, I do like Andy's note about the need for a value calculus in designing these sorts of systems - for responsible behavior. And yes, if push-comes-to-shove I probably agree that money is probably the best poor item out there for that now. For the future, perhaps, other currencies. E.g. perhaps a social currency could be much more potent. Yet that would require a rethink of the "lite" social architecture of MMORPGs today - IMO.
Perhaps, more democratic designs would be a way forward here. And that would be ironic, in a Catch-22 way.
Posted by: nate_combs | Apr 23, 2007 at 21:43
Oh, where I said "money... best poor item out there for that now" what I really meant was "money... best LOUSY item out there for that now".
Posted by: nate_combs | Apr 23, 2007 at 21:48
@Nate: A fair question. What I meant was that "voting with your dollars" is, essentially, the whole idea behind capitalism in the marketplace. I got no problem with that in the abstract (some constraints necessary... see: child welfare laws, anti-discrimination laws, etc.).
And I got no problem with "one person, one vote" democracy as it exists in its various forms these days. I'm most familiar with the US flavor, but the others (British, Canadian, Australian, French, etc.) seem OK, too. Like the difference between Methodism and Presbyterianism, it seems more about differences in the side dishes than the main course.
What troubles me is when economic power is allowed to play too great a role in the democratic process. Wealthy individuals and corporations already wield enormous power in the economic sector, which is as it should be. That's the "voting with the dollars" portion of our program. If you build wealth for yourself or your company, you/it should be able to do more with that wealth than a less successful person/entity. That's one of the reasons to accumulate wealth. If I have 100,000 shares of stock, I get to have 10-times as much voting power in the company than you do, if you only own 10,000 shares.
But... when it comes to the governmental side, one person is supposed to get one vote, no matter how rich they are, or whom they work for. And I use the term "one vote" as a stand-in for "one equal measure of civic power."
What we're seeing, more than ever, in the US, is that a cadre of special interest groups (read: groups with lots of money) isn't just helping to provide a focus for the energies of the people they represent -- that wouldn't be as much of an issue -- but direct economic control over many of the "levers" that persuade both voters and legislators. And what that means is that if you have lots of money, you can now have lots of votes.
This has always been true, to a certain extent. But the degree to which it is believed that money is required to win an election now... and the degree to which the money to do so is concentrated in fewer hands, means that politicians are beholden not to the folks who vote for them, but for the folks who paid for the campaigning. Which means that the processes of the capital market is determining the results of our elections, not the processes of democracy.
That's what bugs me up.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 23, 2007 at 22:33
What is democracy for this purpose? It seems to be getting used as a catchall for transfers of authority from the developers and operators to the players, with every form of anti-authoritinarism being justified as "democratic".
I'm certainly not against giving the players more control in the game worlds, in fact the biggest problem is that they either don't want it, seeing it's excercise as "work" and unfun (so nobody does it), or they like it just fine, until someone else uses it against them, then they want us to take it away so nobody can abuse it.
Democratic principles of governance don't seem to hold together very well in virtual environments. That bit up there about Eve Alliance's tending to not be democratic? There's exactly *one* alliance of any size that tries to operate along traditional democratic principles (elections and so on) with a culture of individualism, and I happen to be in it. And what I see is that after a few months of trying to heard cats, our leaders either go autocratic and try to rebuild the alliance as a dictatorship (which has failed repeatedly) or they turn their back on it and it's months or years before they want any part of alliance politics.
On the other hand, some of the strong-arm dictatorships and cults of personality have been stable for years. They seem to be having fun.
As far as from a design perspective: There is an infinite possibility space of potential rules. Game design is a process of making decisions about what parts of that space to exclude from your design. This is an inherently dictatorial process, and in truth a paternalistic one as well because the players frequently *don't* know what is good for them.
Even in less structured VW's, deliberately intended to fulfill the "multiverse" experience, scarcity and inequitable distribution turn out to be a design feature. Technologically, Second Life is far inferior to Active Worlds. But Active Worlds muddled along for years before SL came out getting nowhere, and has only recently been resurrected as a SL knockoff. And oddly enough, the scarcity and inequities introduced as a result of technological limitations and design choices seem to be what made it a more desirable place to occupy, because you couldn't be just anywhere, couldn't have just anything, it became more fun and useful.
So the case for democracy doesn't look good.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 23, 2007 at 23:53
Maybe the case for democracy looks weak, but perhaps the case for religion looks strong.
With the Greek Mythos I would consider Demi Gods to be as Bartle said, populace elevated to have special powers by the gods.
Frontline exploiters become maybe the Heroes (or villains) of the stories, major players who steal godly powers from the Gods and the Demi gods to use for their own or their peoples benefit. The story of Heroes are generally good stories with a tragic ending, really good metaphore I believe. Players who stay safely within the boundaries of the magic circle are just population, regardless of how good, bad or evil they are?
The Gods tend to be interested in the Heroes, often enough they benefit from the work of Heroes and adjust their pysics around the Heroes stories. Eventually the Hero will cross an invisible border and become the enemy of the Gods and then that story ends, another Hero will emerge and a new story will be written.
*Giggles* o.O
Posted by: Wolfe | Apr 24, 2007 at 05:52
But I'm not saying ownership is defined by scarcity, *value* is defined by scarcity, if you own something that's abundant and omnipresent, it has no value, you probably won't even be aware you own it. You own the air inside your house if you own the house, did you ever give it a second thought?
What is scarcity? Again, you're defining it in the closed nature of a game world designed by game gods. Scarcity could be server space -- but the Lindens roll that out endlessly and devalue land...except not TOO much or even they can't get revenue. And server space isn't free, either, they have to pay something to the colo, and so on. They charge more than some company's charges out there for ordinary server space, but what defines the value of a 3-D world?
Of course, it's all the non-inventoriable content -- the relationships, the design and configuration of the buildings, the events. However, I'm not willing to say that only non-inventoriable content has value (which is basically what the Lindens and many tekkies say, trying to wipe out property meaning). You need a place to put that stuff. Most people aren't comfortable merely perching in black outer space or looking at a Moebius strip building, they want a RL versimilitude. And that has value. The immersibility of buildings and spaces in virtual worlds becomes its value.
>Again, we come back to my original question: What *gain* comes from democratic principles in a virtual environment? Why should they be enforced into a virtual world of any kind? What evidence is there that people *want* them there? Examine your assumptions, explain them to me.
1. Tyrants everywhere, including game companies, love to cite people's apathy, or their "not wanting democracy" or "not being ready for democracy" as a reason to go on not enabling it. But their own game forums indicate how much people fight game gods to the mat. The game gods even wind up expelling people from forums, or even closing them all together (the Lindens).
Think of democracy as like content creation. Most people will consume content. But they won't make it. 0.16 percent of the people subscribed to YouTube make the movies that the rest watch. Most games and worlds have 10-15 percent of the content
And in democracies, too, probably 10-15 or whatever percentage of the people bother to pay attention to, and work on, the mechanisms for democracy. Most people find it too boring or too suspect, even.
That doesn't mean that 10-15 percent RULE, it means that 10-15 BOTHER to make it possible for anyone to participate, and to have the benefits of democracy, even if they make them.
For the life of me, I fail to see how this usual tekkie "arguing the few for the many" approach can be applied here. Most democracies do not have significant levels of voters. It's only in a place like Turkmenistan that you will get the leaders claming 90 or 99 percent voter turn out and voter selection of state-approved candidates. If they really had that, they ensure it with things like bussing factory workers to the polls or allowing family voting or absentee voting in huge percentages democracies don't allow.
Democracy isn't just about sitting in boring parliamentary meetings tooling bills. It's also about freedom of expression and assembly, and for people to be able to speak up without reprisal when some policy affects them negatively, and participate in its mitigation and change.
>So far all I've seen is dismissal, if I don't already agree with you, I must be a cretin. For those of us not blessed with the proper indoctrination, what is so special about democracy? And what definition of "democracy" are you using? I don't think it means what you think it means.
I find it of little use to argue with anonymous people on boards like this about democracy, when I have absolutely no way of telling your level or
knowledge or education or experience. Facile dismissals of democracy indicate shallowness of thought and experience, frankly. I realize it's popular among a sectarian segment of the geekworld to scorn democratic process and hate representative democracy -- but that's merely because they always and everywhere envision themselves in charge as being "experts on everything" because "everything is hooked up to the Internet".
>On the scale of social organizations: Before DAoC RvR became a bad joke, there were formal alliances of thousands of players on most servers. In Eve right now, there are dozens of formal Alliances on the 800-1500 player scale (most, but not all of which are made up of multiple "corporations" which are equivalent to guilds). There's also a war underway with two major powerblocks of multiple alliances against a third, tens of thousands of players involved. There are routinely discrete battles with 1000 participants in one element or another of the action, and there's been one battle that involved in excess of 3000.
So? These are games, games taking place in closed-circuit worlds. The analysis has to be taken onward to open system worlds where there isn't a goal or outcome or set of routines, like SL or There.
>Oh, and most of those are not in any way, shape, or form democratic beyond the "vote with your feet" level. Cults of personality, strongman dictatorships, communistic cooperatives, capitalistic oligarchies, but democracies are pretty rare.
Vote with your feet isn't democracy. It's forced migration caused by tyranny. We want worlds not to have forced migration policies, but participation.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 24, 2007 at 09:09
@Wolfe: SWEET POINT! "The Gods tend to be interested in Heroes."
Riffing out loud here... Is Democracy inherently "uninteresting" from a game-mechanics standpoint? There is no "leveling" in a one-person / one-vote system. I can't, somehow, improve my "democratic" stats, can I? Except by getting elected to a higher office... which depends on others using their one-XP votes on my behalf.
Hmmm... maybe a system where votes=points or popularity=points in a variety of ways. How do you "grind the electorate?"
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 24, 2007 at 09:52
Ah yes, the Myth of Prowesse. Every fan of kungfu movies knows that a single unarmed "elite" will ALWAYS triumph over a horde of gigantic armored 'orcs.' Get a clue, it only ever happens in the movies, or in video games. Indeed, this kind of occurence is what makes a game a game, instead of a world. If you want 'realist worlds' you will have to give up this kind of childish fantasy.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 24, 2007 at 15:23
Okay, Prokofy Neva, I'm going to give you one more chance to engage in this conversation, rather than keep repeating your conclusions while denigrating me for questioning them. I've been off the radar for a while, but I'm not "anonymous people", I'm a game designer with a *strong* interest in using sociopolitical "prior art" to inform and improve my designs. I used to be one of the (least prolific) contributors to this blog. So when I ask you to explain what virtual worlds can gain from democratic principles, it's a dead serious question I actually am interested in the answer to, and if I take the antagonistic position it's in the interest of moving the discussion forward. To give you an idea of how seriously I take this: The article that made many of my colleagues think I was hopelessly "ivory tower".
So:
Most democracies do not have significant levels of voters. It's only in a place like Turkmenistan that you will get the leaders claming 90 or 99 percent voter turn out and voter selection of state-approved candidates. If they really had that, they ensure it with things like bussing factory workers to the polls or allowing family voting or absentee voting in huge percentages democracies don't allow.
Okay, so parliaments, Congress, multiple-tier municipalities (city, county, state, and federal in the US), the US electoral college and party conventions, these are not "multiple levels of voters? And voter apathy is a feature of democratic systems, not a bug? So do virtual worlds have extraordinary disenfranchisement, or just total apathy? Perhaps they are perfect democracies, where nobody has any need to vote anymore?
So? These are games, games taking place in closed-circuit worlds. The analysis has to be taken onward to open system worlds where there isn't a goal or outcome or set of routines, like SL or There.
Why? These alliances and power blocs have *many* of the properties of governance. Taxes, division of labor, foreign and domestic policy, diplomacy, espionage, and of course collective military activity. They behave *far* more like governments than any organization in There or SL, and the fact that so few of them are democratic is interesting, especially in light of the observation that most real life governments in history have not been democratic. So what are the operational properties of democracy that will make virtual worlds better places for the inhabitants? And why, when the players can make any governmental structures they wish, do they choose either various versions of tyranny, or no government at all?
Vote with your feet isn't democracy. It's forced migration caused by tyranny. We want worlds not to have forced migration policies, but participation.
So the Right of Departure *wasn't* the first democratic freedom extracted from the european feudal lords, the one that made possible, even inevitable, the destruction of the feudal system of governance because serfs were no longer "bound to the land" and the whims of whatever feudal lord they happen to have been born into the territory of? Sorry, my mistake.
How is the migration forced? The players can choose to remain, or to leave, generally if they leave they have unlimited rights to take with them anything portable and sell anything that isn't. If this freedom is trivial, then why has preventing this often been a priority for tyrants?
Okay, let's say you create your Utopia, the citizens of your virtual world are all participants in the democratic process. A deeply divisive question comes up, and 51% vote one way, 49% the other. The 49% absolutely cannot abide life in a society that follows this rule. Do you allow them to flee the "tyranny of the majority"?
What if the 51% voted to dissolve the legislative bodies and appoint a "President for life" with unlimited power to make law and delegate authority?
