Horses and the user-governed world
Prokofy Neva said, in the Metaverse roadmap discussion thread,
What’s so tangled and complex about “who governs” (or as I put it often, “who develops?”) The game devs develop, and the game devs govern. Their junior partners, in the form of mods or wizards or junior devs or whatever are merely replications.
It’s hard to conceive of how complex governance will really get in a four-walls game world if the players cannot at some point leverage their power as consumers/prosumers/payers for the server into forcing a sharing of power, and a separation of powers, so that not only an overweening executive always prevails.
Well, the tangled bit seems to me to be the issue of not whether the game operators are willing to hand over the power (some will, somewhere) but how they hand over the power. The complicated bits are:
- Until software is perfect, you will still need devs. This is a difference from the real world: privileged operators who can alter “reality.”
- Until hardware is fully distributed, you will still need a server location and server operators. This is also a difference from reality: your universe is dependent upon points of failure; the real world is not.
- Until bandwidth and power and locations are free, you will still need money. This is also a difference; reality goes on whether we do anything or not. Virtual reality demands active contribution on someone’s part.
In theory all of these can be provided communally, but the pieces aren’t yet all in place to do so. I’d argue that governance in the real world is powerfully shaped by the lack of the above. Effectively, having a virtual world exist demands an act of responsibility; it does not suffer neglect. It’s like a garden: it needs to be tended to some degree, or it decays.
Human psychology says that if some select individuals are shouldering a burden of responsibility, they will demand status that goes with it. In fact, it’s a fundamental incentive structure that would quickly arise if we chose not to have it in place.
And in this case, the responsibility carries with it a HUGE amount of power. And power, well… you know what they say about power. User participation in governance of virtual worlds is physically limited to what the administrators grant. The trick is getting them to grant it.
If we had a fully peer to peer world with a widely distributed network that used bandwidth and power off of the donations of thousands of community members, and if all maintenance required was donations to the common good in some fashion (even as money used to pay contracted programmers) — e.g., a network that was all volunteer — we might approach the user governance scenario. But even then, I would expect there to be pockets of traditional administration models, just because certain types of experiences demand it.
This drama is epic, and is central to how the Metaverse will play out. Never in history have the developers been overtaken by the developed to such an extent, and so rapidly. The Medicis, the Soviets, whatever, they all coopted the creative intelligentsia and technocrats and had them serve the regime by exchanging content for privileges, and using defunding or terror to keep the class in line. So now we’ll get to see how this is done with virtual world tools like banning or muting or expelling, I suppose, and see who wins the politics of fighting for feature sets.
I agree it is epic and central. The point Prokofy raises is whether the forces of user income via virtual businesses will effectively force the administration of a world to share power. I really don’t know that this is a lever for the problem to an extent beyond the current status quo.
After all, currently all pay-for-play users have that lever. By paying a sub fee or whatever other fee the service uses, they are providing operating capital and profit to the business. Should they “vote with their wallet,” they are effectively denying funds to the operators.
In the case of the virtual business with real money, perhaps some players have larger wallets to vote with, but fundamentally, it’s still the same tool: denying operating capital to the world.
Picture a couple of guys standing around a horse. The first guy owns the horse, and rents it out. He’s got a gun and can shoot the horse. He’s got the necessary stable. He doesn’t, however, have the money to feed it. The other guy rents it, and if it weren’t for his payments, the horse would starve. He even uses the horse for his business, where he makes his living. Now the renter has a grievance. His power over the horse owner is to simply let the horse starve. And the power the horse owner has is to deny the renter access to the horse, and conceivably even shoot the horse dead.
Essentially, virtual world governance rests on mutually assured destruction. The leverage that the renter has is basically to threaten to kill the horse — end the world.
