It's been some time since I haunted the distinguished halls of TN, but after some tumultuous times that got me out of the habit of putting my working papers up on ssrn and pointing to them here (and at my own blog), I do have a piece that I wanted to share (and I'll be cross-posting this to Doubt is an Art, as I do with all game-related stuff). I'm sure my skin has grown thin from all this time away from the rough-and-tumble world of collaborative blogging. Be gentle. ;)
Last year I had the opportunity to give the keynote address in February at the Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, as well as to participate in a symposium in April convened by the Potomac Center for the Study of Modernity on Modernity and Chance. Both venues seemed apt arenas for developing some ideas about game as a cultural form, one that we could place alongside ritual and bureaucracy in our understanding of institutions and the techniques for control at their disposal. The core question I'm asking is: What might we learn by examining the increasing use of games by modern institutions in the digital age as analogous to their longstanding and effective use of rituals and bureaucracy?
These are not new ideas in my work (and especially not in some posts I've done here), but I had long planned to set down my ideas about these cultural forms and their relationships to each other in one place, mostly for my own satisfaction (for that reason, too, I am sure that many of the examples will strike readers of my work as familiar ones for my thinking).The paper is still in a working state, without citations and still set up for oral presentation (and includes many of the images from these occasions – I do not plan on including them for final publication). You should be able to download the paper here. Here is the abstract:
The projects of governance at the heart of state and other institutional control under the context of modernity have been marked by a heavy reliance on two cultural forms, ritual and bureaucracy, each of which organizes action and meaning through distinctive invocations of order. The steady rise of liberal thought and practice, particularly in the economic realm (following, if partially, Adam Smith) has gradually challenged the efficacy of these cultural forms, with open-ended systems (more or less contrived – from elections to the “free” market) exerting more and more influence both on policy and in other areas of cultural production. It is in this context that games are becoming the potent site for new kinds of institutional projects today, whether in Google’s use for some time of its Image Labeler Game to bring text searchability to its image collection, or in the University of Washington’s successful deployment of the game Fold-It to find promising “folds” of proteins for research on anti-retroviral vaccines.
But even as they are so used, we can see how these contrived, open-ended mechanisms create new challenges to the structure of the very modern institutions which would seek to domesticate and deploy them. While a longstanding example would be Hitler’s unsuccessful use of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games’ results as part of his project of political legitimization, digital networking technology is making new and more complex gambits of this sort possible today. Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world Second Life, found itself in a state of organizational contradiction as it sought to architect, from the top-down, a game-like space premised (and sold) on a playful ideal of user freedom and control. Google’s recent and reluctant turn to curators for certain search terms also reflects the limits of their previous attempts to continually refine their algorithms so as to let search results reflect perfectly the aggregate actions of web users. In all of these cases we see that a turn toward open-ended, game-derived mechanisms (which often mirror the market) generate paradoxes for those who sought to leverage the potency of games for generating meaningful outcomes.
In this process digital technology has played an important role as well, making the use of games possible at a scale vast in both scope and complexity, while subtly changing even what a useful conception of games would be that could account for the game-like elements now proliferating in much of our increasingly digital lives. From this twenty-first century vantage point, what may we learn by setting the cultural form of game against these other cultural forms, with attention to their shared and distinctive features? By considering what has changed to make the domestication (as it were) of games possible, and also reflecting on how these other forms have been put to work by institutions, we can begin to chart the landscape ahead for games and institutions under the context of modernity and ask key questions about what issues of policy and ethics it raises.
Any comments welcome, of course. It feels good to be back.
Does depriving gamers in Iran from World of Warcraft and the up coming Panda Expansion help anyone?
Hoping people are going to rage-quit their regime?
Here's the post from a blue at Blizz [http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5168067998?page=97#1933]:
And the text:
Our team has been watching this thread closely, and we understand the desire for more information about this situation. Blizzard Entertainment cannot speak to any reports surrounding the Iranian government restricting games from its citizens.What we can tell you is that United States trade restrictions and economic sanction laws prohibit Blizzard from doing business with residents of certain nations, including Iran. Several of you have seen and cited the text in the Terms of Use which relates to these government-imposed sanctions. This week, Blizzard tightened up its procedures to ensure compliance with these laws, and players connecting from the affected nations are restricted from access to Blizzard games and services.This also prevents us from providing any refunds, credits, transfers, or other service options to accounts in these countries. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes and will happily lift these restrictions as soon as US law allows.
Quite apart from the practical points and points of international law, one think I don't get is how "prohibit Blizzard from doing business with residents of certain nations, including Iran" and "this also prevents us from providing any refunds" work together.
If Blizzard could not do business with people, then it could not take their money, right?
But apparently it means they just can't give it back. How does that work? OK Blizzard, don't do 'business' with the people or Iran, just send them a gift - a gift of their own money for the service you are not providing to them.
Less on the specifics - there has traditionally been a notional separation of sport and politics. With the exception of the widespread sporting ban on South Africa this seems to broadly apply. Can't we apply the same to gaming?
Games in general, that is, not just electronic ones.
I was asked this today and I’m wondering if the TN hive mind can come up with a short compelling set of reasons.
A popular phrase these days is “If you are not paying for it, you are the product” the thing is, with social media of all types - including multiplayer games, even if you are paying for it you are still the product, what’s more you are the workforce too.
That is, multiplayer play can be seen as a form of ‘productive leisure’ or more simply labour.
The idea of play as labour or games as productive or play / work not being opposites - is not new. Kücklich (2005) wrote Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry, where he looked at modding culture as a particular form of labour within emerging play practices. Malaby (2003) wrote about the cultural use of games and gambling in Greece as a way to manage uncertainty through, in part, the production of determinative outcomes; and many here and elsewhere have long rejected the play / work dichotomy.Looking more widely, a useful but perhaps gross simplification of the range of notions of play-labour may be seen as sitting on a continuum with utopian views of play at one end and dystopian views of digital labour at the other.
Ludotopian
At the utopian end there is the view that I term Ludotopianism (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2009/02/ludotopian.html) the idea the play outcomes can make the world a better place. The kinds of game that advocates of this ideology such as McGonigal (http://janemcgonigal.com/) espouse tend to be things such as ARG’s that requite an intense investment on the part of some players to achieve the game goals. While these goals are framed as socially good outcomes what is occurring in the practice of play is clearly a form of labour that is, in the most part, un-paid. Simpler versions are things like Google’s Image Labeler (http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/).
Ludocapitalism
At the other end of the spectrum is the dystopian view that: practices of digital production have been turned into a way of for the capitalist system to profit from our every action and inaction, making us willing participants in breakdown between leisure / work / home to the point that we enjoy the act of commoditising our identity.