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 24, 2007 at 18:51
Lighten up dave. Since you're an (all hail the mighty) designer, you can do as you please. Design an entire universe to suit yourself, and live in it alone.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 24, 2007 at 18:58
Oh, give me a break. If just creating worlds to suit myself was my aim, I wouldn't be asking the questions. My highest professional priority is to figure out how to make worlds that are fun for people that *aren't* like me. Because "right of departure" *is* the most fundamental and inescapable fact of virtual worlds, if people don't like my worlds, they won't occupy them.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 24, 2007 at 19:44
Dave, I dunno, this sounds a little harsh. Let me put it this way. Yes, the idea of "democratic virtues" in a contemporary MMORPG (note the "G") sounds tongue-in-cheek in current systems (I admit it). Unless we're limiting the scope to just good guild management.
Nonetheless, I do think it is a useful exercise to think about for the future - yes, even for the "G"s. It might open up new horizons in design. Or at the very least it sounds brutish to me to deny it outright at this point. ;-)
Yeah, when the players feel disenfranchised in a game, we call that "an opportunity for exit". They cancel, we lose their money, and usually we have only indirect methods to figure out why. "The following properties of accounts and characters are more common among those that cancel." Purely after the fact statistical analysis is the best tool we have, ideally we'd have a way for the players to tell us what changes they really want *before* they quit.
BTW, I do like Andy's note about the need for a value calculus in designing these sorts of systems - for responsible behavior. And yes, if push-comes-to-shove I probably agree that money is probably the best poor item out there for that now. For the future, perhaps, other currencies. E.g. perhaps a social currency could be much more potent. Yet that would require a rethink of the "lite" social architecture of MMORPGs today - IMO.
Perhaps, more democratic designs would be a way forward here. And that would be ironic, in a Catch-22 way.
Well, and quasi-governmental structures do appear to have very real impacts on retention rates. A common reason given by people who quit in Eve (at least among those who live in 0.0) is that they got fed up with the politics. On the other hand, many of those don't "quit", they stop playing but keep their account going for a few month training skills, then a few months to a year later we see them again.
So there seems to be a lot of gameplay in political structures. Democracy certainly seems to do well at funnelling all the incompatible viewpoints into harmless activities rather than open revolt. Well, sometimes, it seems vulnerable to the emergence of tyranny by popular demand.
--Dave
Posted by: | Apr 24, 2007 at 20:13
Your 'right of departure' sounds a lot like my 'right of access.' When i encounter an infuriating nuisance in your game, i would rather escape to my private house, and ban him. But you would prefer me to cancel my subscription instead? Or do you plan to hire a platoon of babysitters to 'protect' me?
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 24, 2007 at 21:44
I think of it more as "exclusion" than access. It falls under a broad list of powers that the players may have access to in order to avoid contact with someone (guild remove, chat channel bans, /ignore, killing their character over and over until they go away). All of them represent limitations and sanctions players can impose on each other.
And no, I'd rather you didn't cancel your subscription, and giving the players the tools to sort it out amongst themselves is far more cost-effective than getting CSR's involved.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 24, 2007 at 22:17
Yes, that's exactly what i'm talking about. Do I have the right to exclude folks that i dont want to hang out with? The tools today allow me to ignore his messages, IMs, chat bubbles, and such. But it's a 3D world now, and that doesnt seem to be enough. I would also like to exclude the presence of his avatar, objects, pets, automated weapons, and other nasty things that dont even use text.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 24, 2007 at 22:35
How about the use of his name by those still able to interact with him? What if he's standing in the very same space you are, and you don't even know it because you won't allow yourself to see him? Kind of icky, ehh? What if *you* walk into *his* avatar (generally considered impolite)?
Having "private" space that you control who can and cannot come into isn't unique to SL, it's a standard part of the feature set for "Player Housing" in all of its form, and a pretty strong undercurrent in the popularity of "instanced" content.
In an openly PvP game like Eve, you and your friends kill him and his friends until one side of it has had enough and excercises their "right of departure" (generally to the other end of the map, sometimes to safe "empire" space, rarely out of the game).
You run into the classic conundrum, "Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose" pretty quickly. If you have personal space that everyone expects you to have control of and you excercise that, that's one thing, but if you start impinging on his ability to go about his business in "public" space, your freedom is his tyranny.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 24, 2007 at 22:51
SL struggles with this same issue. So far, the answer is to have several different kinds of 'places.' Some public, but some private, some regulated, but others are lawless, 'enter at risk' zones.
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 24, 2007 at 22:58
I should note that the business of going to the other side of the map rather than quitting the game is pretty much unique to Eve, in other PvP games the only options were to either quit, or start all new characters and organizations.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 24, 2007 at 23:03
You do make Eve sound interesting. I haven't seen it, yet. :)
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 24, 2007 at 23:14
Mikyo says: "SL struggles with this same issue. So far, the answer is to have several different kinds of 'places.' Some public, but some private, some regulated, but others are lawless, 'enter at risk' zones."
Right... and those are game/space "features." Features that, if you had a broad enough democratic system, could be turned off by the electorate. Right?
I'm all for a platform where the rules, when known, are well enforced. Bad code is bad. Bad player behavior is bad. Cheating is bad, unless cheating is built into the system as part of the fun. But these are all circular arguments that end up saying stuff that is, essentially, "bad is bad."
If my expectation, as a player, is that my "home" in a virtual world has various features -- I can have total privacy if I want, I can ban/allow individuals/groups, I can make the windows opaque... whatever -- then anything that violates those expectations is "bad," regardless of whether the expectation was set by the publisher (God/Monarch?) or a democratic system. Ganking a benign despotism is as bad as ganking a democracy.
If features of a game/platform are to include player/user input as to how the system is to be used, the *expectations* of the results of those features needs to be very clear to users, and needs to be set in a way to provide a level of clarity such that new users are not confused about what things are "open to vote" and what things aren't.
Why? Because unlike in RL, in virtual spaces, the rules are a much larger part of the experience. Take the instance we've been using about privacy in an avatar dwelling. Suppose that's a feature that's a must-have for me as a player; the ability to have a space where I can put my stuff, chat with friends, dance, etc. without being disturbed by the uninvited. If I find a platform where that is a feature, I may very well choose to invest time, money, effort there because of that. I can have as much faith that the feature will continue as I care to place in the publisher. Same as in any product/service I buy or subscribe to. I make a cost/benefit analysis accordingly.
Now... add democracy into the equation. I now have to know 2 more things. First, is the feature I value open to democratic debate? And, is it likely that the user-base will substantially alter the feature in ways I find objectionable. As Dave said, what if 51% of the people decide to take away a part of the game I really, really like?
In RL, there are obviously things you can't vote away; gravity, oxidation, Disco. In games, you can't vote away those things, or the necessities of the code. But there are, of course, lots of things you could vote for.
One of my favorite SL issues that would have been a great test of a plebiscite was that of point-to-point teleportation. I don't know all there is to know about the topic, but (in very short), it used to be that you had to teleport to a couple specific locations in an SL region. Then a change was made, and you could teleport to any coordinate or to the location of any person. Big change.
Why? Well, the locations nearest the teleporters had been, until the change, much more valuable, because folks, upon teleporting, then had to walk/fly past those locations to get to where they were going. It was the SL equivalent to having a store on the corner near a bus stop; really, really good "location."
So... should Linden have made that change? From a straight UI perspective, direct teleportation makes perfect sense. "I wanna go *there* as fast as possible. Zap. I'm there." But... from a "Let's build a world!" perspective, there's an argument to be made for having places that have inherently more "geographical" value. And on a platform where the land isn't real... time/attention of users is the real value.
It would have been PERFECT for some kind of grand democratic debate, imho. Because the case for each way to go is really interesting and has a bunch of good pros/cons and natural proponents/opponents.
It could have resulted in a real-estate market where there was at least one value inserted into the system that wasn't (ahem) fictional. It could have created nodal, concentric levels of interesting content where a small, interesting, core set of locations near each teleporter were seen to be more valuable than huge, sparse, widly divergent "islands" of separated users.
It could also have caused the grid to crash 10-times as often, if teleportation/use was concentrated in those key areas. Which may have been the main "tech god" reason to spread out all the teleporting in the first place. A "gravity" issue after all...
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 25, 2007 at 10:56
Richard, your comments on guild governance re: benevolent dictatorships is spot-on. As a benevolent dictator of my guild for five years, across at least four MMO's, I can tell you that we have seen many well-intentioned democratically run guilds die a painful, politically morassed "death by committee" while ours prospered under my enlightened, despotic rule.
As others have noted, there is a practical upper limit on our membership - I do not think it would work for a 200 or 2000 person guild, but the 50-75 people we have now are well-managed and happy to leave the esoterica of guild management up to me. I delegate much to my officers, as any well-run organization would.
Regarding the main topic: Has anyone looked at A Tale in the Desert? I never got into it myself, but it seemed at least to try to advance the concept of user governance.
Posted by: Axecleaver | Apr 25, 2007 at 13:01
I think I turned one of my old dictatorships into something similar to a monarchy but instead of family ties we developed a system for training new despotes, in a relatively controled manner while transfering the ideals and knowledge of what made the guild work to several candidates.
It lived on for at least a few years after my departure. :P
Any mmorpg dev that sets out to be a governmental institution will most likely develop crap. A government tends to spend a lot of time repairing broken things: boring!
Gods amuse themselves and their population with enjoyble things, then worry about repairing whatever broke when the party is over.
Posted by: Wolfe | Apr 26, 2007 at 05:13
"Were you to devise a set of metrics to measure the health of a virtual world, what would they be? High on my list, I suspect, would be the willingness and the commitment of strangers to bring me home.
Dare I suggest it, such a motivator could be a sturdy platform upon which to grow online democratic values."
I like that. It's a shame the actual discussion seems to be more around what features game designers choose to inject into their shallow entertainment diversions to garner the most economic benefits to themselves.
I don't see how discussion about what is or isn't "fun" in something so facile as WoW, has anything to say about "grow[ing] online democratic values."
Your local amateur sunday league football team may be rife with political intrigue, but nobody seriously uses it as a basis for the discussion of governance when you're really dealing with a bunch of hairy guys who just want to kick a ball around and beat another team on a wet, grey afternoon. So no, as a potential future "citizen of the metaverse" I really don't care what features add profit potential to some designer's game. I'm more interested in how the regulation and governance of a space which will be increasingly important to my livelihood and social status, will pan out. Because that's actually serious business. You'll find people demanding a vote pretty quickly when something more important than "fun" or "success in a game" is on the table.
Posted by: Ace Albion | Apr 26, 2007 at 06:29
Okay, Prokofy Neva, I'm going to give you one more chance to engage in this conversation, rather than keep repeating your conclusions while denigrating me for questioning them.
Dave, I'm sorry, but if you make a glib and facile apology for fascism, then expect a pushback from me and others.
>I've been off the radar for a while, but I'm not "anonymous people", I'm a game designer with a *strong* interest in using sociopolitical "prior art" to inform and improve my designs.
I'm aware that you design games and have a games web page, but I'm not a gamer, so it doesn't resonate for me, I'm sorry. Whatevery your sociopolitical frame of reference, it's likely not one I share judging from how quickly you can demand fascism in online games.
This is definitely an occupational hazard, growing out of game-gods' perception that only their games and their internal systems and thinking should pwn everything, but more and more, the kinds of worlds that are being made open-ended and not solely in the game-gods' hands are begging these questions. Ace Albion's analogy with not wanting the local hairy soccer team to run your entire real life with its methods is spot on. I don't want the smelly little fascism you gleefully promote in games to become my way of virtual life in every aspect.
>I used to be one of the (least prolific) contributors to this blog. So when I ask you to explain what virtual worlds can gain from democratic principles, it's a dead serious question I actually am interested in the answer to, and if I take the antagonistic position it's in the interest of moving the discussion forward.
I think you're probably just stuck in games. You're keeping as your frame of reference "games like I design and games in general" whereas I reject that as anything I need to be bound by. Some rote game where I quest and kill and make guilts to quest and kill might, by your lights, become more "fun" if it has fascism, or at least some sort of medieval authoritarianism, hard-wired into it, so that kill or be killed, privileging of elites without accountability, etc. all becomes part of the score.
Why must I accept those norms for all of virtual life? That's silly. I don't. And I won't. And I don't have to. Because I don't sit in games, I go to worlds and social media, and there, I have every right to begin to demand some other paradign than your old-school fascist game routines.
>Okay, so parliaments, Congress, multiple-tier municipalities (city, county, state, and federal in the US), the US electoral college and party conventions, these are not "multiple levels of voters? And voter apathy is a feature of democratic systems, not a bug? So do virtual worlds have extraordinary disenfranchisement, or just total apathy? Perhaps they are perfect democracies, where nobody has any need to vote anymore?
Here, you're just making use of the various tekkie memes available to your particular extremist class of tekkies, who scorn representative democracy. Oh, is this stereotyping? Sure, but you just stereotyped yourself by scornfully asking provocative questions like, "oh, hey, voter apathy, is that a bug or a feature *sneer* *sneer*".
Voter apathy is different in different settings. When an election like Bush v. Gore comes as close as it does, whatever voter apathy you might imagine, that tells you something important about very deep splits and stakes in that society that indeed did play themselves out in the voting system.
The idea that a democracy can become "perfect" or "wouldn't need to vote" anymore is an absurdity, and one said in bad faith, merely to be provocative. Democracies, if they are liberal essentially, presuppose that they are imperfect and that no one has access to the total truth, and that compromise and consensus through open systems must be reached. The idea that there'd be some notion of voting systems needing to "fall away" is like the Marxist idiocy called "the withering away of the state".