The horse owner typically doesn’t shoot the horse, although it has happened. The horse named Motor City Online was shot even though it had a few people who liked to ride it. Some horses get shot and then recover (“she ain’t dead yet!”). Sometimes, the owner decides a horse is ready for the glue factory, but gives it to the renter, figuring, “what the heck, maybe it can still trot around a pasture and as long as they can feed it, they can have it, but it’s no good for any work anymore.”
What’s most likely is that the horse owner decides that they will just find another renter.
Until we can break this analogy, there’s no really good reason for administrators to share power. Many administrators will even choose to shoot the horse rather than share it, on the grounds that “it’s in my barn, people associate it with my name. If you do something bad with it, it hurts me.” This is the basis of IP, trademark, and corporate image concerns.
The whole “vote with your wallet” thing has instead resulted in different horse providers setting up shop. This still doesn’t change the power equation that much for the renter. Their power to affect how the horse is cared for is still very limited.
Now, if a bunch of folks who liked horses got together, pooled cash to buy a stable, pooled cash to pay for feed, and declared themselves a nonprofit, maybe.
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Original post:Horses and the user-governed world
I think those are good reasons for us to take bad behaviors seriously in games and on their official forums (which are just an extension of the game itself). Enough developers have tried to comment on why things like forums andplayer governance are problematic, and how forum fires start . It seems to me enough people just aren’t getting it. Or else there are further problems, maybe from design or things like RMT, that increase the problem. Regardless, griefing and deliberate negativity have a bad affect, and
[…] Comments […]
But what about those who would come to that stable and poison the horses so others couldn’t ride?
Raph, you really need to get into SL, your mind is too big for playing games. Do you want to change the world or sell sugar water for the rest of your life?
As for the topic – the users in SL are doing far more ‘tending’ of the garden then Linden Lab. Cory published some stats, millions of objects and lines of code are written and textures and sounds are uploaded every week by users, or some equally frightening stat.
Who governs is also a factor of how much each player pays.
Example: If I were to approach a VW company and offer $1M/year if they would name one of their kingdoms “Mike-land”, they’d probably say yes, much as football stadiums are named “[Insert company name here] stadium”.
The owners know that having a “Mike-land” will upset some players and lose some business. However, $1M/year is the revenue from about 7000 full-time players, so the proposition makes economic sense even if 6999 players leave in a huff.
Instead of controlling the name, imagine that I wanted control over what the players could do in Mike-land. Maybe they would have to be my virtual serfs (for an hour of their play a week). Or, maybe they all have to shop in my virtual stores. Or listen to my virtual music. As long as only 6999 players are annoyed enough to leave, my laws will hold.
Or, you can scale the fees down, and instead of an entire kingdom, it’s merely an inn, or a bridge… “Mike’s toll bridge. If you don’t pay, spend an hour walking to the nearest ford.”
Or, you can look at this the other way… those players who don’t pay (ala Runescape) are forced to dwell in Mike-land and obey the rules of the tyrant. $1M a year pays for the bandwidth and lousy support of around 20,000 free players (to pick a round number).
Note: Mike-land could just as easily be called “Pizza-Hut land”, and you get advertising. Advertising isn’t the only reason though, since some players will be willing to pay more for special priviledges, especially when those priviledges give them a power trip or provide real ecomonic advantage. SL has already shown this, selling virtual real estate to players who want it for (a) personal reasons, or (b) money-making ventures.
Raph wrote:
Now, if a bunch of folks who liked horses got together, pooled cash to buy a stable, pooled cash to pay for feed, and declared themselves a nonprofit, maybe.
As so often happens, text MMOs have already done this. Batmud, for instance.
–matt
A good question. That’s when the stable owner has to resort to the cops — aka, using the DMCA or the like to justify bringing in the FBI.
If there IS no stable owner, in the case of the fully-empowered userbase, then I have no idea.
What if I think SL is too small? 🙂
What if I think that games can change the world?