Morini & Fumagalli reference Marx’s Das Kapital to provide a direct link with immaterial labour:
“No matter how variously working tasks or productive activities can be considered useful, it is a physiological truth that they are functions of the human organism, and that all these functions, their content and their shape are essentially expenditures of brain, nerves, muscles, human organs (Marx, 1964: 68)”
From this kind of link to classical Marxism the dystopian view of ‘free intangible labour’ has multiple facets. It charts a shift from a division of leisure and labour that were separated by space, time and practices; through ones where tele-working and mobile communications devices gradually eroded the barriers between home and work; to the present day state where our very expression of self is set within a prescribed valorized structure in which we constantly strive to perform ourself yet are simultaneously alienated.
Thinkers have variously described this as “shift from industrial-Fordist capitalism to biocapitalism” (Morini & Fumagalli) or “a ‘calculable’ person, ‘one who knows his or her value as calculated by an external, refereed source’” (Hearn citing Postman).
The production of digital artefacts that typifies much of the free labour we find on the net shares many of the characteristics of labour that has given foregrounded by a strain of feminist socialist critical theory. That is, the theories which posit that certain forms of labour are systematically dis-valued by capitals structures. This process involves both side-lining the practices outside the accepted sphere of production, defining them within the context of gender roles and negating facets such of the labour practice such as components of emotional labour. Typically such activities have included child rearing, domestic work and crafts.
Like these so-called feminized forms of labour, digital artefact production is also simultaneously marginalised from the norms of capitalist production and necessary to support those means of production. Digital production is variously framed in in terms of practices including: leisure (thus non-labour), craft or self-expression. Some forms of production of digital artefacts also require emotional labour through the expression of self in the creative act.
These creative acts feed the capitalist system – we either pay for hosting or we are spectacle and spectator, a social media ouroboros swimming in a sea of advertisements.
What’s more content in the expressions of opinion from ratings and ‘liking’ to blogs theorists of left might argue far from empower individuals as certain digital rhetorics have it. Rather, with this mode of digital production we fall into a system where power asymmetries (class distinctions) that are maintained if not strengthened through giving us the illusion of autonomy and empowerment. Further we are alternatively producer, consumer, spectator, judge in a cycle constructed entirely within the constrains of the capitalist ethos. Someone is making money from our individual or collective acts, and it’s not us. The biggest trick of all is that many fooled in to believing that this is some how in or best interest through the service of democracy.
Turning to social networks, critics from the left would argue - first, that far from being a simple leisure pursuit (as some may still think) the act of networking in the circumscribed mode that social networking software confines us to serves to increase our networked-social capital which in turn increases our value as a knowledge worker. More and more we are called upon or choose to use our social networks to solve problems for our employers. We use these networks to find our next job or next employee so cutting down on the costs of the hiring process and making the network every more vital.
‘Friending’ and ‘linking’ expands the work beyond the closed utility of networks for employers – these acts turn our relationships and very being into an on going process of creating and managing our identity and the identity of others. We digitise and evaluate our relationships in where the public and data mining software to count, evaluate and extrapolate us: ‘It’s X’s birthday in Y days – by them stuff”. The irreducible is reduced ‘It’s complicated is the most subtle relationship we can attain’. When we are not present, we are not poking, or swapping, our down time is as much a metric as our up time.
By carrying a mobile phone we create a trail of data that it of use to companies at the very least to optimise networks and at best as a sellable data item, to be re-combined and sold back to us.
Gamercommodification
What then of online games? This strain of leftist critic does not seem to have paid much attention to online gaming. Though they can be likened to many of the existing subjects of contemporary Marxist analysis. Multiplayer game practise often include elements found in the analysis of: free production of digital artefacts, crafting, reality TV, feminized work, and others.
The most blatant form of the type of ethos that critics from the left critique is the multiplayer Freemium model. Here those that play for free are given the ‘reward’ or payment of being able to play the game in return for playing the game. More specifically a mass of players is needed to create the in-game community from which the rest of the business model works. Either players consume advertising and or they embody a community that instantiate value in the digital goods they buy or ‘earn’ access to through play - would you buy a digital item that has the sole purpose of decorating your room for $10 if no one knew you had it? Maybe, but would you buy another?
Thus as players we are performer, spectators in a themed reality TV show where are acts are confined to those that the designers allow us and our expression of self is confined to the brand images we have a choice of – Warcraft is a brand. Even when we are given free rain, such as in Second Life, we have so internalised these structures that what do we do – reproduce them endlessly, we create to consume and through so doing strive towards our own sense of alienation.
As Molesworth (2007) has noted (and I have commented upon elsewhere) the notion of Flâneur is highly applicable to the online game experience. Virtual Spaces are constructed to support the gaze onto the world, onto each other and self-reflexively onto us. Got to any major city in WoW and you will observe a spectacle of display. Of course this all falls within a cycle of production and consumption into which we embed our identity only to have it commoditised and spat back out at us.
The next step in this mode of production includes acts such as Guild Membership, Alpha / Beta Testing, Fan Art, Machinima and wiki’s. Each of these requires a much deeper commitment to production and consumption of the game, but let’s move to the final set: guild leadership and Add-on / mod creation.
Add-on / mod creation was the practice that Kücklich picked out in his plabour piece – here the notion of free labour is brought into sharp focus. Add-ons for things like WoW are often free though enhance the game experience dramatically – many priests will say that it’s almost impossible to play WoW at a high level without HealBot. Hence this is a direct displacement of paid labour, what’s more some Add-on’s are effectively co-opted by Blizzard – the recent quest display system is oddly similar to the Add-on QuestHelper.
The mod scene also act as a form of training and picking ground for the games industry which is taken to the extreme through selectively elevating just enough mod writers etc. to industry status, and making a sufficient public performance of this that the community is incentivised to go on creating free works that drive the sales of boxed product.
So a Marxist might suggest that games and gamification (which is just an extension of willing complicity) are a capitalist triumph because they make us happily complicit in our own exploitation. And we have not even looked at the processes within games: Animal Crossing and early training to be a wage slave ‘my first mortgage’ – anyone, anyone?
People’s republic
One of the main criticisms levelled at the Marxist analysis of these contemporaneous practices is that the theory really relies on exploitation – but who’s being exploited?
Certainly there are elements of Social Networking where one can put forward an argument that people give away much more than they realise – there are various consequences of this that they the individual may not intend. Though the most exploitative must be acts such as identity theft which, I believe, falls outside the sort of exploitation that the far left seek to locate in the practices.
Focusing on multiplayer games – one can describe them in terms of free labour but this seems to ignore the nature of games and ignores the goods that players receive. For multiplayer games to work there must be some minimal level of co-operation, even if that is an agreement to be and opposing player. The nature of group play is that everyone plays for themselves and for each other in the sense that the ‘other’ is needed for the game to work.
Beyond this in games, and to a large degree in social networks, individual derive pleasures from the acts that above I’ve described in terms of free labour. Here I’m not denying that it is labour, but questioning whether an analysis based on presumptions of exploitation get to the important aspects of what’s going on.