>Why? These alliances and power blocs have *many* of the properties of governance. Taxes, division of labor, foreign and domestic policy, diplomacy, espionage, and of course collective military activity. They behave *far* more like governments than any organization in There or SL, and the fact that so few of them are democratic is interesting,
I think this is said merely out of ignorance about groups and projects and communities in SL, so I'll leave it at that.
>especially in light of the observation that most real life governments in history have not been democratic.
So? What has that got to do with the price of fish in China? The tide on the globe in the last 25 years has been toward democracy, not away from it, whatever its fits and starts. To ignore that is to pretend that you can pwn the globe with your analysis the way you pwn the game design in your game.
>So what are the operational properties of democracy that will make virtual worlds better places for the inhabitants? And why, when the players can make any governmental structures they wish, do they choose either various versions of tyranny, or no government at all?
Whether or not human nature devolves to evil rather than good, or tyranny rather than freedom, need not be the selling point for this or that ideology.
The operational properties are abundantly clear and I don't see why they need to be argued so vehemently, but it's typical of an overall allergenic and even hostile attitude I find widespread in your class of people.
If you have an open system of commentary and criticism, it leads to improvement of the system. People can criticis and correct without reprisal.
If people can control their own destinies and make choices about their land or group or business, they are free to make mistakes as well as successes and that contributes to the overall ability of the system to have feedback, criticism, correctives and learning from mistakes.
These two very fundamental aspects of any democratic system *you would hope* would be *hardwired* into the scientific process itself. So that no tekkie, of the type able to design games with computers, would question the need for systems with feedback, self-correcting mechanisms, and such.
So...why abandon that scientific truth when it comes to asking the question as to why democracy, freedom of speech, the right of the people to gather to petition those in power for redress of grievances -- why would those feedback and self-correcting loops suddenly be something you'd sneer at?
In your world, only the game-god gets to correct his mistakes -- if he admits them and when he feels like it.
>So the Right of Departure *wasn't* the first democratic freedom extracted from the european feudal lords, the one that made possible, even inevitable, the destruction of the feudal system of governance because serfs were no longer "bound to the land" and the whims of whatever feudal lord they happen to have been born into the territory of? Sorry, my mistake.
Yes, your mistake. Or rather, even if you can find some literalist tekkie-inspired date of firstness, your limited vision. Because the right of the Church to be free and have its own elections was the first thing in the Magna Carta. Then you had the right of inheritance I believe first after that, the right to pass on the property you have to another by your designation (most game companies jealously guard this prerogative and make it a bannable offense to try to pass on your account to anyone).
>How is the migration forced? The players can choose to remain, or to leave, generally if they leave they have unlimited rights to take with them anything portable and sell anything that isn't. If this freedom is trivial, then why has preventing this often been a priority for tyrants?
Well, your thinking, again, is bound by games, and games aren't the only thing that we want to make up the Metaverse and virtuality in general. Why should someone be stripped of property and value because they don't agree with the game-gods? Where is due process and the rule of law?
Read the rest of the Magna Carta--filled with handy tips of how we can make game-gods less tyrannical and more responsible. Things like just compensation for seized goods.
>Okay, let's say you create your Utopia, the citizens of your virtual world are all participants in the democratic process. A deeply divisive question comes up, and 51% vote one way, 49% the other. The 49% absolutely cannot abide life in a society that follows this rule. Do you allow them to flee the "tyranny of the majority"?
You're mixing up *the right of emigration* and *the right to flee the tyranny of the majority* which OF COURSE they should have, and I never claimed they shouldn't have, with my critique of your "vote with your feet argument" (a common one, a hackneyed one, even, in these discussions, which I've handily argued against even citing all kinds of scholarly arguments about why this is insufficient, sorry I can't dredge up the links now).
My point is that you have such a closed and rigid system, that you can't admit democracy, change, correct, collaboration -- freedom -- so you have to institute a forced migration policy. You call it falsely "democracy" or "free choice" that in the general world at large, people can leave this or that game and go to another one of their choice.
But that's not your democracy or the Metaverse's democracy; that's the democracy of the real world at large, so no fair invoking *that*. All you have is a forced migration policy -- shut up, or leave. And I'm saying that's insufficient in the more mature Metaverse that leaves the rigid rote patterns of games and game-gods, and goes out further into a freer context where people should be able to have the right to change their government.
>What if the 51% voted to dissolve the legislative bodies and appoint a "President for life" with unlimited power to make law and delegate authority?
This sort of abstraction can't legitimately be cited to argue against democracy -- again, it's done with the totalitarian sneer that acts in bad faith. Sure, democracy always contains within it the seeds of its own destruction by having to allow majoritarian votes that lead to an Algeria situation. So? That doesn't end democracy as problem or a solution, as anyone subjected to a world in which voting brought in thuggish terrorists who killed a lot of people would tell you. They'd like to be able to vote them out of office. And eventually, they do.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 26, 2007 at 07:35
@Prok and Ace: I think what I'm missing in both of your arguments is a realization of the fact that the actions that are contained in an MMO/VW are already part (in many cases) of democratic systems; which is my point to randolfe_ when he posts about the economy of SL.
At some point, the citizens of [insert democratic country here] could decide that [insert VW] is [bad/good] and create legislation that would [destroy / subsidize] it, or at leat that [insert question of virtual rights] is [bogus / righteous]. At that level, the metaverse is/will be as subject to democracy as smoking in restaurants, the draft, abortion, speed limits and medical marijuanna.
And the other capitalist, vote-with-your-dollars, tripartite "democracy" of customer, company and owner also applies some pretty decent levers to these systems.
So... again... my point is that, just as we don't want to ignore democratic features, we don't want to automatically import them because they work in RL. Firsly, because RL imposes many existing democratic "features" on these spaces already, and to add them may be either contradictory or redundant. Secondly, because they might be poor levers of behavior and results in terms of their relationships to virtual rather than real spaces. And third, because they might just suck.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 26, 2007 at 15:14
"Any mmorpg dev that sets out to be a governmental institution will most likely develop crap." Okay, but we discussing virtual worlds, not "Dungeons and Dragons version 99969.321"
Posted by: Mikyo | Apr 26, 2007 at 19:09
@andy
I wondered why my ears were burning. In your assessment of SL (and all other online games/worlds) as subordinate to the sovereignty of real world nation states, I agree completely. In fact, you could say my economic objections were exactly in the same category -- improper disambiguation, as it were.
Virtual worlds cannot be democracies with any real sovereign rights; merely democratic organizations within democratic sovereignties. Similarly, virtual worlds are not _economies_, but markets within economies.
I think a lot of wrong thinking comes from the transnational nature of virtual worlds and the internet. I also believe this is mostly fanciful wishing. Most of these questions have been solved for years now, after the rise of the internet, internet commerce, transnational companies, and global financial markets.
Posted by: randolfe_ | Apr 26, 2007 at 19:21
randolfe_ wrote:
But as I never tire of pointing out, randolfe_ (and quite respectfully), this is a distinction that itself doesn't bear much weight as a universal, because it aligns itself with a narrow understanding of economies as restricted to market transactions (and to the political/economic institutions which legitimate them). What virtual worlds make clear, it seems to me, is the importance of seeing "economy" in the broader sense, encompassing the exchanges not only of material capital, but also social and cultural capital, and how all of these are parlayed one into the other.
While this is always true of human life, online or off, this broader economy becomes more obvious -- and perhaps in the relationship of its elements somewhat transformed (given the vastly lower production and distribution costs) -- in virtual worlds. In this respect, your attempt to subordinate SL's market economy to a national (or international) one, while perhaps *useful* for certain kinds of questions we might ask, fails as a claim that is supposed to hold for all the questions we might ask about these environments and their economies. In other words, if someone wanted to refer to SL's economy in the course of an exploration of how human exchange within it works, I think this would be a perfectly useful application of the term, and not objectionable on your grounds.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | Apr 26, 2007 at 20:16
Thomas
When I say economy, I mean financial economy, as enabled by the study of markets (involving tangible exchanges of monetizable goods or services), neoclassical economic theory, and modern competing economic theory. As such I do not invoke the more esoteric or postmodern definitions of capital.
Perhaps a new paradigm is arising in which the notion of capital itself will be called into question. I am simply attempting to point out that claiming a new paradigm is arising, is itself an extraordinary claim.
While applying "economics" to, for lack of a better term, "non economic things" is enlightening and useful, it is nonetheless outside of the original scope of the field of study. It is also outside of anything I've ever claimed, criticized, or debated. (It is sometimes frustrating, respectfully so, that I am simultaneously criticized for being both overly narrow and overly vague.) Ambiguities arise when applying economic theory to things like culture, or say biological systems. For example, economics can be applied to biological evolution. However, natural selection pressures can be applied to market economics. Logically, this means there is a limited amount of deductive value that can be extracted through these lines of reasoning.
Posted by: randolfe_ | Apr 26, 2007 at 20:44
randolfe_, I'm just recommending that you avoid the universalizing statements that suggest that a financial understanding (of markets, economies, etc), is the preeminent one. After all, while the edifice of RCT economics reigned for quite some time, it did not reign forever, and economics itself (as a discipline) has recently woken up to the fact that artificially separating these things has severely hampered its account of the world. This isn't "postmodern," it's merely where the social sciences are now. Every reasonable economist I know (and I know many) readily and graciously acknowledges the artificiality and limitations of treating the economy in too narrow a vein. As I took pains to note, this does not mean that certain questions may not be usefully addressed through the kind of approach you're working from, only that it is not the only, nor always the best, way of understanding *economic* actions.
I'm not quite sure why you so readily bristle at my comments -- they are always offered in the spirit of increasing understanding. Defensiveness about your discipline and its (past) limitations doesn't really serve any purpose.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | Apr 26, 2007 at 22:19
Prokofy, can you dial the ad hominem back a notch or three? I haven't called you names, I've simply forcefully challenged your ideas. Your response has been to deny that I have any standing with which to do so, or the knowledge or capacity to understand the answers. You've insulted me repeatedly, engaged in repeated strawman attacks, and generally been dismissive of the idea that I even might have knowledge you don't. You're working my last nerve, and I must be mellowing in my old age because a few years ago I'd have already been tearing into you. As it is, only respect for our hosts is keeping me from taking this debate straight into the gutter you keep pulling it towards. You seem to be quite frightened by the prospect of substantive debate on this subject.
The idea that a democracy can become "perfect" or "wouldn't need to vote" anymore is an absurdity, and one said in bad faith, merely to be provocative. Democracies, if they are liberal essentially, presuppose that they are imperfect and that no one has access to the total truth, and that compromise and consensus through open systems must be reached.
Governance is a dynamic system of keeping the gears of society from jamming each other up and making the whole machine come apart. Democracy has many merits for this purpose in the real world, but its value in a virtual realm is not established, and you keep refusing to even discuss the ways in which it might apply does not make your case. It is *not* an automatic given that what virtual worlds need, gamelike or otherwise, is democractic systems.
I ask again: What definition of democracy are you using? What specific elements of virtual worlds should operate under what democratic processes?
I think this is said merely out of ignorance about groups and projects and communities in SL, so I'll leave it at that.
Why? Please, share with me some examples of residents of Second Life using democratic principles to organize themselves. What problems are they trying to overcome with these, how are they implementing them, and what, if any, reverses or unintended consequences has this led to? How many such organizations are there, what is their scale, and are the participants satisfied with the results? Are there any web forums, blogs, or articles where I can read about them, and where in Second Life should I look for them?
I have been under the impression that Second Life was filled with cyber-sex pleasure-domes, static and abandoned potemkin villages built for corporations, and an endless series of half-finished model dreamhomes and game prototypes. But I can accept that as only an occasional tourist I am not connected to the social networks that might point me to the good stuff. So hook a guy up, okay?
BTW, have you checked out ATITD? There's an environment where democratic principles are used heavily, and actually seem to work. Do I have to carry both sides of this conversation by pointing to examples?
The tide on the globe in the last 25 years has been toward democracy, not away from it, whatever its fits and starts.
That's debatable, but irrelevant. Most of the human beings who have ever lived (hell, most of those now living) did not live under democracy. There's obviously *far* more examples of non-democratic governence to draw on for inspiration.
Virtual worlds are not simply a reflection or extension of the real world, but can be (and by available evidence, mostly are) other places, where the inherent properties of the residents is the only immutable aspect of the social dynamic (and through the process of self-selection into preferred environments, even that is not absolute). I can easily imagine people who live in more or less democratic mileaus in real life choosing virtual worlds that are anything but. Actually, I don't have to imagine it, which is where we started this.
Whether or not human nature devolves to evil rather than good, or tyranny rather than freedom, need not be the selling point for this or that ideology.
Who's talking about ideology? I'm talking about social system analysis and design. I don't think that social systems that work in virtual worlds neccessarily say anything about what would work in real life. The fact that you're attaching ideological baggage to the question is a reflection of the post-modern humanities viewpoint that social analysis should serve ideological ends. You seem to be under the impression that all we can do is *argue* about what is the superior social form, and the winner gets to implement his version of utopia for the multiverse.
No, this *is* a technical problem. We get to destruction-test socio-political paradigms without using up people in the process.
The operational properties are abundantly clear and I don't see why they need to be argued so vehemently, but it's typical of an overall allergenic and even hostile attitude I find widespread in your class of people.