That would be what I meant by pockets of traditional administration…
Yeah, a bunch of muds effectively ran this way even if they didn’t officially declare as nonprofits. The license basically mandated it. But none of them were run the “distributed” way that I know of… even BatMUD still has one central server location and therefore still has the issue of a centralized authority.
What about the issue of cloning horses? I know most of the major horse owners don’t look too kindly on clones of their horses, but what if they sanctioned it? What if they sold clones of their horses to be rented out by people who had their own stables already?
Wouldn’t that look more like horse breeding and not horse cloning? In which case the horse owner would want “Stud Fees”.
Seems to me in many cases the owner decided that the grievance is at least somewhat valid. In which case they might fix the shoes, or whatever it was. This is why when a MMORPG rep tells me something would be “Impossible to code” I tend to think they mean “would be impossible to get permission for that many hours of paid coding”. Too many times they have changed their tune when the renters made clear that they wanted this feature, and if not provided would shop around.
well, the internet was small at one point. SL might be small,but it is huge in impact (eg: businessweek) and this is where it’s all going one day.
It’s sad to see people like you spending all your precious brain power on things like puzzle pirates, bejeweled, and hero’s quest.
Again: Games have value, read the book
Further, I don’t care what magazines choose to talk about SL, TSO was on the cover of Newsweek not that long ago. Next week it will be John Travolta.
I don’t really think the future of Virtual Worlds is a chaotic mess of people making up 3d objects for each other. There is no game, there is no theme, and there is no statement or idea. In many ways, there is no persistent world. But if you are having fun, that’s cool. I’m sure the data will be very useful.
If you are really interested in spreading the word about your product, perhaps you could talk about your experiences there. I admit, most MMORPGs these days are centered on killing monsters and looting their bodies, it’s not a very high bar for your SL to be better than. So what do you actually do there that is better? I hear a lot of the untapped potential, and it’s there. I heard about the money, and I don’t think it’s there, at least not yet. And I hear about the booming sex-industry and quite frankly wonder if my wife would even let me visit you guys, if I was foolish enough to ask permission before downloading things.
Raph, please don’t do the SL thing.
You’ll drown in a sea of bad pr0n and furries. Personally, i value your thoughts too much to see that happen, if i don’t always agree with them.
Beyond Virtually Assured Destruction
Raph Koster yesterday extended some ideas from the Metaverse Grudge Match that began last week. Raph talks about the kinds of power users and administrators have over the virtual worlds they occupy and run, and the fact that both camps ultimately find …
[…] 3pointD.com picks up on the discussion on horses and governance (alas, without using the horse metaphor!) and offers, The alternative is a distributed metaverse in which a series of online spaces exist not in a contiguous pile but as loosely connected locations on a metaversal web, much as Web sites are connected today. Some of these would be public, some would be private, some would be restricted to a certain group of people. Instead of one administrator, you have thousands or millions. Instead of your inventory and avatar and all that’s associated with it existing in one place, dependent on that place’s back-end, those things exist in portable fashion. Under this model — in which you can host your own corner of the virtual world (or have it hosted for you through a hosting service) — exit costs are radically reduced. If I leave a loosely connected space in the distributed metaverse, all I lose is access to that space. My inventory and identity go with me. The administrator may lose the income associated with my activities there, but small spaces are much less costly to run, so my power over the administrator is reduced (though not eliminated). The people have more power, much as Prok envisions. (If the network is built on an open-source, peer-to-peer architecture, the people have even more power.) […]
In my opinion, I think that only a minority of players would want to play in a user-governed world. MMO Games should be an escape from reality, or at worst reality-lite. If you’re (you meaning a player) trying to replicate the real world in a make believe setting perhaps you would be better served dressing up in garb and joining a local LARP. Personally as a player I’m happy to leave the management and maintinance of my virtual world to the respective companies that built them. I have no problem paying a monthly fee to someone who can provide a reasonable value in terms of entertainment to me.