While formally I reject the social contract description of games one might take on the language of the left and oppose the notion of MMOs as synthetic model of the capitalist system by seeing them much more like a commune where the labour of each is shared by all.
“Factions of Azeroth unite; you have nothing to lose but your buffs”
Kal Marksmaker, lvl 85 Goblin
Hearn, A. (2010), Structuring feeling: Web 2.0, online ranking and rating, and the digital 'reputation' economy, ephemera, volume 10, number 3/4 (nov 2010): http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/10-3/10-3hearn.pdf
Kücklich, J (2005),Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry, Fibre Culture Journal, Issue 5, 2005: http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-025-precarious-playbour-modders-and-the-digital-games-industry/
Malably, T., (2003), Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City, University of Illinois Press.
Molesworth, M. (2007), Monsters and the Mall: Videogames and the Scopic Regimes of Shopping, The University of Tokyo,
Situated Play: Proceedings of the 2007 Digital Games Research Association Conference: http://www.digra.org/dl/display_html?chid=07312.56350.pdf.
Morini, C. & Fumagalli, A. (2010), Life put to work: Towards a life theory of value, ephemera, volume 10, number 3/4 (nov 2010): http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/10-3/10-3morinifumagalli.pdf
You can’t get arrested for using BitCoin (yet) but you probably can for that pun.
To get to the point - I'm worried about BitCoin.
First, for those that have not been following the related tech and now politics news and can't be bothered reading www.bitcoin.org: what is BitCoin?Well, it is a non-fiat, non-centralised electronic currency. That is, BitCoin is not issued by any government; nor is it generated centrally by some other authority; and it does not have any physical manifestation. Technically BitCoins are digital files that sit in a distributed peer-to-peer database that use electronic signatures hence encryption as a fundamental to several aspects of their function. All BitCoin transfers are made public but the parties to the transfer are not. BitCoins can be bought (form those that have generated them) or self generated. Generation occurs through a process termed ‘mining’ which is getting ones computer to solve a hard mathematical problem, the problem is sufficiently difficult that there is an infinitesimal chance that ones computer will solve it at any one try, what’s more the difficulty changes with respect to number of factors such as time - there’s also an on-going process of creation, but let’s not get too into the details.
On the face of it BitCoin seems like other electronic currencies – such as WoW Gold. However there is a wide variety in electronic currencies and BitCoin is not quite like others.
So, BitCoin is like the kinds of virtual currency we are used to talking about on TN in at least a few relevant ways: it’s not backed by any asset or state, it’s electronic and its value is determined by the market (though this is increasingly true of most types of currency). Having said that, the kinds of currencies we talk about here are not as similar as one might think, here is a quick (non-exhaustive) run down of what is out there in currency land:
Fiat currencies - Those issued by states like China’s Renminbi, or the UK’s Stirling.
Hard Electronic Money - Electronic money systems where exchanges are non-reversible – these come in several types depending on what they are based on. Thus an e-currency virtual wallet on a mobile phone and BitCoin are hard electronic currency but the former has value in virtue of is representing fiat currency value, the latter’s has value do to the belief in the value of the currency in-and-of itself.
Soft Electronic money - Electronic money systems where exchanges are reversible, again there can be multiple types of Soft Electronic Money but the ones I’m aware of stand in for fiat currencies e.g. PayPal.
Closed economy game / social currency - A ‘currency’ that is limited by contract to only be used in a game. Technically these are not currencies but rather a limited license to use an element of a game or social network which themselves have no inherent value and there is no guarantee of access or redemption. Though, in practice, of course these are often used as tokens of exchange. An example of this is WoW gold.
Ingress-only game / social currency - An ingress (my term) currency is the same of a closed economy but the ‘currency’ can be. Note the property of no guarantee of access or redemption is retained even though a user may think they have purchased the right to access the ‘currency’ and trade it for electronic goods such as games or clothes. See Habbo Hotel, Xbox Points etc.
Exhalable economy game / social currency - This is a ‘currency’ that can be both bought and sold but does not legally retain value. For example, a Linden Dollar is traded as if it holds value but legally what is being traded are limited license to use elements of software that have no guarantee that they will exist over time and explicitly no inherent or redeemable value.
Semi-regulated game / social currency - This category is more about the state in which a currency persists rather than, in part, the currency itself. For example China and Korea have laws pertaining to in-game currencies that regulate their use – in the case of China this banned the use of QQ Coin for consumer to business transactions, in the case of Korea it enabled the sale of in-game currency between players.
Other - I’m not quite sure where EvE Online sits with the invention of PLEX (Pilot License Extension) as this is an in-game object that represents game time, which in turn has a direct financial value, so it’s kind of a in-game but ingress-by-proxy-feedback-something-currency.
So BitCoin is kinda like other currencies you might be aware of. One similarly that you will have spotted is that generated BitCoins is like bot-grinding i.e. you set your computer going at a mathematics quest and it has a chance of getting a loot drop but the probability changes based on certain game factors.
It’s the ‘kinda’ that worries me. As I hope my list above illustrated as soon as we move away from fiat currencies the exact different between one thing that looks like a currency and another gets rather complex.
My worry is the one I’ve had for some time, as all this virtual stuff starts to get more political and media attention the chances of staggeringly bad regulation and statute rises. Now, I’m all for regulation when it’s appropriate and regulation of virtual world / social media currencies may be a good thing – especially to protect consumers (ingress-only currencies already seem to be out of step with EU consumer law if you ask me). But the level of literacy about the complexities and social practices that surround things like virtual currencies is worryingly low. The Internet is a series of tubes remember.
So far we have a senator in the US, Charles Schumer, talking about BitCoin though largely in relation to allegations first made in Gawker about the use of BitCoin to purchase drugs on SilkRoad and suggests BitCoin is used for Money Laundering. LulzSec say they have received USD $7200 in BitCoin (http://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec/status/77771916794011648) which is sure to upset many.
If people like Schumer make moves for an outright ban of a class of currency it’s in everybody’s interest to carve out a space where virtual currencies can exist. One way might be for us to come to some agreement about how we would characterise virtual currencies as a matter of law – that is not argue over whether these things are property or not but provide a positive workable legal definition of what a virtual currency is that can be dragged and dropped into any putative legislation.
See tVPN’s work on virtual items and currency as a background doc: http://www.virtualpolicy.net/wp-virtual-items-public-policy
Monica Potts argues in the American Prospect (for those of who who don't know, it's a left-of-center magazine) that liberals who play video games go along with the conservative modes of play within them. (For the purposes of this discussion, the word "liberal" will refer to everything from social democrats to greens to progressives, while those who desire limited government will be called libertarians).