If you have an open system of commentary and criticism, it leads to improvement of the system. People can criticis and correct without reprisal.
If people can control their own destinies and make choices about their land or group or business, they are free to make mistakes as well as successes and that contributes to the overall ability of the system to have feedback, criticism, correctives and learning from mistakes.
As long as they aren't "My class of people"? BTW, which class is that? The open contempt you seem to hold the people with the skills to *build* what you only talk about seems rather...pathetic.
Anyway, it's not like I could stop them from freely engaging in commentary or criticism. Or would have any interest in engaging in reprisals. What would be the point? My problem isn't them engaging in commentary, it's figuring out how the hell to turn that feedback into operational changes. And keep minorities of them from gaming the system I use for that.
These two very fundamental aspects of any democratic system *you would hope* would be *hardwired* into the scientific process itself.
Huh? What the hell does the scientific process have to do with democracy? Which "scientific process" are you speaking of here? The hard-sciences process of observation, theorization, and experimentation? Or the humanities approach of ideological agendas and academic politics? Because the latter is pretty much dead, it just hasn't had enough time to start holding the funerals.
There's observable truth, there's testable theory, and all the rest is just mental masturbation.
So...why abandon that scientific truth when it comes to asking the question as to why democracy, freedom of speech, the right of the people to gather to petition those in power for redress of grievances -- why would those feedback and self-correcting loops suddenly be something you'd sneer at?
They're overly complicated, inelegant, and prone to wild and unpredictable oscillations. They also seem to be *way* too boring, most people would rather go somewhere things just work than invest effort participating in them for virtual worlds. Fascism makes the trains run on time.
In your world, only the game-god gets to correct his mistakes -- if he admits them and when he feels like it.
Did you even read the article I linked above? Must not have, you'd have noticed that I already realize that the current process is *way* too slow to react, and tends to follow the path of least resistance straight off of cliffs.
Yes, your mistake. Or rather, even if you can find some literalist tekkie-inspired date of firstness, your limited vision. Because the right of the Church to be free and have its own elections was the first thing in the Magna Carta. Then you had the right of inheritance I believe first after that, the right to pass on the property you have to another by your designation (most game companies jealously guard this prerogative and make it a bannable offense to try to pass on your account to anyone).
Those were democratic reforms? I thought it was obvious they were just ruling class infighting (but then, you'd have known that had you actually read my article). Other than a few lines about Yeomen, the Magna Carta didn't concern itself with the common people.
BTW, most of the large game companies now explicitly support various forms of passing on your account, for a fee. Mostly to prevent fraud, people giving away the account, then using the original registration details to take it back. If there's an explicit record that the account has been transferred, it heads that off.
Read the rest of the Magna Carta--filled with handy tips of how we can make game-gods less tyrannical and more responsible. Things like just compensation for seized goods.
Sure, make me do the *rest* of your homework. BTW, I have read it, repeatedly. I'm beginning to believe I have a better grasp of it than you do, since I don't need it to "prove" anything about my personal ideology.
My point is that you have such a closed and rigid system, that you can't admit democracy, change, correct, collaboration -- freedom -- so you have to institute a forced migration policy. You call it falsely "democracy" or "free choice" that in the general world at large, people can leave this or that game and go to another one of their choice.
Okay, so now *you're* the one arguing that virtual worlds are inherently incapable of being democratic environments? Or were you under the impression that the metaverse is going to spring forth fully formed from the sheer weight of ideological neccessity, without mere "tekkies" having any part of it? Or are you going to build it?
What's up with the spelling of "tekkies"? I suspect there's some subtle insult involved there, but I'm afraid it's wasted on me.
But that's not your democracy or the Metaverse's democracy; that's the democracy of the real world at large, so no fair invoking *that*. All you have is a forced migration policy -- shut up, or leave. And I'm saying that's insufficient in the more mature Metaverse that leaves the rigid rote patterns of games and game-gods, and goes out further into a freer context where people should be able to have the right to change their government.
Why should their government control the "physics" of the metaverse? Why not the other way around, physics determines governmental structure? Even non-game virtual worlds must inescapably wrestle with questions that have far more in common with game design than anything traditional governance ever deals with (as in the example of Second Life teleportation above).
This sort of abstraction can't legitimately be cited to argue against democracy -- again, it's done with the totalitarian sneer that acts in bad faith. Sure, democracy always contains within it the seeds of its own destruction by having to allow majoritarian votes that lead to an Algeria situation. So? That doesn't end democracy as problem or a solution, as anyone subjected to a world in which voting brought in thuggish terrorists who killed a lot of people would tell you. They'd like to be able to vote them out of office. And eventually, they do.
Eventually, they kill them. But grievous errors in the administration of virtual worlds don't end with a cigarrette, a blindfold, and a bullet, or even with prison cells. They end without even a whimper, a quiet slide into irrelevance and eventual non-existence.
Please, leave your real world ideological baggage out of the dicussion. The "rightness" or "wrongness" of political structures are irrelevant in this context, virtual world governance is only about what works. If democracy works, I'm all for it. If it doesn't, I'm not even against it because I don't need to be. It's just irrelevant.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 27, 2007 at 01:53
randolfe,
I've been trying to call Thomas on this social capital stuff for awhile now, but he deflects my concerns and now doesn't even talk to me.
I respect the concept of non-monetarized capital. Social capital is something I deal with and appreciate all the time.
But...there's an awful lot of goofy stuff around these ideas. Basically, I find it neo-Marxism, is all, but attempting to label it in this way makes them head for the hills, of course.
Fact is, you don't go up to 96th and Broadway (would the upper West side be the place we should start to look for social capital?) and see...the social capital exchange. You know, my 4 hours of babysitting for your 3 hours of helping my son with is Spanish homework.
The metrics for measuring these more esoteric things just aren't there (yet), but worse than that, there's a very hardcore and extremist belief in places like SL that social/human capital *alone* can carry a world. That you don't need money or business. That you can all just put out the Creative Commons tip jar.
But somebody always has to pay, somewhere, and they are merely shielding the truth about that with the big lie of "social capital".
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 27, 2007 at 02:28
"Social Capital" and other such constructs are basically attempts to extend economic "rational actor" analysis to behaviour that isn't motivated by fiduciary gain. It's a body of theory, one that allows predictions to be made to test the theories.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 27, 2007 at 02:36
I like that. It's a shame the actual discussion seems to be more around what features game designers choose to inject into their shallow entertainment diversions to garner the most economic benefits to themselves.
You wound me, sir. Making money isn't my end in and of itself, it's just that to pay my bills and get others to work on the parts of it I can't do myself, I need it. If I could have found someone who would have made those resources available without expecting me to make even more money, I'd be all over that. But I either have to make money, or convince someone that I can, if they let me use some of their for a while.
There are much easier ways to make a living, even to get rich. My eventual goals are much, *much* deeper than just making money.
I think the divisions between "game" environments and "virtual worlds" are mostly artificial. At a minimum, they are overlapping sets, not all virtual worlds are games, and not all games are virtual worlds, but there is a very significant set that are both.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 27, 2007 at 03:31
Prokofy, can you dial the ad hominem back a notch or three? I haven't called you names, I've simply forcefully challenged your ideas.
Dave, I don't really see any "ad hominem attacks" here, but I do see *labels* that summarize your hidebound thinking. You have a set of reference points. One is a lack of appreciation of democracy, and a refusal to apply in in virtual worlds as an automatic. That may well stem from your lack of appreciation for it in RL, I don't know, I suspect that could be, given your readiness, without blushing, without any regret, to take the side of fascism, and say anything less than that is fun. Awful stuff! But...I don't see you even having an awareness of that.
>Your response has been to deny that I have any standing with which to do so, or the knowledge or capacity to understand the answers. You've insulted me repeatedly, engaged in repeated strawman attacks, and generally been dismissive of the idea that I even might have knowledge you don't.
You've "set me straight" be making sure I understand you're a game dev, yes, I've grasped that much. You remind me of the Linden on the Herald comments once, where I was complaining about sim performance and expressing doubts about a method they were using to forcibly maintain sim FPS by making all the scripts work slower, it just struck me as a funny kind of sim socialism. He replied, "You must not be a game dev." That spoke volumes -- the assumption that "we're all game devs here" or "only game devs get it" etc.
I do hope you have some appreciation of democracy in your own country, like a Western country. But you may scorn it there, too, I don't know. Well, it's simple. Why can't we have that in worlds, too? Who's to say we can't? You? The game dev?!
>You're working my last nerve, and I must be mellowing in my old age because a few years ago I'd have already been tearing into you. As it is, only respect for our hosts is keeping me from taking this debate straight into the gutter you keep pulling it towards. You seem to be quite frightened by the prospect of substantive debate on this subject.
I'm not frightened of anything at all, hardly. It seems you must fear debate because you aren't taking up my points whatsoever.
Here's what I said:
"The idea that a democracy can become "perfect" or "wouldn't need to vote" anymore is an absurdity, and one said in bad faith, merely to be provocative. Democracies, if they are liberal essentially, presuppose that they are imperfect and that no one has access to the total truth, and that compromise and consensus through open systems must be reached."
This is just plain nutty. I just outlined various ways in which residents or players giving feedback, in which voting, participation, etc. could be used. And *are* used!!!
There seems to be an unexpressed assumption. That democracy only exists to give feedback in a system where you can't own all the information flow, and need people to talk and say what's up. There's an assumption that server side, with the ability to gather the sum of all server data, performance data, even chat logs and behaviour patterns, that therefore you have all the feedback you need, thank you very much, and don't need to hear from *people* whom you may regard as redundant, client-side, to all the "hard data" you gather client-side. I reject that premise as short-sighted.
>It is *not* an automatic given that what virtual worlds need, gamelike or otherwise, is democractic systems.
>I ask again: What definition of democracy are you using? What specific elements of virtual worlds should operate under what democratic processes?
I'm using only the most ordinary and common one, of people being able to speak up with proposals and criticisms, and participate in features. I've already stated that and it's an obvious truism, and your drilling on this is odd.
>Why? Please, share with me some examples of residents of Second Life using democratic principles to organize themselves. What problems are they trying to overcome with these, how are they implementing them, and what, if any, reverses or unintended consequences has this led to? How many such organizations are there, what is their scale, and are the participants satisfied with the results? Are there any web forums, blogs, or articles where I can read about them, and where in Second Life should I look for them?
I'm afraid I'm not going to take the time to give you a huge taxonomy of Second Life and its groups, but you need to look more at the "discussions" filter of the events calendar and not make these glib and obvious statements about sex palaces, that's silly.
My own rentals company for me is just such an experiment, where I constantly try to make rules with people giving feedback and trying to be fair and just and find ways for people to get along, and to deal specifically with crime, and with dissatisfaction. But that's only one company, and not a government, and not pretending to be some grand experiment in democracy.
The Neufriestadt experiment in governance with different political parties and attempts to make three brances of government is one such government sim; the Independent State of Caledon is another with its various methods of trying to turn what by necessity has to be one-person rule (only single ownership is recognized for islands) into something like a ruler plus a cabinet, I suppose.
Ever single sim or neighbourhood on a mainland sim deals with all the governance issues constantly, trying to resolve the issues of scarcity (FPS, prims) with the issues of harmony, compromise, consensus, how to mitigate what harms one's neighbour but not compromise one's own freedoms. This is constantly occuring everywhere, but it doesn't occur in some organized fashion like "a game guild" such as to make it *easy* for people who want *facile answers* to grab it and make one college-essay type piece about it. Nevertheless, it's vitally important, and there will be books coming out that have more analysis of the anthropology and ethnography of Second Life and then perhaps skeptics like you will be persuaded.
>I have been under the impression that Second Life was filled with cyber-sex pleasure-domes, static and abandoned potemkin villages built for corporations, and an endless series of half-finished model dreamhomes and game prototypes. But I can accept that as only an occasional tourist I am not connected to the social networks that might point me to the good stuff. So hook a guy up, okay?
I dunno, go in, look up the groups, join bunches them (you get 25) whether Second Life Bar Association or Free Culture or Mainlanders or whatever, depending on your interests, watch for the notices of events, check out the discussions, join one of the neighbourhoods. I think they have some parcels open in Neufriestadt.
>BTW, have you checked out ATITD? There's an environment where democratic principles are used heavily, and actually seem to work. Do I have to carry both sides of this conversation by pointing to examples?
Um, no, you can be less lazy and just go read the existing material with all the examples alread, though.
I was at first quite excited about ATITD, when I was looking to find something better than the Sims OnLine. I spent some months trying to first get off that island then getting on to the mainland. I found it frustrating, lonely, and stupid. It had too many dumb game routines in it, of the sort "pick up the mud, ok, now plant the flax, oops, you forgot the water, go back and get that" or whatever. It had this forced collectivism in it, that i hate in games, where it demanded of you, seemingly, to join groups and hook up with people tittering with all their inside jokes and try to learn from them in exasperation, but if you wanted to do solo learning, you could do that, but then you'd be doomed to roam this endless parched-mud landscape for hours. I had to stop wasting time on it.
So I read about it, and found that yes, there were indeed many interesting democracy thingies going on there, sure. But still, it's one game-god/pharoah ruling it who has tightly scripted it as a quest with wins. I personally just don't find it really very compelling to dress up like an Egyptian and roam around doing simulated Egyptian stuff. That kind of stuff just gets in the way for me, it's an obstacle.