[…] Horses and the user-governed world on Raph Koster Horses and the user-governed world on Raph Koster Quote: […]
I’ve always thought that there was more to the central authority than just a producer-consumer relationship. At least in-so-far as “he who governs” or “he who develops” pertains to setting the expectations and limitations of the game world.
There is a tension in gamers between the desire to personally have control over parts of the world and the (rational) fear of what may come of the world if other players have too much control. Having a central authority set expectations legitimizes a lot of the accomplishments in a world. I think that players, while they will often say exactly the opposite, tend to be most comfortable with worlds that are centrally governed because of this. With WoW the expectations, limitations and measures of success are all very clear because one central authority dictates them and I think this is attractive to players.
If governance does pass on from developers to some other set of people I think that those groups who succeed will be those who tend to have some form of central governance themselves so that they can achieve coherent and consistent meanings.
A few other thoughts…
I think that it’s no mistake that MUD’s and such usually use the concept of “god” to refer to developers or administrators who have control the world and I don’t think this is just a conceit of those developers/administrators. It’s there because it works as a way to create stories, just as a dungeon master is the “god” in D&D. The dungeon master doesn’t have his position because he bought the dice and the books but because the role of a central storyteller is important. I think this, as much as economic relationships, defines the relationship between developers and players in modern MMO’s.
well, the internet was small at one point. SL might be small,but it is huge in impact (eg: businessweek) and this is where it’s all going one day.
The future is in virtual worlds, yes. The future will not be in just SL. The reason the Internet boomed at all was because it could support it. SL can’t, and almost certainly won’t. It’s a good first step, and I think everyone should mess around with it, but to expect it to go the same way as the Internet is just kidding yourself.
Raph, please don’t do the SL thing.
Incidentally, for those of you who didn’t read the Thoughts on the Metaverse thread, Raph has already done the SL thing. =P
I also think it’s worth trying to figure out how to properly run a P2P MMORPG. Maybe it’s completely impossible… who knows. I’ve come up with an idea or two, but nothing workable. (Hm… right now I’m thinking that perhaps they could rotate the role of server…) Why? Because it might actually be possible to come up with a world that doesn’t ever actually go down except under extreme circumstances. A P2P network is stronger than the client/server architecture all MMORPGs are based on, though they do unfortunately remain dependent on supernodes (unless they all acted as supernodes… *ponders more*)
You know, an act passed by Congress is typically just changing lines of code… ^_^
The dungeon master doesn’t have his position because he bought the dice and the books but because the role of a central storyteller is important.
What if the developers don’t want to impose a story upon the players? As you become more worldly, part of the idea is to dissolve the idea of story and let the players come up with their own. I recognize that there’s value in remaining gamey, but what about when you don’t want that anymore?
Raph,
I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to repudiate just about everything you say. Most of it is predicated on the notion that game devs and world gods are special New-Age priests of cyberspace endowed with greater powers than have ever been known to man. Well, kinda, but not really — cyberspace and everything in it not only can get unplugged, all it takes is one good power outage such as we had on the East Coast a few years ago to put that in perspective. The Catholic Church or the Soviet Empire never had those kind of power outage problems while they were in power.
Seriously, while the power implied with server ownership and proprietary software and restrictive TOS (and its arbitrary and biased enforcement!) are all very real problems of over-reaching executive power, they aren’t new, and they aren’t special. Any large entity like a corporation or an empire or an organized religion has to have some legitimacy and some measure of public accountability. To the extent such entities are more accountable and transparent in our time, they are more or less successful, their business is going to go well or poorly.