Research by Jonathan Haidt is the best thing yet offered on the difference between liberal and conservative thinking. Haidt's work suggests there are five core dimensions of moral reasoning: Harm, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Conservatives register concern about all five. Liberals care much less about the last three. Flashpoints of liberal/conservative conflict would therefore be things in the last three categories, such as: Having a Don't Mess With Texas Bumpersticker (Loyalty), Doing What the Police Officer Says Just Because He's a Police Officer (Authority), and Sing the National Anthem in a Traditional Way (Purity).
Ms. Potts touches on various experiences in games like the Sims and casually refers to some play modes as conservative and others as liberal. She also tends to view most of videogame play as essentially conservative, with a few liberal exceptions. She is concerned that she is not disgusted by, and actually enjoys, some of the conservative play modes.
Are there liberal and conservative moments in games? Does one or the other type predominate? Or are games an inkblot, much like mainstream media, which is criticized by all sides for being biased the other way?
Or, consider the premise that games are conservative. Why would that be? Are game developers generally a conservative bunch?
Finally, why couldn't you play any game in a way that suits your moral inklings? Are the incentives in games strong enough to lure people into acting contrary to their moral commitments?
About two weeks ago, I told Ren that I'd write up a post about the Stern v. Sony decision, which was issued early last month. This is a case where a federal court essentially answered the title question of this post. The answer, at least according to this particular court, is "no."
The plaintiff in the case, Alexander Stern, sought to bring a claim under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA) against Sony Online. According to his Complaint, Stern is an individual with multiple learning disabilities that impair his visual processing abilities. His visual difficulties make it hard for him to get things done in SOE games. Stern claimed that the ADA required Sony Online to make reasonable accommodations to its software for players like him who have disabilities. Stern seemed to specifically want mods enabling additional visual and auditory cues, which he claimed that SOE failed to provide. (Michelle Hinn guest-blogged here about these sorts of mods back in 2007.)
The problem with Stern's claim was that the ADA section at issue applies only to public accomodations. Relying on past decisions in California courts interpreting the ADA, Judge Percy Anderson concluded that public accommodations under the ADA were either 1) physical places or 2) goods or services with significant connections to physical places. Because SOE games are not physical places or services connected to physical places, Judge Anderson concluded that the law did not apply to Stern's difficulties. As the court put it, Stern was merely seeking to "fully enjoy the video games." This was something the federal law did not entitle him to demand of the defendant. (Stern's state law claims under the Unruh Act were left unresolved by the decision.)
Judge Anderson's opinion was required by law in California, I think. In other states, Stern's claims may have had a little more traction. In Illinois and New York, for instance, federal courts have suggested that the ADA is not limited to physical structures and might apply to web sites that provide the same sorts of products and services that are provided in physical spaces. (Would virtual worlds fit into that category?) For some more details about the law, I can recommend a recent student Note by Joshua Newton, Virtually Enabled: How Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act Might Be Applied to Online Virtual Worlds, 62 Fed. Comm. L.J. 183 (2010). You can find it here (PDF).
Broadly speaking, the Stern case and cases like it involve the recurring legal issue of cyberspace as place that Dan Hunter has written about in the past. As Dan explains, Internet law in the past fifteen years or so has regularly grappled with claims by plaintiffs seeking to apply "real space" laws to analogous online contexts. In some of my own writings, I've argued against the extension of certain place-based laws to the Internet. In the case of virtual worlds, however, Dan and I have argued that the extension of chattel property laws to virtual property can be theoretically justified.
The ADA is interesting in this regard. The ADA was enacted to combat discrimination against people with disabilities and to allow those with disabilities to participate more fully in society. It sought (and still seeks) to strike a balance between business owners and those with disabilities. If online spaces and social software, like Facebook and Second Life, are becoming new hubs of interaction and commerce, we would think the goals of the ADA should resonate in cyberspace as well. And if the ADA applies online, I would hope it might apply to game settings as well. Actually, in my forthcoming book, Virtual Justice, I've used an ADA case, Martin v. PGA Tour, to explore the sometimes problematic relationship between the rules of competitive games and the ADA's requirements. In that case, the Supreme Court decided that the golfer Casey Martin was entitled by the ADA to use a golf cart to ride between holes in the PGA Tour.
But if the ADA can be applied to some games, how necessary is it in today's MMORPG context? Newton's Note, above, concludes that the ADA really ought, as a matter of policy, to apply to virtual worlds, even if the current statute and doctrine do not extend that far. However, an editorial on AbleGamers, a website "dedicated to the disabled gamer," called the dismissal of Stern's suit good news. Apparently, the author, Mark Barlet, felt the suit would have a chilling effect on the existing level of cooperation between the disabled and developers in the game industry. The argument, I take it, is that the informal social networks are doing better than the law could do.
Perhaps, in the incredibly fluid context of networked entertainment software, avoiding the rigidity and expense of regulations and lawsuits might be the right call? I don't know. What do you think?
One of my longstanding interests in studying virtual worlds is governance and legitimacy. How are virtual worlds governed, and to what extent is this governance legitimate? When we think about political legitimacy, we can start to see a key difference between how political institutions have established their legitimate rule in the past, and how the multiple new institutions of governance in virtual worlds go about it. In particular, I am curious about how games may be making larger and larger contributions to political legitimacy in virtual worlds. To what extent are the outcomes that games generate not only legitimate in reference to the game (a valid, just, or fair win, if you will) but also contributing in some way to the legitimacy of associated institutions, such as guilds, gamemakers, and others?
The paradigmatic example of an institution which faces this question of political legitimacy is the modern bureaucratic state. As Max Weber famously observed, the state is the entity "that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" (1946:78, emphasis in original; online version here). The legitimacy is important, of course, because ruling by illegitimate force is costly -- one wants to release the hounds only when necessary. But on what grounds is this legitimacy claimed? The bureaucratic state, by itself, can refer only to its procedures as right in and of themselves, and this is a weak foundation on which to construct a sense of belonging and legitimate rule amongst a citizenry. The nation, however, is a rich font of such meanings, containing as it does arguments about shared language, culture, history, and territory (all in the context of an "us" that is not "them"). So the story of the nation-state (as it is usually called in the literature) is one that involves an intimate relationship between the institutional apparatus of the state and the symbolic resource of the "nation". (NB: I am collapsing to an unforgivable degree what is an enormous body of scholarship on the state and its relationship to the nation -- this list is a place to start, at least.)
For virtual worlds, however, there is no central metaphor of the nation already in place. Certainly, as they persist they are generating shared languages, meanings, and practices, to a certain degree, and one sees attempts to port offline categories of territorial belonging into virtual worlds, with varying degrees of success. But I have noticed something else, and it leads me to ask whether games and the indeterminate outcomes they generate can be a source of political legitimacy.