>That's debatable, but irrelevant. Most of the human beings who have ever lived (hell, most of those now living) did not live under democracy. There's obviously *far* more examples of non-democratic governence to draw on for inspiration.
Well, I prefer to accentuate the positive.
>Virtual worlds are not simply a reflection or extension of the real world, but can be (and by available evidence, mostly are) other places, where the inherent properties of the residents is the only immutable aspect of the social dynamic (and through the process of self-selection into preferred environments, even that is not absolute).
This strikes me as faux science and monkey math, I'm sorry. Perhaps aggregated, all the games of the world add up to this. But...it is all rapidly becoming beside the point as the open-ended virtual worlds knock the game pieces off the table, and start something else -- not-a-game. But we don't know yet if in fact everyone is going to want to play Gor and be masters and slaves when given open-ended spaces. Maybe they will. That will be sad. That will be no more an indictment of liberal democracy than the RL fact of many large countries with large populations also maintaining authoritarian rule.
>I can easily imagine people who live in more or less democratic mileaus in real life choosing virtual worlds that are anything but. Actually, I don't have to imagine it, which is where we started this.
I'm still not getting why we can't have customer feedback, participation, voting, criticism, management, etc. Hell, even in SL, we're going to get home rule soon.
>Who's talking about ideology? I'm talking about social system analysis and design.
This is one of those over-the-top tekkie comments that should be left to speak volumes all on its own, but you may be able to see it. If you don't think social system analysis IS ideology; if you can't see that your design IS an idealogy, than you're hopeless. Of course it is.
>I don't think that social systems that work in virtual worlds neccessarily say anything about what would work in real life. The fact that you're attaching ideological baggage to the question is a reflection of the post-modern humanities viewpoint that social analysis should serve ideological ends.
*Rolls eyes*. "Ideological baggage" is just ideology *you don't like*. You want some warmed-over Marxian/corporativist/authoritarian ideology that you fancy from virtual worlds to be blessed as "the neutral state, against which all others are judged to have baggage". But...we outside your ideological milieu can see it has plenty of baggage.
You're the one serving your ideological ends with your analysis: you want to justify fascism, not only for virtual worlds, but so it seems, for real life.
!!!
>You seem to be under the impression that all we can do is *argue* about what is the superior social form, and the winner gets to implement his version of utopia for the multiverse.
Erm, yes, I'm "under that impression" because that's exactly what people do in Second Life.
>No, this *is* a technical problem. We get to destruction-test socio-political paradigms without using up people in the process.
Yes, go ahead, make it a technical problem, by which you mean, "take my ideology and code it as law". No thanks!
I said:
"If you have an open system of commentary and criticism, it leads to improvement of the system. People can criticis and correct without reprisal.
If people can control their own destinies and make choices about their land or group or business, they are free to make mistakes as well as successes and that contributes to the overall ability of the system to have feedback, criticism, correctives and learning from mistakes."
There's...a reason you can't concede this obvious and scientific point?! And that is...???
>As long as they aren't "My class of people"? BTW, which class is that? The open contempt you seem to hold the people with the skills to *build* what you only talk about seems rather...pathetic.
Hell if I know what this crack is about. However, you can be quite sure that I do only hold open contempt for people who imagine that their building skills are all that is required to make a world. That's exactly why I bother with forums like this, so that people like you don't take over with this ideology, which I call "creator fascism".
>Anyway, it's not like I could stop them from freely engaging in commentary or criticism. Or would have any interest in engaging in reprisals. What would be the point? My problem isn't them engaging in commentary, it's figuring out how the hell to turn that feedback into operational changes. And keep minorities of them from gaming the system I use for that.
Always with the games. Always with the problems of a game-god. Never with any conception of an open-ended world. A game-god making a closed-circuit game of routines can't worry about democracy. His subjects/customers burn through content, and then they go grabbing at the stuff they can hack or game, and he has to crack the whip. He has to do this for their *own good,* eh? Because otherwise, they won't have a game with rules, it will just be looting and buying game gold.
Except...even in closed games, as Raph Koster's site will show you, people rebel, make the game-gods mitigate features, etc. So it's not all so simple.
I said:
"These two very fundamental aspects of any democratic system *you would hope* would be *hardwired* into the scientific process itself."
>Huh? What the hell does the scientific process have to do with democracy? Which "scientific process" are you speaking of here? The hard-sciences process of observation, theorization, and experimentation? Or the humanities approach of ideological agendas and academic politics? Because the latter is pretty much dead, it just hasn't had enough time to start holding the funerals.
Oh, I see what we're about here now. This is the problem of "The Two Cultures" and C.P. Snow. Except now we're in reversal. In Snow's day, the scientists were banging on the bastion of the old boys' network from the humanities, trying to gain recognition and power. Now the tables are turned, but worse, there isn't even any longer a concession to a notion of TWO cultures!!!
We actually have a fullblown case of what I'm always talking about here: avid hatred and contempt for the humanities by the scientists.
Avid.
Hatred.
And Contempt.
It's good to see it there, in writing.
Of course, "the humanities" which includes all the values of literature and philosophy and such are now merely reduced to "an ideological agenda" (more often then not called in some Marxian cant "a neoliberal blah blah").
I don't know anything of "academic politics" and I don't see why they have to intrude on a discussion about games and worlds, but I gather that *your* experience with academic politics *that didn't go your way* may have soured you? How else to understand "what's up" with that sort of blunt swipe at the humanities?
>There's observable truth, there's testable theory, and all the rest is just mental masturbation.
Um, yes, well the "scientific processes" I referred to was about *gathering feedback*. And accepting a variety of comments and criticisms about a feature. To correct it?
Oh, never mind, I guess you get all the feedback you need from your server tapes, ok!
>They're overly complicated, inelegant, and prone to wild and unpredictable oscillations. They also seem to be *way* too boring, most people would rather go somewhere things just work than invest effort participating in them for virtual worlds. Fascism makes the trains run on time.
Um, ok. Well, you just noodle around in your games then, while the rest of the Metaverse walks around you? Just don't get in the way, please!
>Did you even read the article I linked above? Must not have, you'd have noticed that I already realize that the current process is *way* too slow to react, and tends to follow the path of least resistance straight off of cliffs.
Um, I dunno, have you read the gadzillion pages of my blog, like "Finding the Lawn-Mower: Philip's Evil Ideas"?
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/01/finding_the_law.html
>Those were democratic reforms? I thought it was obvious they were just ruling class infighting (but then, you'd have known that had you actually read my article). Other than a few lines about Yeomen, the Magna Carta didn't concern itself with the common people.
I'm less interested in reading your article, which isn't a pre-requisite for understanding your extremist point of view anyway, now that I hear you dis the Magna Carta as "infighting in the ruling class" and not getting that that's how you have to *start* in an unfree situation.
But...you probably just want everybody to pull the "yes" lever on the "vote-yes-only" voter and um, express the wisdom of the crowd or something...
>Sure, make me do the *rest* of your homework. BTW, I have read it, repeatedly. I'm beginning to believe I have a better grasp of it than you do, since I don't need it to "prove" anything about my personal ideology.
Well, um, if you read it, we can look forward to it appearing soon in an implementation in *your* game, eh?
>Okay, so now *you're* the one arguing that virtual worlds are inherently incapable of being democratic environments? Or were you under the impression that the metaverse is going to spring forth fully formed from the sheer weight of ideological neccessity, without mere "tekkies" having any part of it? Or are you going to build it?
Ah, there we go again, creator fascism! Only those who build count! Only the coders get to rule! Nobody else gets to be a part of it! Ugh. Elitist crap. No sale.
And no, they aren't inherently incapable. Human beings often like to be told what to do, or tell others what to do. But they eventually arrive at more democratic systems, they always have.
>What's up with the spelling of "tekkies"? I suspect there's some subtle insult involved there, but I'm afraid it's wasted on me.
Totally.
>Why should their government control the "physics" of the metaverse? Why not the other way around, physics determines governmental structure? Even non-game virtual worlds must inescapably wrestle with questions that have far more in common with game design than anything traditional governance ever deals with (as in the example of Second Life teleportation above).
This sounds like the Marxist "material determines consciousness" article of faith. It's not a religion I believe in. Some people turn off fly. Some islands have telehubs, some don't. Choice, choice.
>Eventually, they kill them. But grievous errors in the administration of virtual worlds don't end with a cigarrette, a blindfold, and a bullet, or even with prison cells. They end without even a whimper, a quiet slide into irrelevance and eventual non-existence.
Oh, yeah? When people's livlihoods, identies, and 24/7 informational logs are going to be contained in them? I don't think so.
>Please, leave your real world ideological baggage out of the dicussion. The "rightness" or "wrongness" of political structures are irrelevant in this context, virtual world governance is only about what works. If democracy works, I'm all for it. If it doesn't, I'm not even against it because I don't need to be. It's just irrelevant.
Oh dear God, this is awful stuff. I do hope smarter people than me can show up and rip that idiocy to threads better than me. Real-world ideology is written in every line of code. It's deeply embedded in every game. Democracy isn't a machine that doesn't work or works badly, it's an approach to how you make a machine -- if you in fact decide that humans control technology, and technology doesn't control humans. And that's what it's about.
I know which format I'm chosing, especially when the technology is controlled by a guy named Dave who will tell me technology has to control humans, when all means is that technicians have to control some humans who don't rebel against them.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 27, 2007 at 03:41
@Andy
"@Prok and Ace: I think what I'm missing in both of your arguments is a realization of the fact that the actions that are contained in an MMO/VW are already part (in many cases) of democratic systems; which is my point to randolfe_ when he posts about the economy of SL."
I didn't miss it. Nate started a topic about growing online democratic values, and Dave waded in with a fistful of "get over it" and "developing a game democracy doesn't make me any money". It doesn't matter that there are democratic things happening in WoW or Eve, because it's all just people feeding their egos. They are just games. There's some kind of cognitive dissonance that must switch on when some guy takes out an EVE ship that has an eBay or Game Time Card value of $20,000 and shrugs it off when it gets blown up. The counterpoint being supposedly grown adults bullying a woman to tears because of how some item with blue writing on the name got handed to an avatar. It's like bowling club drama.
This is like that argument that you can't peer at microcosmic economies and "governments" because nobody inside them cares enough to behave in a realistic way. So I wouldn't look for lessons around democracy by looking at games. You need to see what happens when people's livelihoods are at risk, the roof over theirs and their family's heads, the food on their table. Not whether they get +4 or +5 stamina per second off item X or Y.
I don't know if we even have anything like that yet. My thinking was around the future, way beyond anything like SL for example. I'm concerned about how I will be governed as I travel around the New Metaverse. Will it be local national government stamped over, according to server geography, or avatar owner nationality? Or will it be some "magic circle" new law space? And how would we go about formalising some way of getting people to behave in an agreed, reasonable way? How would we govern that?
We'd shrug and say "Well the metaverse monopoly owner doesn't like democracy so we'll just suck it up or go make beaded necklaces in the woods?"
Will we still have people saying "lolstfufag ITS JUST A GAME" when they wipe out some father's weekly earnings in some act of childish spite?
Posted by: Ace Albion | Apr 27, 2007 at 03:43
Has anybody else read
Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World
? I think it should be mandatory reading for discussions of this nature.
Posted by: lewy | Apr 27, 2007 at 04:01
Gah.
Posted by: lewy | Apr 27, 2007 at 04:03
Posted by: lewy | Apr 27, 2007 at 04:05
Prokofy I regret to inform you that in the real world true Democracy has been dead for a very long time. Aside form the smallest of applications what has replaced it is the Democratic republic. You should be familiar with this as many if not all 'Democratic' nations use this model.
This is how it works: The people nominate others to speak for them - in the US this is the electoral college - and they usually follow the voting pattern of the people. They are not required to however and there has been at least one recorded instance where the 'popular' vote and the EC's vote were different.
That is the face of 'Democracy' in the modern world - a face that quite frankly is as corrupt and corruptible as any single Human.
Posted by: Reality | Apr 27, 2007 at 04:59
Ok - forgive the double post there, system must have hiccuped.
Posted by: Reality | Apr 27, 2007 at 05:03
Just wanted to mentioned that Prok is either merely wrong or disingenuous again: Magna Carta does indeed hold freedom of the Church as its first article but there is no mention whatsoever of elections or the Church having any right or dispensation to hold them.
Furthermore, the Papal Bull on Church leadership issued by Pope Innocent III (who is mentioned in the said Magna Carta article) is explicit that only time a Church election is ever acceptable is for the appointment of a new Pope.
Posted by: Rich Bryant | Apr 27, 2007 at 09:39
@Thomas
I do not intend to bristle at you specifically, and I find your comments considerate and intelligent, as I do those from most others. I was reacting to the circular sinkhole I get stuck in trying to criticize the financial-economy and related claims about the SL virtual world, and VWs "economies" in general.
When I narrow my criticisms to a specific details and circumstance I'm informed that I don't see the bigger picture. When I take an opposing theoretical view I'm informed I don't support it with details. But when I provide those details ad nauseum the context again shifts to render my analysis invalid for not considering bigger picture issues.
I refer to postmodernism -- something I admittedly loathe -- as a cynical metaphor for the continual insistence by so many in the "Second Life is the Future" camp to refuse to allow anything to be defined, tested and analyzed. Every claim tested is met by "it wasn't meant to be in the first place" or "you don't understand the paradigm". No, it's not postmodernism proper. But it shares the same frustrating qualities.