In the examples I’ve often given around Second Life, I don’t expect that when I call up Verizon, or Oxford health insurance, or my Congressional office, that I have to be filtered through a user’s group, vetted by a junior game dev, resmodded, inspected for my skill-up level, or admitted on sufferance. They are public entities, there’s a social contract involved in dealing with them and often a legal one, they have customer service representatives or legislative assistants and I make my complaints to them — they redress them. They don’t admonish me that they own all the DSL connection in the building, or own the permission system to authorize my surgery, or can hold up a bill in Congress until I express loyalty — that is, it’s not *suppose* to work that way, and to the extent that it does is the extent that we rebel. Most of the time, they play their limited role — and it is limited, by the rule of law, in ways that game devs seem to think doesn’t apply to them, or from which they are exempt by their specialness.
So what, we’re supposed to roll over and become supine in a game world or a virtual world? Why? It’s not even the issue of “voting with your feet,” and it’s not even the question of “we’re helping to pay the game devs’ salary” which we can invoke in SL because we pay rent on the servers. It’s just normal public accountability. As I’ve often said, whatever the issue of subscription fees or “walled gardens,” the reason they call them massive multiplayer games is that they’re massive and multi-player and that means they are public, and involve the public. As much as the gaming and VW industry prefers to invoke the analogy of Hollywood and the entertainment business when conceiving of these masses (that gives them less accountability perhaps?), the analogy particularly for open-ended social worlds is something more like the responsibility that television and the print media have to viewers and readers.
The public expects the news media to tell the truth, to publish the news without fear or favour, and in some communities even assign the media the social role of “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.” Some an awesome, mammoth project as building the Metaverse, which is to overarch us all and contain Everything, ought to do *at least* that much. Why give it all away to proprietary game companies, some of which don’t even have very good employee manuals or codes of behaviour? After all, a telephone company can be big and powerful and have lots of telephone poles and wires but if nobody wants to make a call to nobody else, it’s all pretty useless. Or to take a non-hypothetical example for RL entertainment, isn’t the reason we have less of these giant movie theaters with seating and ushers and popcorn makers because of videos you can rent and take home? Wouldn’t it be better for the guy with the short red jacket with the gold piping to become involved in helping people rent videos instead of having his role made obsolete?
As for your complicated bits:
> * Until software is perfect, you will still need devs. This is a difference from the real world: privileged operators who can alter “reality.”
In a setting like SL, the residents themselves are creating and altering the reality to a significant extent. More and more, all the Lindens are doing is plunking down a server with a flat landscape and the leaser then textures it, terraforms it, puts builds on, etc. In a situation where the “value-add” is so largely coming from the subscriber, you really can’t keep talking about “privileged operators” in the same way, of course. Of course, the residents rely on the devs and still need them to transfer the access to the server and keep the server running. So? In RL, my landlord gives me the lease and the key and keeps the heat on and I pay him rent, he doesn’t piously tell me that he can “alter my reality” or consider himself “privileged” — of course he could shut off the hot water arbitrarily but then I have recourse to a lawsuit — and that brings me to the *only* thing that you can say about game devs: utter refusal to submit to the rule of law, utter arbitrariness. That is, sure, they have their TOS, but given that the TOS actually codifies lawlessness (*shudders*) by using such terminology as “any reason or no reason” (with a resonance far greater in a virtual world than in RL settings where exactly the same language is used), they set up a situation of permanent arbitrariness.
And, I’m thinking the software doesn’t have to be *that perfect* or even open-sourced. I think that the weight of trying to run so large a world, or collectively, so many worlds, will compel game gods to delegate more. So far, they have a very brittle arrangement, they usher their own into a magic circle, into a company of those “with a high and lonely destiny” and they spend a lot of time keeping others out — and it keeps breaking, as often their own kind who are outside the magic circle, the hackers and griefers, wind up breaking these fragile barriers. So more and more they will have to make the mechanisms more flexible precisely to protect them from their own kind who are destructive.
When the motor vehicle first began to be mass-produced, there were specialized mechanics, entire jobs built around just driving and maintaining these special devices. Today, you can change your own battery and your own oil. The same with the camera, where once a town photographer was the only one with the specialized device, today even a little kid can upload their cat’s picture from a digital camera to the Internet. Virtual worlds are virtual! So that ought to make their makers more vulnerable to the forces of the increasingly knowledgeable masses and even more accountable to the increasing demand to make the mechanisms more usable.