Recently, a graduate student of mine, Krista-Lee Malone, posted a paper at ssrn (Malone 2007) based on the master's thesis she completed at UW-Milwaukee. The thesis was about hardcore raiding guilds in World of Warcraft, and the paper looks comparatively at the adoption of DKP systems by two guilds. Malone suggests that DKP systems create "player obligation to the guild through a rationalized system intended to measure commitment" and that they therefore constitute a core practical component of how guilds as institutions establish legitimate rule. The gameness is relevant in DKP, because player performance in the game is a factor (50 DKP MINUS!).
Similarly, when doing research at Linden Lab I noticed a number of attempts to deploy games as mechanisms to generate outcomes that could stand as legitimate and, importantly, be an alternative to, for example, top-down decision-making, or democratic voting. One such attempt was through the application of the Elo Rating System.
Second Life is a good example of a project – and Linden Lab has been a good example of a company – that is deeply informed by the “left-libertarian” attitude toward technology and its promise which has shaped everything from the structure of the early internet to the proliferation of personal computers, but about which I do not have sufficient space to say more here (see Turner, 2006). Suffice it to say that in a political sense Linden Lab in 2005 was characterized by an almost overpowering faith in technology, matched only by a similarly monumental suspicion of vertical authority – especially bureaucratic authority, although charismatic authority was suspect as well. The paradox for Linden Lab was how to realize the ongoing creation of Second Life in a way that was consistent with their idealized vision of individual creativity and liberty, while remaining indisputably and unavoidably the single most powerful institutional player on the scene.
Over the course of my field research at Linden Lab, I discovered that this tension between vertical control and horizontal, “emergent” governance was not only a key to understanding their struggles to make Second Life, but also of their struggle to make themselves as an organization. For as Second Life grew in size and complexity, so did Linden Lab, and this tension came to be the preoccupying focus of their own organizational lives as well. This preoccupation was the result of the same politically-charged disposition, one which tended to treat top-down or vertical decision-making as the antithesis of empowered and creative collaboration. As people at Linden Lab witnessed their creation and their company growing, this fear of a loss of liberty reached, at times, a fervent pitch, and in this ongoing predicament they are not alone in high-tech circles. Google, as recent coverage by several journalists has revealed, is similarly shaped by a disposition that combines a deep faith in technology with a rejection of vertical authority. Julian Dibbell has also recently charted the strange advent of what he calls ludo-capitalism, wherein labor experience is increasingly framed as (and constituted to be) a game. We should therefore be eager to understand how the entities that have their hands deep into the recesses of our digital lives are going about trying to solve their version of the challenge that famously preoccupied nation-states: how to establish legitimate institutional power in the face of practical and undeniable imperfections and limitations.
Elo rating systems are a group of statistical methods for calculating the relative skill levels of large numbers of players for two player games. Based on a system developed originally by Arpad Elo for generating a ranking of chess players, they have since been both modified and improved within chess and adapted for other two-player games. A ranking system generates a rating for each player, and is seen as legitimate in the degree to which these ratings seem to accord with the matches that do manage to get played. Thus, a key aim of these systems is also to predict the outcomes of matches between rated players, and its accuracy is thereby judged (and thus the system may also come to be modified). In this way, Elo rating systems generate an emergent ordered ranking, and this emergent quality made this technique an attractive solution for the challenge that faced Linden Lab: how to generate a ranked order of prioritization from a heterogenous collection of company tasks.
In mid-2005, one developer at Linden Lab, himself quite familiar with chess ranking systems, set about to code onto Jira a system built on Elo’s algorithm. He created a webpage that pitted two (and only two) tasks against each other for Lindens to choose. These “matches” would over time generate a list of highest-ranked to lowest-ranked Jira tasks. Rosedale enthusiastically supported this effort, and in two days the programmer had created the system and sent an email over the company-wide email list containing a link to the site. Upon arriving at the site, one saw a simple presentation of two Jira tasks, including each one’s title, unique Jira number, and a brief description. Employees were simply to pick one of the two (or pick a “draw”) and the system would record that match result and generate another match of two more tasks (soon after they were each asked to pick winners of ten such “matches” a day). Many Lindens tried out the system with some enthusiasm, as it seemed relatively un-“gameable”. Hundreds of matches were “played” in a short span of time (a matter of days), and a ranked list was generated. For Rosedale, this was a step on the road toward realizing an ideal of company decision-making from the ground up. For others, the system was suspect at the point of participation; presented with two entirely heterogenous tasks (add a urinal to the men’s bathroom vs. add a web browser to the Second Life client), they felt that picking between them was nonsensical. It was eventually abandoned in practice and other game-based (and non-game-based) initiatives to tap into the wisdom of Linden Lab’s crowd were tried.
So, I am left with a lingering question. Was the ultimate illegitimacy of the Elo-ranking system due to something deeper -- the fact that it was an attempt to incorporate a game into corporate decision-making? The suggestion I would like to make is that, for institutions, games are in fact quite difficult to domesticate, precisely because they can generate outcomes that challenge or outright contradict any existing, more coherent, narratives. And I would add to this another issue, just as important, and that is how the legitimacy of a game's outcomes is directly related to the community of its players or the institution which controls it (as in the case of organized sports). When games are mobilized for purposes other than the playing in and of themselves, who gets to interpret the outcomes, and say what they mean? The sponsoring institution, or the participating players? To me, these are central questions as we see more and more institutions attempting to govern through games. While Julian has rightly focused on what this means for labor and exploitation, in the Marxian sense, I think there is a related (Weberian) question that we must attend to as well -- how are institutions learning to use games to establish legitimate governance?
References
Malone, Krista-Lee. (2007). Dragon kill points: The economics of power gamers. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1008035.
Turner, Fred. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Weber, Max. (1946). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
I’m wondering what TN reader’s view is of the trajectory of the intersection of virtual worlds and what some term the political economy is. In short do we think that the practices associated virtual worlds are tending towards liberating us or are acting as just another way for dominant ideologies to be re-enforced?
It seems to me that in many ways virtual worlds are the ultimate expression of consumerism. Game worlds construct new needs which the use-value of virtual artefacts meet and new forms of labour are constructed to enable us to gain them.
Both game worlds and social worlds, in their different ways, can also act as a pure mechanism for symbolic-value exchange through the mechanism of virtual goods. For example: a virtual Gucci bag may have no use-value what so ever in a virtual world but it carries with it much of the symbolic value of the brand.
In general virtual worlds seem often to replicate structures of labour and production – they even support a class hierarchies based on geography, contextual knowledge, time in the given community etc.
At the same time virtual worlds offer the promise of liberating us. Not quite in the old utopian ideal of freeing us fully from pre-existing notions of self but at least opening up new opportunities for self-exploration. What’s more should you have access to a virtual world the barrier between roles of consumption and production seems to have been lowered such that both within the context of a virtual space e.g. as a crafter or builder in second life; or outside it, say as a fan fic creator, many can participate in a mixed traditional, amateur and / or gift economy.