If you accept that I meant financial-economy when I said economy and I was speaking about the current 'era' not perpetuity, then I stand by the absolutism of my original statements.
a) Virtual worlds have no sovereignty, and are always subordinate to and subject of nation state sovereignty.
b) Virtual worlds have no financial capital economies, and are always dependent upon host economies for growth.
Either or both of these things could change. Humanity could agree upon and bestow sovereignty to a Virtual World. This is highly unlikely for at least a few more generations, in my opinion.
Similarly, if enough information-economy goods and services take place wholly within a Virtual Worlds to reach the threshold of producing meaningful productivity-fueled growth, then VW economies will be "real" financial economies, properly measured by GDP, etc. Again, it is possible and maybe even more likely than the issue of sovereignty. But it won't happen anytime soon, and probably not for decades at the minimum, in my opinion. I say this because, in this regard, VWs are not unique, and offer nothing particularly compelling not already offered by a decade of established internet markets and commerce. VWs are just an evolutionary user interface. And, in my opinion, commerce conducted on VWs will quickly revert to real-currency denominated transactions. At that point, little distinguishes SL from eBay, except for all the (admittedly important for other reasons) non-financial stuff you study and are an expert in understanding. But I don't talk about the GDP of eBay, which is a big market. It's not an economy as such. It's a market. The same with any VW until the above tests are met.
Finally, it's not that I don't care about or don't value notions of social capital or cultural transactions. I just don't speak to things outside of my domain of expertise. I maintain I can study the financial economy making simplifying assumptions about cultural and social interactions. I believe this is already well accounted for in behavior economics, which I think is accepted by most everyone today. But behavioral economics does not require I defer macro and micro rigor to things like cultural transaction value. It just requires I accept that actors are not rational in a simplified understanding of "rational". The same applies to financial psychology. I need not be an expert in psychology to study finance, only understand that the maximizing function applied by financial actors includes qualitative factors, which can nonetheless be quantified through means such as Bayesian logic.
Posted by: randolfe_ | Apr 27, 2007 at 13:52
It's a shame there's no way to split this into several topics, since the discussion has gone a couple directions, with some interesting thoughts sputtering out prematurely.
But first things first:
Well, it's more accurate to say that fascism is "fun" (or compelling, at least -- I think there is sometimes a confusion between the two) to those who ideate towards fascism. Some people find it inherently distasteful and onerous, and are not interested in participating in a social activity or community where they are either arbitrarily dominant or submissive to other individuals according to the design of the system.I've largely lost interest in the "MMORPG" genre because of the prevalence of this kind of thinking, both on the part of developers and fellow players, and I engage in these discussions in part because I'm interested not in how things are, but rather what else is possible, and I get the sense that this might be the orientation of others you are currently arguing with.
Note: I am talking about the lesser game/guild authoritarianism practiced by ueberguild leaders and game GMs, and working on the assumption that no one here (including but not limited to Dave) is endorsing mid-20th Century European Fascism.
It depends on what you define as democratic principles, and I think -- as you've asked in a few posts -- that it is worth unpacking what those who clamor for democracy are talking about.For me, it begins with property and inherent rights which game makers need to recognize. I think, as Corey talks about in the article cited in the original post, that what I would like to see first as basic participant rights for people who use virtual worlds:
1) What I "create" is "mine" insofar as I can decide what to do with it. This includes all of my virtual items and the avatar itself. "Mine" includes rights of trade, and I should be able to exchange items and even avatars with other people as I see fit.
The argument from this end is simple: I have put effort into an activity, so the ownership of the result should belong to me. If game developers don't like this, they should design game systems where there is no value in trading items. The creation of rare tradable quantities creates markets.
2) While I support game makers rights to keep me from being abusive to other players, the game makers don't have the right to tell me that I don't keep my basic, assumed rights when I'm in game. This needs to be clarified as to what that means, but the start would have to be a developer that was willing to make the concession first.
I'm not picking on you, I just find a lot of what you say interesting to mull over.I think it is correct to align science and Democracy (or Liberalism*) together, for a few reasons. In short, it is because they both depend on transparency and liberty from control of an overseeing body to work correctly, thus Science arguably thrives best when practiced in a Liberal political environment, because the Pope or Dictator is not reviewing the results (or the experiments) and deciding what's true.
* I use "Liberal" here to replace democracy, in part because it's funny to do so, but also because in many ways people who are talking democracy are talking about Enlightenment ideas of Liberalism (as opposed to current misidentification of communism/socialism as equating to Liberalism), i.e. property rights, inherent behavior rights, etc.
But to the crack about the "humanities," you should watch it. Many of us here are in the humanities, and I for one would thank you not to casually denigrate what we have chosen to do with (at least part of) our lives. To say that the humanities are concerned with only "ideological agendas and academic politics" is grossly distorting, and it belies not only ignorance of what is involved in the study of subjects grouped under the rubric of "Humanities," but also your lack of experience with the so-called Hard Sciences (which are pretty rife with "ideological agendas and academic politics" themselves).
Posted by: illovich | Apr 27, 2007 at 14:22
Dave, I don't really see any "ad hominem attacks" here, but I do see *labels* that summarize your hidebound thinking. You have a set of reference points. One is a lack of appreciation of democracy, and a refusal to apply in in virtual worlds as an automatic. That may well stem from your lack of appreciation for it in RL, I don't know, I suspect that could be, given your readiness, without blushing, without any regret, to take the side of fascism, and say anything less than that is fun. Awful stuff! But...I don't see you even having an awareness of that.
As with most of your characterizations of me, this one had me laughing. I'm actually closer to libertarian than anything else, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, with a "live free or die" attitude about civil liberties and a strong current of distrust for the state, but an equally strong feeling that in a rich nation no child should be destined for inevitable poverty and ignorance regardless of the status of their parents, there should always be an opportunity for someone to recover from their non-fatal mistakes, and the wealthy and powerful cannot be allowed to trample on the poor and weak.
Actually, it was exposure to the formal libertarian party that first made me realize that ideological purity makes you stupid. Those people are *nuts*.
You've "set me straight" be making sure I understand you're a game dev, yes, I've grasped that much. You remind me of the Linden on the Herald comments once, where I was complaining about sim performance and expressing doubts about a method they were using to forcibly maintain sim FPS by making all the scripts work slower, it just struck me as a funny kind of sim socialism. He replied, "You must not be a game dev." That spoke volumes -- the assumption that "we're all game devs here" or "only game devs get it" etc.
Well, once at a conference, shortly before the launch of a competing product, I found myself sharing a table with the developers of that title, guys that I had been locked with in a hammer-and-tongs battle for mindshare that got pretty nasty at times (I had my own "hate wall" in their office). They were surprised when I wished them luck, and I explained to them that the number of people who could understand the pains of administering a virtual world was (at that time) a very small set, and I looked forward to having more people to commiserate with.
Like I said, at that point our relationship was very antagonistic, and they were pretty dismissive. A year later, I met them again. We just looked at each other, nodded, and started drinking. Until you've been through the fire, you can't understand. Once you have, you don't need an explanation.
I've only met a couple of the Lindens. But yeah, I know exactly why they couldn't explain it, and you can't understand. Only the gods understand the price of divinity.
I do hope you have some appreciation of democracy in your own country, like a Western country. But you may scorn it there, too, I don't know. Well, it's simple. Why can't we have that in worlds, too? Who's to say we can't? You? The game dev?!
Certainly not me. But the residents don't seem to be in any hurry to "take up the white man's burden." They seem to think that's what they pay *me* for. If I can find ways to make them take over without mucking everything up, I'm more than okay with that.
I'm not frightened of anything at all, hardly. It seems you must fear debate because you aren't taking up my points whatsoever.
Here's what I said:
"The idea that a democracy can become "perfect" or "wouldn't need to vote" anymore is an absurdity, and one said in bad faith, merely to be provocative. Democracies, if they are liberal essentially, presuppose that they are imperfect and that no one has access to the total truth, and that compromise and consensus through open systems must be reached."
This is just plain nutty. I just outlined various ways in which residents or players giving feedback, in which voting, participation, etc. could be used. And *are* used!!!
In editing the response, I tried to trim out what seemed merely insulting or perjorative, perhaps sometimes I clipped things of substance but it wasn't my intent.
I'm a believer in the Jeffersonian ideal of governance; "The state that governs least, governs best." In any form of government, it would be "perfect" when it operated with absolutely no ripples, nobody ever needed to complain because the feedback loops were so well tuned that all sources of discontent were satisfied before they could actually emerge. It wouldn't matter if the government was ostensibly democratic, authoritarian, or whatever, because it would do what government is "supposed" to do: Let people live their lives and stay out of their way.
But yeah, I'll grant that the bit about "perfect democracies" was disingenuous. People are not wired for contentment, they have to find something to bitch about.
There seems to be an unexpressed assumption. That democracy only exists to give feedback in a system where you can't own all the information flow, and need people to talk and say what's up. There's an assumption that server side, with the ability to gather the sum of all server data, performance data, even chat logs and behaviour patterns, that therefore you have all the feedback you need, thank you very much, and don't need to hear from *people* whom you may regard as redundant, client-side, to all the "hard data" you gather client-side. I reject that premise as short-sighted.
Funny thing is, I created the player-feedback system for Camelot. Wasn't particularly democratic (well, perhaps republican, in the original sense), but it got the job done, piped the concerns of the players as directly as possible into the development debate. Actually, to be totally honest, it had a lot more parallels to religious paradigms than governance, if you wanted changes to the magic spells for Hunters, you went to the priest (Hunter Rep), who prayed to the messengers of the gods (the Product Quality group), who, if your prayer was deemed worthy, took it to the God of Magic (developer in charge of the spell system).
Now tell me about my God Complex, okay? Or can you stop psychoanalyzing me based on the methods I find to get the job done?
I'm using only the most ordinary and common one, of people being able to speak up with proposals and criticisms, and participate in features. I've already stated that and it's an obvious truism, and your drilling on this is odd.
Not really. Are we talking "Vox populi, vox dei" or about sending a letter to your congressman? Total democracy, or direct participation at only the lowest levels? I don't care if the players want control over the zoning laws, and if giving them the powers to sort out their own grievances about who did what to who will keep them happy and out of my hair, that's all good. But, on the other hand, if they want a plebiscite over whether there will be a change in execution priorities for the scripting system, or some other issue where they can't have what they want, they're SOL.
Ever single sim or neighbourhood on a mainland sim deals with all the governance issues constantly, trying to resolve the issues of scarcity (FPS, prims) with the issues of harmony, compromise, consensus, how to mitigate what harms one's neighbour but not compromise one's own freedoms. This is constantly occuring everywhere, but it doesn't occur in some organized fashion like "a game guild" such as to make it *easy* for people who want *facile answers* to grab it and make one college-essay type piece about it. Nevertheless, it's vitally important, and there will be books coming out that have more analysis of the anthropology and ethnography of Second Life and then perhaps skeptics like you will be persuaded.
I look forward to them. Really.
I was at first quite excited about ATITD, when I was looking to find something better than the Sims OnLine. I spent some months trying to first get off that island then getting on to the mainland. I found it frustrating, lonely, and stupid. It had too many dumb game routines in it, of the sort "pick up the mud, ok, now plant the flax, oops, you forgot the water, go back and get that" or whatever. It had this forced collectivism in it, that i hate in games, where it demanded of you, seemingly, to join groups and hook up with people tittering with all their inside jokes and try to learn from them in exasperation, but if you wanted to do solo learning, you could do that, but then you'd be doomed to roam this endless parched-mud landscape for hours. I had to stop wasting time on it.
I find the ATITD experiment fascinating. Not for me, either, but that such a construct can be created is very, *very* interesting. I think Andy Tepper is making a business mistake by not running multiple shards, there's an obvious social scaling problem and he's not going to get the money he needs for grander visions without either increasing the number of worlds or squeezing the existing base for more money.
>That's debatable, but irrelevant. Most of the human beings who have ever lived (hell, most of those now living) did not live under democracy. There's obviously *far* more examples of non-democratic governence to draw on for inspiration.
Well, I prefer to accentuate the positive.
The current states didn't appear from nowhere, and democracies don't routinely devolve into authoritarian rule for no reason. You learn more from failure than from success.
This strikes me as faux science and monkey math, I'm sorry. Perhaps aggregated, all the games of the world add up to this. But...it is all rapidly becoming beside the point as the open-ended virtual worlds knock the game pieces off the table, and start something else -- not-a-game. But we don't know yet if in fact everyone is going to want to play Gor and be masters and slaves when given open-ended spaces. Maybe they will. That will be sad. That will be no more an indictment of liberal democracy than the RL fact of many large countries with large populations also maintaining authoritarian rule.
I'd say what I was offerring was observations in search of a theory. I have several, and ideas for experiments to start whittling them away.
And I agree, how people choose to arrange themselves in a virtual world, where consequences are consensual and non-fatal, doesn't neccessarily reflect upon their desires for the real world.
I'm still not getting why we can't have customer feedback, participation, voting, criticism, management, etc. Hell, even in SL, we're going to get home rule soon.
Who's saying you can't? I'm just asking if you *need* it. And is it an all or nothing, or can we pick and choose?