> * Until hardware is fully distributed, you will still need a server location and server operators. This is also a difference from reality: your universe is dependent upon points of failure; the real world is not.
Well, that’s not true — when all the bridges were closed on 9/11 for several days and no one could leave the city, the points of failure did fail. The difference with the real-world equivalent of server locations and operators — the people who operate bridges or tunnels or toll booths or trains or telephone lines — is that they feel an accountability to the public that apparently you can’t or won’t feel. You’re no different than an operator of a common carrier — a public commons — a line of communication, a bus, and while you’ve trained people to be more docile (you as a class of game gods), there’s no good reason why they should remain so, and if anything, they need to curb your tendency to authoritarianism more.
Modes of travel and communication often start out privately developed and owned, but gradually the companies go public and in many countries even the government begins to fund them. Why would a system of virtual worlds and what sustains it be any different?
There are towns and cities or even just universities increasingly taking it upon themselves to provide wireless access. More and more, there are public terminals for the Internet, for free or for a small cost. Isn’t it likely that in 25 years, we will take it as much for granted that we can plug into the Internet in many places as we take it now for granted that we can plug in a lamp or a tape recorder? And perhaps even take it for granted that some sort of basic virtual Metaverse will just be “there” like electricity is “there”?
> * Until bandwidth and power and locations are free, you will still need money. This is also a difference; reality goes on whether we do anything or not. Virtual reality demands active contribution on someone’s part.
Oh, a lot of money actually goes into keeping up the appearances of reality, Raph, the jobs and schools and hospitals and stores that you have to use in reality. Maybe the grass and the air come for free, but even keeping those free and availability can come at a cost. I wonder why people become giddy in talking about virtual worlds as if they must always spring forth full-blown from the head of Zeus? What’s so special? Just about everything in RL requires somebody’s “active contribution” — just getting this lettuce, bread, and tomato in my sandwich to me took the “active participation” of hundreds of people growing and labouring and transporting and packaging and delivering. They all have a job to do and don’t feel I need to give them taps on the love machine nor request their bears or love them forever as a fanboy.
>virtual world governance rests on mutually assured destruction. The leverage that the renter has is basically to threaten to kill the horse — end the world.
This mutually-assured destruction concept used to be considered a deterrent in the 1970s and 1980s, but then it came to be seen as “exterminism” — the very project of maintaining the MAD began to corrode science and politics and society and the superpowers lost so much in maintaining the arms race that even without dropping the bombs they began to suffer and were ready to change in the 1990s.
Why all this violence and sad cruelty? In your model, the horse is always getting shot. The power is so rigid, yet so brittle, than it figures it will snap (not get any rent) if it “gives in” to the grievance so it shoots the horse. Couldn’t we assure the stable owner that he will always get to be stable owner and get whatever glory he needs to get from that if he will just go on laying on the horses and stop being an ass? And we will lay on the hay and ride the horses.
>And the power the horse owner has is to deny the renter access to the horse, and conceivably even shoot the horse dead.
Obviously, there’s another way — he could listen to the grievance of the renter, and ameliorate the condition. He could reason and deliberate with him. Game gods seem to fear a social contract or a dialogue with civil society leading to a compact or a compromise — like the Wicked Witch of the East feared water! And it often seems all that is needed to melt their beautiful wickedness is water — pour it, and leave the game and log off.
>What’s most likely is that the horse owner decides that they will just find another renter.
Yes, this is what we call the Kenny Linden “there’s always another guy to buy the island” concept. They can’t get away with too much of that, however, or they get a bad rep, and the fresh supply of new guys dries up.
>Their power to affect how the horse is cared for is still very limited.