We might also note that widespread fact of things like gift economies within virtual worlds stand as a challenge to the rigidity of exchange-values and all they stand for in respect of social relations.
A we can see how individuals have the power to subvert ideologies through playing with brands and taking stabs at ideologies – such as Dead in Iraq and others that work on the art / politics threshold.
Plus virtual worlds do give us pause for thought. They motivate discussions about the contingency of many things we see in the physical world around us – for example the nature of property and money. However I wonder if those that really engage in those discussions are largely an intellectual elite who would be talking about them anyway.
Lastly when we look at something like Second Life and There what we seem to see are endlessly reproduced norms of body type etc that look like the products of an internalisation and then self production of dominant types. While there are many ‘fake’ versions of brands, they are still versions of brands so still operate in the same world of assumed values. What’s more we can no longer gamble in Second Life the reason being because of US laws – hence many virtual worlds seem simply to act as a way of expanding US cultural and legal norms, even if the virtual world is not in-fact based in the US as it will probably have a tendency to norm towards its values. As virtual worlds come out of China I expect that we will see a spreading of its cultural assumptions too.
So I contend that virtual worlds hold the potential to liberate and the potential to reinforce and indeed spread the dominant ideologies of the time. What I’m interested in are people views of where things are now and where they seem to be headed.
I’m currently erring towards the pessimistic view of things – give me hope :)
Ted's Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University convened the second Ludium Conference this past weekend in Bloomington. Attendees were charged with hammering out a well-considered platform to guide virtual world policy. We were successful, and the Declaration of Virtual World Policy [Edit: along with its wiki] has been posted by the conference's designers, Studio Cypher. Here it is for your perusal and comment (along with more details):
A Declaration of Virtual World Policy
made by
representatives of law, industry, and academia, assembled in full and
free convention as the first Synthetic Worlds Congress.
Whereas virtual worlds are places with untapped potential, providing new and positive experiences and effects, we resolve that:
-A self-governance group of virtual world stakeholders should be formed
-A players’ bill of rights should be drafted and should include the right of free speech and the rights to assemble and organize.[Edit: FN1]
-A universal age verification system should be created to support the individual rights of all users
-Virtual world designers should have freedom of expression
-Virtual worlds should include plain-language End-User
License Agreements (EULA) to enable all individuals to understand their
rights
-There are different types of virtual worlds with different policy implications
-Access is critical to virtual worlds, so net neutrality must be maintained
-Game developers shall not be liable for the actions taken by players
-Fair use may apply in virtual worlds that enable amateur creation of original works
-The government should provide a comprehensive package of funding for educational games research, development, and literacy
[Edit: FN1 Modified to reflect correct wording voted on at Ludium 2.]
SWI plans to send this platform to all major candidates for the presidency and for all contested congressional seats in the coming 2008 election. I'm sure these statements will prompt a lot of discussion and debate (I hope so), but I thought I would remind everyone that the congress is concluded, and these are SWI's policy recommendations, at least until the next Ludium ;-). I'm sure that registration for that one will be open, as it was for this one.
The Ludia are conferences structured as games, and this one was modeled
on a political convention, the first Synthetic Worlds Congress. Studio Cypher deserves a lot of credit for creating a game that generated incentives to both compete and collaborate. All attendees began in districts (of three delegates), and started by forging platform planks, combining them regionally (3 districts to a region, 3 regions total) by the end of the first day. On the second day, all voted in multiple straw polls on 30 potential planks, with merging of planks and refinement of language prompted by the game design, the end goal being a list of 10 planks, as determined by a final vote. The list above is the result. In addition, the conference elected me as its Speaker, which basically puts me forward to direct the traffic of media and policy-maker inquiries about the declaration to the appropriate legal, industry, and academic experts. In the process of determining the speaker as well there was a greater interest amongst the nominees (Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Joshua Fairfield of Indiana University Law School and TN, and myself) in focusing on the platform, and the breadth of expertise in the room that would be able to speak to its specific planks, then on the race for the position.
We all know that well-designed games are good at generating incentives for their players, and in a way I took it as a sign of the success of this one that before the first day was even completed many players were eager to concentrate on the content of the planks rather than press for every advantage that the game mechanics gave them to accumulate "influence points" or the currency, gold coins. It quickly became apparent that the Ludium had sparked useful ideas and discussion about virtual world policy. The feeling that we were succeeding in hammering out a useful set of policy guidelines only grew over the course of day 2.
The Ludium was also the setting for related news from Ren Reynolds, who took the opportunity after final voting was completed to let us know about the Virtual Policy Network he is spearheading, and organization based in the UK that will tackle similar policy matters from a European as well as global perspective. Bravo, Ren!
[Edit: Some Ludium2 reports from attendees have appeared. Christian Renaud of Cisco has a post here, and Mia Consalvo has a post here. Ron Meiners has blogged about it at Virtual Cultures, Garrison LeHearst weighs in here, and Michelle Senderhauf of ARGNet posted during the conference. Richard, of course, blogged about it here, and Peter Jenkins has a post on his blog as well. Any I've missed? Drop a comment below and I'll add the link!]
A sizable group of Second Life residents (more than 1300 as of this writing, although there is some doubt as to the authenticity of the signatures) has signed an open letter to Linden Lab, to highlight five concerns related to the infrastructure of the virtual world:
* Inventory loss - this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well. Regardless, this cannot continue - we will not accept financial loss as a feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure our data is not lost, and you are failing us.
* Problems with Find and Friends List - we continue to see search outages on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends lists work again.
* Grid stability and performance - teleports fail quite regularly, especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out in, and sim performance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.
* Build tool problems - the importance of build tools that actually work as promised cannot be overstated enough - we rely on them to create content. Prim drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying to work around the problems.
* Transaction problems - inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming (and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing content and having to try to confim the transaction in the first place. We trust that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its accuracy.
The letter demands that Linden Lab put off new feature rollouts until these issues have been addressed, but doesn't specify what action the group will take should LL not comply. It doesn't seem that these users can do much, beyond organizing more protests -- many have invested a great deal of time and effort in SL, and I don't think they would be willing to abandon the virtual world.
So far, Linden has not responded on the official SL blog.
Steven "Play No Evil" Davis, in a great comment on Mark Wallace's thread, asked the following question:
Is griefing simply emergent play that some folks don't like?
I think this is an interesting question to pursue, and I'm going to take a somewhat provocative stance and answer "no," partly to explore some territory and partly because I think there's a case to be made against griefing that doesn't founder on a libertarian objection (i.e., that if some people do something in a low-consequence environment, then it must be fun to them/their choice, and therefore must be okay).
I should state at the outset that studying cheating, griefing, and similar topics is not a principal part of my research, and there are several esteemed folks around here that do it, so I hope to learn from them if they'd like to weigh in. Here, I'm just following through on some ideas that have been percolating on meaning and games, and how they might help us answer Steven's question.