This is one of those over-the-top tekkie comments that should be left to speak volumes all on its own, but you may be able to see it. If you don't think social system analysis IS ideology; if you can't see that your design IS an idealogy, than you're hopeless. Of course it is.
Of course it *isn't*. Social analysis should be about truth, about how things actually work, not about what the analyst needed to prove. The very fact that you can't see that design isn't ideology, but engineering, probably means you're hopeless.
Game design is about creating an experience for the user. Not his ideal experience, not a little slice of utopia, but an interesting experience that changes his viewpoint. He can be very immersed in living in a virtual fascist state, and that can actually *increase* his understanding of why fascism is a bad thing for his real life.
Am I a fascist for showing him that experience? Is he one for experiencing it? Well, I've read Mein Kampf, does that make me a Nazi? I've also read Das Kapital, am I a Marxist? To make a better case (since Hitler was certainly a Nazi and Marx a Marxist), if a Jewish director does a bio-pic documentary of Hitler with an objective viewpoint, is he a Nazi?
Don't confuse the actor with the character. If I implement an environment where fascism thrives, it doesn't mean I have any love for fascism, only that it was what I needed to do (or, probably more accurately at the current level of craft, because I didn't know any better and that's what came out).
*Rolls eyes*. "Ideological baggage" is just ideology *you don't like*. You want some warmed-over Marxian/corporativist/authoritarian ideology that you fancy from virtual worlds to be blessed as "the neutral state, against which all others are judged to have baggage". But...we outside your ideological milieu can see it has plenty of baggage.
You're the one serving your ideological ends with your analysis: you want to justify fascism, not only for virtual worlds, but so it seems, for real life.
Nope. See, this is the problem with the Humanities, since it is axiomatic that everyone pursues "research" that supports their ideology, you can always back-track from conclusions to motives. So when you're talking with a reductionist, and the reductionist reaches conclusions that point back towards ideology you find repugnant, you assume he *wanted* those conclusions and has that ideology. And he looks at you like you've suddenly started preaching from the Bible in Klingon. Things generally go downhill from there.
Erm, yes, I'm "under that impression" because that's exactly what people do in Second Life.
Sounds like you've found your little slice of Utopia, then. Seems a silly place, but to each their own.
Yes, go ahead, make it a technical problem, by which you mean, "take my ideology and code it as law". No thanks!
Again, you're assuming I have an emotional investment in the results. I don't. I want to find out how to create the underlying "physics" that causes various sociopolitical regimes to emerge. Then I want to figure out how to use those to create an interesting experience for the players. "What happens if tribal social dynamics are set loose in the asteroid belt?" "How about anarcho-capitalism in a tolkienesque realm?" "What if we could get Fascism and Communism into the same world, and let them fight it out?" "What would it be like to be a minor noble in the court of a mid-dynasty Chinese Emperor?"
I don't want to create *my* utopia. I don't want to create *a* utopia. I want to create a multiplicity of "utopias", places where people can go and find a universe that works differently, interestingly, not just in an artificial way but in a social way.
You people with your ideological vision of a cohesive utopian metaverse that will not just be "virtually" perfect, but will somehow magically "trickle down" into objective reality and make *it* perfect, strike me as hopelessly naive, and ridiculously short-sighted.
"If you have an open system of commentary and criticism, it leads to improvement of the system. People can criticis and correct without reprisal.
If people can control their own destinies and make choices about their land or group or business, they are free to make mistakes as well as successes and that contributes to the overall ability of the system to have feedback, criticism, correctives and learning from mistakes."
There's...a reason you can't concede this obvious and scientific point?! And that is...???
Because it's not a scientific point, it's a catechism, a declaration of faith.
Hell if I know what this crack is about. However, you can be quite sure that I do only hold open contempt for people who imagine that their building skills are all that is required to make a world. That's exactly why I bother with forums like this, so that people like you don't take over with this ideology, which I call "creator fascism".
Only the gods know the price of divinity. ;-)
Always with the games. Always with the problems of a game-god. Never with any conception of an open-ended world. A game-god making a closed-circuit game of routines can't worry about democracy. His subjects/customers burn through content, and then they go grabbing at the stuff they can hack or game, and he has to crack the whip. He has to do this for their *own good,* eh? Because otherwise, they won't have a game with rules, it will just be looting and buying game gold.
And your metaverse won't have rules? Your metaverse won't have an underclass? Dude, you're playing a game there even if you don't think you are, and if your level of immersion has blinded you to the bumpers and slides, then I guess there's a lesson to be taken from it.
Except...even in closed games, as Raph Koster's site will show you, people rebel, make the game-gods mitigate features, etc. So it's not all so simple.
Been there, done that, got the nerf-bat hanging on my wall.
Oh, I see what we're about here now. This is the problem of "The Two Cultures" and C.P. Snow. Except now we're in reversal. In Snow's day, the scientists were banging on the bastion of the old boys' network from the humanities, trying to gain recognition and power. Now the tables are turned, but worse, there isn't even any longer a concession to a notion of TWO cultures!!!
No hatred, not even contempt. You just don't matter anymore. You're preaching at the heathen in Klingon, and totally oblivious to the foundations eroding beneath you because your "science" has been so disconnected from objective truth for so long, you don't even recognize it when you see it anymore.
But you give me too much credit, I have even less claim to the status of "scientist" than you do, I am but a humble craftsman, a mere tinkerer.
Um, yes, well the "scientific processes" I referred to was about *gathering feedback*. And accepting a variety of comments and criticisms about a feature. To correct it?
That's not science. Unless you're saying with a straight face that PoliSci is actually a science? It's useful, and in fact I have used it, but except as observable data for deeper theory, it's not science, just management.
Um, ok. Well, you just noodle around in your games then, while the rest of the Metaverse walks around you? Just don't get in the way, please!
You're cute. You look at SL, at a collection of virtual recreations of suburbia, red light districts, and corporate office parks, at glorified "homeowner's associations" of furries and leather fetishists and would-be pedophiles, and you think *that* is the wave of the future? Please, amuse yourself if you wish, it's all grist for the mill.
Oh, yeah? When people's livlihoods, identies, and 24/7 informational logs are going to be contained in them? I don't think so.
If you're foolish enough to trust so much of yourself to such a place, you shouldn't be surprised at the results.
Oh dear God, this is awful stuff. I do hope smarter people than me can show up and rip that idiocy to threads better than me. Real-world ideology is written in every line of code. It's deeply embedded in every game. Democracy isn't a machine that doesn't work or works badly, it's an approach to how you make a machine -- if you in fact decide that humans control technology, and technology doesn't control humans. And that's what it's about.
Pfft. Technology doesn't control humans, technology sets the parameters for how they interact. *Nobody* has a better grasp on how impossible it is to "control" humans than an MMO designer.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 27, 2007 at 16:24
Well, it's more accurate to say that fascism is "fun" (or compelling, at least -- I think there is sometimes a confusion between the two) to those who ideate towards fascism. Some people find it inherently distasteful and onerous, and are not interested in participating in a social activity or community where they are either arbitrarily dominant or submissive to other individuals according to the design of the system.
I've largely lost interest in the "MMORPG" genre because of the prevalence of this kind of thinking, both on the part of developers and fellow players, and I engage in these discussions in part because I'm interested not in how things are, but rather what else is possible, and I get the sense that this might be the orientation of others you are currently arguing with.
Note: I am talking about the lesser game/guild authoritarianism practiced by ueberguild leaders and game GMs, and working on the assumption that no one here (including but not limited to Dave) is endorsing mid-20th Century European Fascism.
Pretty much. Since the authoritarian structures inevitably get referred to as "fascist", I might as well accept the label.
"What else might be possible" is exactly what I am looking for, but in searching from that you have to start fom the reality: Allowed to create any governance they want, players generally adopt authoritarian structures. Looking at the examples in Second Life and ATITD, I'm starting to see glimmerings of why. The rewards of most games are most efficiently reached through authoritarian principles, but in at least some cases, the participants have found that democratic means work better. The lack of combat seems to be a key element at first glance.
It depends on what you define as democratic principles, and I think -- as you've asked in a few posts -- that it is worth unpacking what those who clamor for democracy are talking about.
For me, it begins with property and inherent rights which game makers need to recognize. I think, as Corey talks about in the article cited in the original post, that what I would like to see first as basic participant rights for people who use virtual worlds:
1) What I "create" is "mine" insofar as I can decide what to do with it. This includes all of my virtual items and the avatar itself. "Mine" includes rights of trade, and I should be able to exchange items and even avatars with other people as I see fit.
The argument from this end is simple: I have put effort into an activity, so the ownership of the result should belong to me. If game developers don't like this, they should design game systems where there is no value in trading items. The creation of rare tradable quantities creates markets.
See, I can understand this, but it's not an absolute. Often, what you create has no value outside of the context of the environment you created it in. On the other hand, on other occasions it might have no value *inside* of that context, but be valuable elsewhere. For example, a UO castle has no value outside of the conext of the game, but the comics that were created using the UO engine were of immense value *outside* of the game.
2) While I support game makers rights to keep me from being abusive to other players, the game makers don't have the right to tell me that I don't keep my basic, assumed rights when I'm in game. This needs to be clarified as to what that means, but the start would have to be a developer that was willing to make the concession first.
What are your civil rights in Disneyland? Stage a political protest on the grounds, and you'll get hustled out PDQ. Even in a labor dispute between Disney Corp and the park employees, they can't protest on the property.
I'm not picking on you, I just find a lot of what you say interesting to mull over.
I think it is correct to align science and Democracy (or Liberalism*) together, for a few reasons. In short, it is because they both depend on transparency and liberty from control of an overseeing body to work correctly, thus Science arguably thrives best when practiced in a Liberal political environment, because the Pope or Dictator is not reviewing the results (or the experiments) and deciding what's true.
* I use "Liberal" here to replace democracy, in part because it's funny to do so, but also because in many ways people who are talking democracy are talking about Enlightenment ideas of Liberalism (as opposed to current misidentification of communism/socialism as equating to Liberalism), i.e. property rights, inherent behavior rights, etc.
I would agree, and that's what annoyed me about the way he was using the terms, because it was basically putting an ideological test on the acceptability of observations, theories, and conlusions, if they didn't support his (never defined) version of Democracy, they weren't acceptable, regardless of their truth.
But to the crack about the "humanities," you should watch it. Many of us here are in the humanities, and I for one would thank you not to casually denigrate what we have chosen to do with (at least part of) our lives. To say that the humanities are concerned with only "ideological agendas and academic politics" is grossly distorting, and it belies not only ignorance of what is involved in the study of subjects grouped under the rubric of "Humanities," but also your lack of experience with the so-called Hard Sciences (which are pretty rife with "ideological agendas and academic politics" themselves).
What can I say? He annoyed me by challenging the validity of my viewpoint, so I attacked his. Still, the Humanities have been particularly rife with the attitude that ideology dictates results as a matter of course, not as something shameful as it would be in hard sciences but as just the Way Things Should Be.
And the Humanities *are* poised for a revolution, as reductionist interlopers from the "hard" sciences, via Cognitive Neurology, Social Simulation, and Evolutionary Biology start to invade their turf with explanations for things they insisted were insoluble. Inevitably, *much* of Psychology, Sociology, and to a lesser extent Anthropology are going to be exposed as "not even wrong".
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 27, 2007 at 17:50
@Dave
"And the Humanities *are* poised for a revolution, as reductionist interlopers from the "hard" sciences, via Cognitive Neurology, Social Simulation, and Evolutionary Biology start to invade their turf with explanations for things they insisted were insoluble. Inevitably, *much* of Psychology, Sociology, and to a lesser extent Anthropology are going to be exposed as "not even wrong."
I think you're confusing the social sciences with the humanities. IMO you're overly optimistic about reductionist interlopers exposing the 'not even wrongness' of the social sciences. The ultimate reductionists are the physicists. Physics hasn't displaced chemistry why should cognitive neurology displace sociology?
Posted by: JuJutsu | Apr 27, 2007 at 18:15
Cognitive Neurology isn't encroaching on Sociology, but on Psychology. And it will displace it because although both claim to be the "Science of the Mind", Cognitive Neurology actually *is*. There are few "right answers" in Psychology, little or nothing that all practitioners or researchers would agree are true.
And in a way, Physics *did* supplant Chemistry, just so long ago that we've forgotten. Do modern chemists spend much time talking about the Four Elements, or phlogiston, or "essential vitality"? No, the "natural sciences" which once was a single body of research, expanded its reductionist reach until it replaced metaphysics with physics. That march hit a wall before it managed to explain the mind or its products (including societies), but that wall is cracking with the development of emergent systems and complexity theory, plus the computational and data integration power to use them.
--Dave
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 27, 2007 at 19:40
It's certainly pretty to think so, Dave, but I don't share your faith in reductionism. As long as people's actions are motivated by meaning (among other things), such approaches (while certainly contributing in heir own ways) will find that wall impregnable. In fact, I think there are fewer and fewer every day who hold so dearly to the promise of removing interpretation from understanding humans and society.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | Apr 27, 2007 at 23:14
@Prok: A couple of things:
“One is a lack of appreciation of democracy, and a refusal to apply in in virtual worlds as an automatic.”
I do have an appreciation for democracy, which is why I would not apply it automatically to all virtual worlds. Your attachment to Democracy sounds religious, rather than as some practical system for achieving a desirable end.
“-- if you in fact decide that humans control technology, and technology doesn't control humans. And that's what it's about.”