No, I don’t buy that. From my admittedly limited experience, I’ve seen the extreme of TSO, where the game devs never came in the game and never even answered their customers or spoke to them except in the gay balloons of their feature ads, and attempting to bring about change was futile (unless you simply decided to play a metagame) and I’ve seen SL, where campaigns which I’ve taken a lead on, like removing the destructive power of officer recall, used to grief groups, was removed from the features, when we could make a persuasive enough case. The list of features that resident power has changed in SL is admittedly a short one — but there’s still a list. And that gives you a basis to expect more.
Of course, there’s a huge amount of hokum that goes into this — LL will simply decide something unilaterally like “we need to junk this joints feature in the build tool, it’s too buggy and fixing it is too much trouble and doesn’t sell more subscdriptions” — so they go through the phony exercise of having a liaison pretend to ask for “public opinion” about whether people really use joints, and then after 30 days of that, sure enough, we see joints removed in the next game patch. But the fact that the game gods even feel compelled to ask the public, the fact that sometimes, they do change their plans based on the degree of static they get back, gives us grounds to expect a lot more of this Metaverse started by game companies. A *lot* more.
>Now, if a bunch of folks who liked horses got together, pooled cash to buy a stable, pooled cash to pay for feed, and declared themselves a nonprofit, maybe.
I’m not sure what you’re envisioning here, but I suppose one variation of it involves some kind of Knights Templar of the Metaverse, who, out of selfless goodwill, and reaching deep in their pockets, create some kind of Round Table or Exchange, where at least their own privileged members could maintain a loose set of rules, devices, knowledge, wisdom, about the running of games. Maybe they already have that, in a sense, and it’s called “State of Play: IV”.
Or maybe, again borrowing an analogy from the world of the media, you could have something like the AP. The AP began as a non-profit organization, a service or professional service that was created to enable journalists to share news, to have pools of reporters, to have the few who might get into a war zone, or a presidential candidate’s train, or whatever, be able to file a brief factual report for the many. For smaller papers that couldn’t afford a national or foreign bureau, this service was vital and they would pay something for it. So sure, those who like horses and stables and riding might, out of a sense of public service, create conditions where instead of this incessant all-or-nothing violent opposition, where stables’ owners were always trying to get their horses fed by dilatory riders, where horses were run ragged, where riders who did feed the horses constantly developed grudges against the failure of the owners to clean out the stables, etc. you had some more neutral force that tried to sustain the entire enterprise.
Already, I gather, this happens informally, as even proprietary software like SL makes use of other open-sourced software, and things completely unrelated to SL as such, like Yahoo Messenger, become integrated into the use and the culture of SL (mainly as a way to communicate faster by typing in longer paragraphs than SL itself enables, and being able to talk outside an environment where everyone believes they are being chatlogged, including by LL).
Already the ultimate answer I would give to you, which I had framed in my mind even before Mark Wallace published his blog on the portable ID today, was that game players are highly portable. That is, they don’t need your horse to ride, essentially. Or they emulate or even steal your horse. If one game pales, people drift to another, and extend a hand back to their comrades left in the old country, and help them immigrate to the new one.
Ultimately, I think you have to take sober cognizance of the fact that people do not need your Metaverse to come together or stay together. There are enough different and variable pieces of this thing-in-the-making around now, whether MySpace or Yahoo or Flikr or WoW or whatever, that people migrate or even swarm around together and if conditions aren’t good in one place, or even if it is just down for maintenance, they go someplace else. The quality that binds them is a spiritual one, it takes place in the human mind, heart, and soul, and these faculties of the human may have their software and hardware expressions, but obviously they exist independently of these machines.
Just as Yahoo Groups have the shared files, or people use briefcases, so these identities and networks are stored, maybe even only on the back of an envelope in the real world. Like sea monkeys, all you need to do is pour water on them and put them in an environment at the right temperature for them to thrive again.