To begin this speculation, the first thing I'm going to do is narrow the topic a fair bit. Rather than discuss "griefing" in the broad sense, I'm going to focus on one activity in MMOGs that is often seen as griefing: ganking. Very specifically, I'm talking about a human player, piloting a higher-level/better geared toon, attacking a toon that is much lower level, without any other circumstances (game objectives and narratives), histories (they, or their guilds, know each other or similar), or players (on either side) involved. This is simply the killing (frequently, one-shotting) of another toon by a vastly more powerful toon. I'm drawing my sense of this phenomenon from the open PvP servers of World of Warcraft -- other games/server types may vary considerably and interestingly.
What I would like to suggest is that this kind of PvP is meaningless. Or, perhaps more precisely, that the meaning it has is so narrow, rationalized, and improverished that it is outside of, or rejects, the game in which it is situated. Games, as ends in and of themselves, are things that can generate new meanings and experiences. For the ganker, however, ganking is a means to other ends ("Personal best crit!"), not a potentially generative new experience. (And, by the way, please keep in mind that I am not talking about all PvP -- there are many other kinds, both institutionally designed by the developer and emergent, which would not fit with the argument I'm making here.)
I'm speculating that ganking happens when a player who does not want to be challenged to play a game (i.e., encounters where the outcome is contingent), instead opts to do something where the outcome is a foregone conclusion: kill a player that is vastly lower in capabilities. If meaning is found at the meeting point of inherited systems of interpretation (cultural expectations) and the performative demands of singular circumstances (something I talked about here), then ganking is a denial of that meaning. It is a retreat from the demands of the new, and it signals a disposition that does not want to be performatively challenged. Ganking lower level players is, then, a somewhat pathetic attempt to feel, well, something. But that something is not the meaning that participating in a challenging game would create -- it is removed from that. If there is no contingency, it follows that there is no meaning -- all you have left is an impoverished environment where pointless negative reciprocity (I was ganked at L24, so I’ll gank at L60) reigns.
It might be argued against this that an environment of open PvP, rather than erasing contingency, actually spawns it, generating a wide open landscape of ganking possibility for the lower level players. This would be a way to argue that there is still a game, on a broader level, and it is a cat-and-mouse game. The difference in capabilities once the battle is joined is not in question -- the cat wins -- but the game is actually about avoiding that encounter (thanks to David Simkins for voicing this argument to me). This is an interesting way to go, and I agree that it can turn out this way, under certain game design conditions. I would argue, however (again, I'm being provocative to see where this leads), that in WoW this doesn't hold, because the architecture of the game is not very flexible about alternative places to go to accomplish objectives. The quests for any given level are in a small set of vastly distributed places, and the transportation costs (in time) for low level characters are high. This means that if someone is trying to get quests done in Stranglethorn Vale, there is not a viable game in avoiding the gankers -- they have every advantage also in the "meta" game of cat-and-mouse. For most players, this means that the ganking feels, again, like a foregone conclusion, it is only the question of when it will happen that is utterly contingent (that is, too contingent). In neither aspect is there a performative challenge for the gankee or the ganker. One is left with either too much determination, or too much chaos; either way leads to a loss of meaning.
So why does it happen at all, if it's so meaningless? To answer this, one would have to make a normative, critical claim (and goodness knows those are popular around here). One would have to say that what happens is that the game objectives get replaced by utterly personal objectives, individualistic and empty goals that are the simulacra of actual (new) meaning. Gankers, this argument would say, are getting their jollies in an endless circle of confirming their own expectations, mistaking the increasing number of notches on their belt for actual personal development. In fact, this line of reasoning would argue, they are each stuck in an iron cage of false objectives.
Now, I can spin this argument out, and understand how to get from point A to point B, and it's consistent with my experience and preferences. But, on the other hand, I have lots of friends who enjoy open PvP, even the random but inevitable ganking part of it, so I hesitate. I'm also certainly one to be wary of normative claims about other people's experiences ("Yes, yes -- you say you're having a good time, but you're really just deluding yourself").
On the other hand, the argument that if people choose to do something in these domains it is just a different "style of gameplay," and therefore morally unassailable, also rubs me the wrong way. It seems to rest not only on a separation of play from real experience (and I have a whole set of strong empirical objections to that view), but also on a modernist, individualistic ethic -- it's all about the individual experience, this seems to say, and that should be our final arbiter of all matters ethical.
I don't have any real answers here, but I'm quite taken with the notion that ganking is, effectively, not a game, and with thinking through the consequences for meaning and experience that follow from this. To what extent this could be extended to other kinds of griefing, I'm not sure, but it does seem to me that quite a few players out there actually don't seem to want to play a game at all.
So I've been having my usual beginning-of-the-semester chats with my graduate students about their projects and progress. I enjoy these, and I think they do to (they almost never complain about the thumbscrews, or -- more of a shock -- having to read Habermas). One of them, Krista-Lee Malone, is a master's student and long-time gamer who is completing an excellent thesis about hardcore raiding guilds. During our chat she said something about how these raiding guilds went about preparing her to participate in their activities, and it prompted me to follow up on some ideas from here. It's about Foucault, bodies, institutions, and whether the relationship between developers and guilds is changing in important ways.
Krista-Lee plays a priest (one with more purples than I'll ever see for my druid, I'm sure), and what she said was (paraphrasing), "I can healbot Molten Core in my sleep, but if I'm thrown into a new situation, I can't heal at all." While that's probably an overstatement, it suggests something about the nature of raiding guild discipline -- at least, pre-TBC. It turns out, and this is not unusual, that the guild power-leveled her toon and then taught her to follow a very specific and detailed script for the instances they were running, starting with UBRS and then through Naxx.
Michel Foucault famously argued that the power of modern institutions is driven, at root, by the ability to discipline people, or, more directly, to discipline their bodies -- to mold those bodies and order their actions in ways that allow groups to achieve institutional objectives effectively. To do this, they draw on practical techniques developed first in places like early Christian monasteries and the Roman legions. Bodies are organized, regimented, taught to sit, to stand, to kneel, to match their singular shapes to the demands of regularity -- no pinky out of place, the leg held just so. The effect of this "bio-power", as he most convincingly shows in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is not only effective institutional control over otherwise unruly subjects, but in fact a re-shaping of their selves. They come to see this discipline as consitutive of who they are, as shaping their very desires. The classic (and idealized -- practice is messier) example is the panopticon, where prisoners are architecturally situated in view of an invisible and authoritative observer. The guard watches from in a darkened room while they are laid out in a brightly-lit Cartesian grid. It comes to matter little if the guard is there at all, as the prisoners internalize the surveillance.