What evidence do you have that that is even a choice? I think the evidence is overwhelming that the relationship between technology and humans is complex interactive dance. The results of which we can only vaguely predict and hence control.
I think one reason you get “builders” riled up Prok is that you seem to assume the critical issue is deciding the result you want, that and getting there is a mere technical issue. Whereas, for anyone who has actually tried making a predictable change to a complex system, formulating the desire is the easy bit. Any brief comparison in any democratic country of “what the voters voted for” and “what the voters got” illustrates this quite nicely.
If I have “faith” in any long term system, it the evolutionary one. Spray a whole bunch of diverse systems into a wide array of niches and see what survives. Virtual worlds give us the opportunity to do this without the cost of real human lives. Avatars may die, but the player vote with their feet and move to other worlds. In this context, making one particular governance method apply “as an automatic” would be the worse thing you could do.
Posted by: Hellinar | Apr 27, 2007 at 23:34
No, he gets "builders" riled up because he thinks we only make things so that we can enslave others by making them dependant on us. I just read the last 100 entries in his blog, I want my 3 hours back. I also made the mistake of looking up "Gorean", now I need to go give my brain a good scrubbing with bleach and a stiff wire brush.
--Dave (well, at least they're better than the age-players)
Posted by: Dave Rickey | Apr 28, 2007 at 01:56
@Dave and Prok:
I may have found my perfect cage match... ;-)
On Prok's side: If we go back in time before the printing press, communicative technology belonged to the religious class (essentially, in Western society). So they could be "Text Gods." And establish rules that said, "You wanna ask forgiveness? Talk to the padre." Along comes tech that drops the price-of-entry for printing and literacy by two orders of magnitude... and you've got the Reformation, etc. All of a sudden, Mother Church ain't the only one with a line to God. Same thing on the Web, now that we're all 2.0-y. Even 10 years ago, you needed at least some techno cred to run a Web site or have an Internet biz. FTP anyone? Now? Blogs, MySpace, eBay, Etsy, Amazon affiliation, Google ads, etc. etc. Anyone who thinks that being a dev of a particular tech will allow for constraints based on knowledge need only look at folks who in 1995 worked in the printing industry with actual photographs. Ignoring the customers, ignoring the crowd, playing only with the folks who've "seen the elephant...." bad idea. Get meta about it before you get disintermediated is my advice.
On Dave's side: The changes I note above had nothing to do with Big "D" Democracy in the political sense. As I said above, there is inherent democracy in both the economics and the contractual/business nature of any system like SL.
So... Prok... you want more democracy in SL? I suggest one of the following: Get your demands together, and get enough people who control enough revenue for SL to say, "Give us this, or we leave." Or...
Do the same thing and go to Linden as investors. Or...
Get a lawyer to back you up in court when you say, "The contract that I signed w/ Linden Labs implies that I should have a much greater say in the running of this thing." Or...
Write out a coherent constitution that spells out, very clearly, what you think the ideal set of democratic features in a VW (SL specifically, or the metaverse in general) should be, such that it compells many other people to demand it from Linden. This would be the Thomas Paine, "Common Sense" method of conversion. Democracy in the US didn't just up and grow from magic beans. I know you blog on the topic often and feel strongly about it. But a single, well-written, relatively short, easily understood (to non-experts) manifesto of what *exactly* the issues and positions are might be very helpful.
It would cover, among other things (for me, as a user):
1. The right to vote my avatar's views rather than my own, if I am roleplaying in a particular system.
2. The right to vote my RL views (player) as well as my avatar's, even if they conflict.
[Explanation... if one is roleplaying a true submissive, and his/her Master commands a particular vote at the avatar level on a game feature, well... you gotta do what your Master says. If, on the other hand, someone regularly plays other avatars that are not submissive, should the *player* get to vote as well? Or should he/she have to create or log-in as a separate character to do so? And/or are there issues that are up to avatar vote specifically vs. player vote?]
3. The right to certain core features not being subject to change, either by the devs or by any democratic action. This would be akin to a "Bill of Features." For example, if I am going to base my participation in a VW on economic features, and, at some point, the devs or dems say, "You know what? This whole 'money thing' is a pain... Let's just scrap it and go with kumbaya style lovin'..." Well, all my investment just went "poof." Same with, perhaps, "family vs. adult" content. If I join a space specifically because it either has or does not have adult content, changing that single feature might be a reason for exit for me. I'm not suggesting that all features in a VW be locked at inception in this way, but that the devs/dems be clear as to, "These are the things that make this *this.*" For example, if you told me that the "Bill of Features" for WoW included a stipulation that all out-of-character general chat on RP servers would be punished by an instant, 15 minute account freeze... I might go back ;-)
@Prock: I *do* agree with you on general principles that democracy in RL is a good thing... for governing nations. But that doesn't mean it's always good, all the time, for all decisions, in every case, for all groups.
Many RL social groups, for example, have core rules that aren't open to debate, discussion or vote. When you join, they're part of the architecture. You may vote on lots of other stuff. Or you may vote for a committee, and they the members pick out the stuff. Public schools are largely like that. We elect all kinds of politicians and school board members that make decisions about curricula and school levies and new facilities and hiring decisions. And then the PTA supplies feedback, too. But it doesn't vote on whether to use textbook A or B. If it did, teachers would be even more unhappy than they are.
Same for corporations. Publicly traded ones usually have a board of directors elected by shareholders, who (as I said before), vote their shares on many issues.
There's democracy at work all over. You've pointed out ways in your own posts as to how it happens already in SL. You're looking for some more, direct features... OK. Give it to me straight. What, specifically, do you want? Give me the "Common Sense" view and I'll let you know if I think it, well... makes sense.
You don't want to vote on code, you've already said that. And you don't just want islands where the owners can impose (or not) democracy, because that still leaves them at the whim of the game gods... OK.
What's the plan? And not just for SL, but for how you'd interject democracy into other spaces, as well.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 28, 2007 at 09:24
However there is the third possibility that you've explained your point of view correctly, and I have understood it, but that I don't agree with you, and/or your concept is flawed in some way.
I can think of two plausible responses to this assertion:
The base argument that virtual assets are not governed by pre-existing law and social practice is absurd, given that currency and other financial mechanisms are largely virtual at this point, with no actual base item of value propping up any currencies, and only contract law and securities regulations insuring the value of things like bonds, stocks, etc.
Essentially, the idea that a developer can just "turn off" their game and make it disappear is only currently true because there is not a formally existing structure of property rights with virtual assets in virtual worlds -- but I do question if Linden Labs could just "turn off" Second Life, given that the Linden has a value pegged to the dollar.
Posted by: illovich | Apr 28, 2007 at 17:54
>I've largely lost interest in the "MMORPG" genre because of the prevalence of this kind of thinking, both on the part of developers and fellow players, and I engage in these discussions in part because I'm interested not in how things are, but rather what else is possible, and I get the sense that this might be the orientation of others you are currently arguing with.
What illovich said.
Reality, I realize this is a popular meme among literalist tekkies, the idea that the Electoral College somehow invalidates democracy. Whatever the need for changes to this system, elections still pretty much have meaning and reflect the will of the state more or less. The person in the mechanical role of the electoral college seat does vote with the will of that state. Of course there are exceptions, problems, etc. But don't confuse a vast and deep split in American politics with somehow democracy itself being broken. Your problem is that you have not found a way to persuade other people in your own country whose views you don't like to come around to your ideology.
Rich Bryant, I'm not "wrong" or "disingenous" but you're merely reading what you like into a briefly-quoted text. The reference in the Magna Carta is *to the Church's own elections* not to some broadly-established elections for the entire society:
"+ (1) FIRST, THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed, appears from the fact that of our own free will, before the outbreak of the present dispute between us and our barons, we granted and confirmed by charter the freedom of the Church's elections - a right reckoned to be of the greatest necessity and importance to it - and caused this to be confirmed by Pope Innocent III. This freedom we shall observe ourselves, and desire to be observed in good faith by our heirs in perpetuity."
Look, I'm not a scholar of the Magna Carta, but like anyone else, I studied it in high school and college and I'm capable of going to the Internet and reading the text. And my point here is merely that it reference the Church and its rights *first* which was interesting and also referenced *a prior agreement about the Church's own elections* which is also interesting. And if "all the Church gets to do is elect the Pope," well, hey, that's pretty important, especially in the time this was operative.
I don't know if it is really possible, or advisable, to go on answering Dave Rickey line-by-line here, I'll return and read it more in detail later, but I'm very heartened to see others have taken him on. I see he indeed has a very reductionist attitude toward the humanities and even the natural sciences.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 29, 2007 at 18:15
And Rich, I can't quite understand the nervous tic that caused you to make this "correction" and to make this statement:
"Furthermore, the Papal Bull on Church leadership issued by Pope Innocent III (who is mentioned in the said Magna Carta article) is explicit that only time a Church election is ever acceptable is for the appointment of a new Pope."
Surely you can grasp that when a document like the Magna Carta, a kind of national law or binding agreement of its day, references *another previous agreement* like the Papal Bull, which it is *reaffirming that it is bound by* that *too* becomes part of that later legal document. And that revalidation in fact now has more weight, in a much more publicized and effective document of law.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Apr 29, 2007 at 18:21
Same for corporations. Publicly traded ones usually have a board of directors elected by shareholders, who (as I said before), vote their shares on many issues.
Publicly listed (US) corporations are not democracies by any measure.
* Participation in voting is an exclusive privilege, not an inclusive right.
* Unique shareholder entities are not equal in voting power.
* Shareholders enjoy few rights not established at the pleasure of those creating the articles of incorporation.
* Different classes of voters are often established, with different privileges accruing to different classes of shareholder. Some shareholders can participate in multiple classes simultaneously.
* Shareholder voting power can become, and in practice always is, diluted over time.
* Management can many times choose to overtly ignore shareholder votes outcomes, so long as they successfully argue they are discharging their obligation of fiduciary responsibility.
* Special rules, restrictions, and rights apply to large shareholders relative to the shares outstanding.
* In practice, no "grass roots" shareholder activist power exists. Only organizations of large shareholders, some of which represent smaller shareholders in aggregate (like pension funds), hold sway over management decision making.
Posted by: randolfe_ | Apr 29, 2007 at 19:01
@Randolfe: Thanks. Good points, all. I didn't mean to suggest that corporations were run in the *same way* as democracies, or that there was anything like a "one person (one shareholder) one vote" system going on.
What I meant was that there are (in many cases) features in companies that, while not purely democratic, do allow for the opinions of more than one individual, or group, to be included in decisions. Very few corporations have a king-like (or god-like, if you like) CEO who can operate with impunity. And most good companies set systems in place to guard against cults-of-personality (even within departments), such that good ideas (and not necessarily strong-willed people) can rise to the top.
Again... I appreciate the clarification. Because I do *not* want democracy, per se, in my companies, just as I do *not* want capitalism in my democracy. One is good for one thing, and the other for another. But just as money is a good measure of certain things in a democracy -- you can tell much about a governor, for example, by how well he balanced his budget -- so may certain democratic "features" be good for companies and, yes, games/worlds (since they are probably companies, anyway).
Mixing the two out of context, though, isn't necessarily wise.
Posted by: Andy Havens | Apr 29, 2007 at 20:30
Prokofy, kindly do not tell me what my 'problem' is. I live in the United states.
I do hate to be the one to break things to you - but true Democracy is dead in any large scale government capacity. Nothing you say can change that fact - absolutely nothing.
Kindly get off your crock of shit attempts to denounce what other people are telling you. There is nothing 'tekkie' or 'litteralist' about stating facts - bothing.
I realize you were born in an era when the bullshit that was spewed was drilled so deep into your psyche that you have a problem dealing with truth and reality, that is quite sad really.
Oh yes - just to let you know? I never said it 'invalidated' anything whatsoever. I said that true democracy is dead and has been replaced with a Democratic Republic as its current face. Kindly gain enough reading comprehension to tell the difference and cease placing words and meanings where they have not appeared.
Posted by: Reality | Apr 30, 2007 at 02:22
@Andy
Because I do *not* want democracy, per se, in my companies, just as I do *not* want capitalism in my democracy. One is good for one thing, and the other for another.
We couldn't agree on this more. I am just as disgusted by money in politics as I am by ill conceived attempts to turn corporations in to quasi-democratic policy tools.
Posted by: randolfe_ | Apr 30, 2007 at 12:13
Deities generally don't enforce the suggestions they hand down, at least by my experience. More often it is the people who are subject to the consequences of those rules that take the greatest interest in them.
It's an interesting idea to have participants or subscribers to a VW explore options of investing in that world. Some kind of democratic investment would allow for a broadening of risk management in business practices. Investors pony up to the risk of losing everything while people who do the work also partake in the rubric of profits. A tennant or lessor of a VW is more oriented to property management and upkeep than being subscribed to some privelege. Of course, profits also entail less quantifiable returns in measuring quality of life adjustments. An economy of distractions, however, requires the concerted effort of almost all involved. We seem to be getting pretty good at it though.
The maleable nature of the subject almost makes me wonder if a lesson cannot be taken from current VWs to the point of dictatorships finding creative ways to market their projects to a subscriber base. Agencies have been giving away oppression for free or at a loss for ages, perhaps in total ignorance that there is a sizable population that is willing to pay for it.
Posted by: genericdefect | May 04, 2007 at 03:12