I'm not saying that Krista-Lee was a prisoner of her guild. Um, exactly. Foucault argues (in later works) that this disciplining of bodies is something taking place all around us, particularly as we learn to act within highly-regulated contexts, like schools, the military, hospitals, and airports. And, like the prisoners, he asserts that we come to accept and even celebrate the kind of self the institutions have made of us.
All of this is to get us thinking about to what extent hardcore raiding guilds should be seen in a similar light. The essence of disciplined bodies is that they are malleable; they can be shaped to perform in lock-step (literally) under a command hierarchy. The tension, of course, is that this strategic control always involves a tradeoff with the tactical, the ability of a group to respond on the fly, to emergent situations. For Krista-Lee, this effect was directly discernible -- while she enjoys soloing and quest-grouping, she felt lost in new instances, when there wasn't an explicit script to follow.
As I've pointed out, for WoW, this had -- before the expansion -- created a mutually constructive relationship between the 5(10)-person instancing and the large-scale raiding. While small-scale grouping not only allows for, it depends upon, tactical rethinking on the fly, large-scale groups narrow and leverage the set of available class skills (maybe hunters begin to leave pets behind, druids get pushed into healing, only one hemo rogue is called for) into more strictly-defined roles. The small-scale was, perhaps like boot camp in the military, an intense and necessary part of enculcating a set of competencies (what is a pull, sheeping, aggro), but one that ultimately is left behind, smaller in comparison to the institutional ambitions which these competent bodies now serve to realize. Rationalized systems of resource distribution, like DKP, along with political structures and communications tools, play a role as well for these institutions, harnessing individual desire into organizational discipline, to get the 40 people needed together all at one time, ready to down Onyxia, or tackle a world boss.
The reason I think this is particularly interesting for us to think about now are the cases of both WoW and Second Life and some of the recent changes these VWs have undergone. The downsizing of endgame instances in WoW, the availability of soloable loot roughly on a par with Tier 1+ in Outland, and (to my unsystematic eye) the prevalence of small group quests there with excellent rewards, all suggest that Blizzard's moving away from supporting the emerging institutions (guilds) of its creation, ones which had dominated server culture for pretty much the whole game. This is an interesting contrast with past TN conversations, like the one here.
By contrast, the revamped estate tools in SL (which I'm sure many folks out there know more intimately than I), increase the amount of governance by island owners not only over a piece of property, but also over a group of people, and in fact these tools have thereby become deeply intertwined. To my eye, this enables the generation of institutional players on the SL landscape that LL has never had to deal with before. I'm not thinking first of the existing external institutions with a "presence" in SL, but rather of those entities that until recently we could somewhat reliably continue to think of as individuals, but which are now better understood as institutions. While the relationship of LL to some of its major content creators has been undoubtedly cozy, one can't help but wonder how long that will last -- institutions are competitive. The interesting thing about Second Life is the extent to which Linden Lab has had a "free-ride" for a long time, effectively being the only large institutional player in the arena. Social convention was emergent from the users, and was (is) something with which to contend -- a lot of time at Linden is devoted to this "community management". But architecture, the market, and "law" (others modes of governance, as I see it) were all firmly in Linden's hands. That's changing now, and the question is whether Second Life will fly apart at the seams once these other institutionalized interests find their footing.
All this is really just to wonder whether we're entering an era where the relationships between virtual world makers and the people involved them are changing. It is probably wise for us to get in the habit of thinking just as readily about developer/(in-world) institution relationships as we do about developer/individual player relationships. I actually think this will be a hard habit to break -- the idea of the game maker/game player relationship as primarily institution-to-individual is just one instance of the engrained tendency for those in industrialized societies to think about social institutions primarily as they relate to individuals.
WoW and SL both demonstrate, at a very broad level, different solutions to the emergence of institutions within their creations, an emergence that was, I believe, inevitable once resources began accumulating within these persistent and contingent domains. Foucault, like Weber, thought that people banding together to accomplish something was fine, but was wary of what happens next. Once any nascent institution begins looking for something else to accomplish, its primary raison d'etre has already changed. At that point, it's more interested in its own reproduction than in its original aims or purview. Once that happens, look out.
[Addendum: Ever-alert Julian Dibbell points to ShaunConnery's Rapwing Lair. Surely the script in Krista-Lee's guild never sounded so good.]
One of the rocks that players and academics often throw at developers is that their virtual worlds "aren't democratic". Democracy is good; virtual worlds aren't democratic; therefore, virtual worlds are bad.
OK, so players often use "not democratic" as a short-hand for "not a democracy in which I am the president", and academics often use it as a short-hand for "not Utopia", but they do have a point: on the whole, virtual worlds really aren't democratic. Nevertheless, as Ted points out in his book, this is a consequence of players' having no reason to want to be political leaders: they'd get responsibility, but no power.
However, players do organise themselves politically, typically in what have come to be called "guilds". These aren't usually democratic either, but they do represent player self-governance. Furthermore, some of these guilds can get quite big.
So, here's a scenario. Suppose that a guild got large enough that the players in it wanted their own server, for guild members only. They approach the developer, the developer says OK, and sets up a special server that can only be accessed if you have the guild's say-so. This would leave the running of the entire virtual world up to the guild; guild officers could even be given customer service powers if that's what the guild wanted.
It's only hypothetical, but it does raise some interesting questions. Would developers ever want players to run their worlds like this? Would such a guild-operated world address players' and academics' complaints about lack of accountability? Would it wipe out RMT on that server? Would it be sustainable, if the guild had the right critical mass, or would it inevitably fail? What are the legal issues, eg. if someone put in a minimum wage claim for their CSR work, whom would they sue? Would developers still get rocks thrown at them for not being democratic?
Thought experiments: don't you love 'em?
In response to anti-game legislation, some of it ridiculous, the Entertainment Software Association has established a Video Game Voters Network. Members are encouraged to advocate for sound policies regarding the medium. I've been thinking quite a bit lately about policy issues as regards synthetic worlds. Some questions, below the fold.
Once formed and self-conscious, how will the gamer bloc vote on other issues?
Is the gamer bloc an extension of the discussion board gaming community into real world politics?
Will the gamer bloc speak out about real-world policies only, or will it try to affect game development as well?
Presuming that it is incredibly useful and important to maintain a distinction between the policies imposed by real-world governments and the rules imposed by game designers, how can such a distinction be sustained when, for example, real-world governments impose laws that affect game development, and there is a self-conscious gamer bloc prepared to act in both domains?
Arnold Schwarzenegger, California governor and icon for a bloodthirsty annihiliting robot, is currently considering signing a bill authored by child psychologist Leland Yee and now passed by California's legislature, according to which depictions of bloodthirsty annihilating robots, or of the termination of bloodthirsty annihilating robots, shall not be sold to those too young to understand the difference between imaginary and genuine bloodthirsty annihilating robots. Gamepolitics unravels the irony; Slashdot reviewed what some lawyers think. Thanks to Hector Postigo for the link.