In fact, these networks and connections people make which transpire in a mental or emotional or spiritual zone (however you want to describe it) require less feeding than horses and as you’d be the first to say by pushing the accomplishments of MUDs and MOOs, don’t even need the horse of a 3-D rendering engine.
But we don’t have any illusions that these horses, or rendering engines help, and indeed people become dependent on them. Everyone is well aware that with game gods can arbitrarily banish them from the kingdom forever, and maybe even begin to share master shit lists with each other. Indeed with Philip Linden’s recently-articulated concept of “civic redress,” the game gods can even have plausible deniability while they let groups of residents, themselves without any special accountability, ban, mute, and deter other residents from large land masses using tools the devs give to them for this purpose, specifically to reduce their own responsibility or involvement in customer disputes.
Why this saveragry? I guess I’m not surprised that the game gods use the same brutal ethic within their games deployed for killing orcs or trespassers when they tackle the issue of arranging their game itself in the public space.
Why don’t they take another route? What prevents them from becoming socially responsible, responsive to a civil society from below seeking to mitigate the effects of their rule from above? In RL, a guy like the Unilever CEO can say, “Corporate social responsibility is a hard-edged business decision. Not because it is a nice thing to do or because people are forcing us to do it… because it is good for our business”.
Can’t games and social worlds see that it is *good for business* if they create the means for fair and just governance? Ultimately, it wasn’t good for business for the Romans, the Ottomans, the Soviets, to run things as they did. Why are virtual world empires going to be any different? Yet their very innovation and their world-historical new capacity mean they may have the flexibility to prevent the shooting of the horses and the burning down of the stables.
They just have to obey the real world law, and the law lets a virtual world operator do darn near anything.
They aren’t necessarily; they could be privately held. The point being, they are regulated, and VW’s aren’t.
Well, no, not always. 🙂 Only insofar as they agree, and they feel like doing so, and aren’t legally obligated to do so (and sometimes not even then). The point being, there’s legal recourse if they don’t.
My point is, none of the infrastructure of normal public accountability exists within a VW, and there are few forces driving it into existence. I agree it should exist, but it doesn’t, and it’s not trivial to cause it to exist either, because of the forces arrayed against it.
And any Linden with access to the server code can make every single bit of it incompatible with a one-line change. Or delete it all, with a one-line command. All of that reality users are creating is a soap bubble that can be popped at any time by a superuser (using superuser in the Unix sense here). That is the issue with privileged operators.
The powers that SL citizens have to alter reality are parlor tricks — they are what the operators deign to give.
From the philosophical sense, I agree.
But in the real world, of course you can, because everything in the server is dependent on the server until such time as regulation says otherwise.
Actually, everything game devs are doing right now is fully under the law. It’s just not law you like.
They’ll never surrender ownership unless forced to.
Despite what Manhattanites think, Manhattan is not the universe! 🙂 Of course the real world can suffer localized failure of infrastructure. But what we are talking about is a failure where the ground Manhattan rests on ceases to exist. There is no real world analogy.
Again, this is a regulatory issue, and virtual worlds have a ways to go before they can be regarded as that sort of public good.
Again, you are too focused on the buildings, the human infrastructure. I am talking about reality, not the petty stuff we have encrusted on the surface of the planet. I am talking about the existence of the real universe and its laws of physics, versus the existence of the virtual universe and its laws of physics.
An MMO dev has the power to alter Planck’s Constant. An MMO dev can change gravity. An MMO dev can wave a hand and reverse the strong and weak forces. There isn’t anything we know of in the real world that can do that.
There aren’t any such guarantees in the real world… why would there be in this case?
This is what usually happens, 99% of the time. The developers of a virtual world are constantly bending over backwards to keep their customers happy. If they are smart, they are dialoging, but even if not, they are monitoring. It is in their business interest.
The challenge comes about when there is something that users want that is not in their business interest. That’s when users conclude that they aren’t listening.
Again, that’s only at the whim of the server operators. You won that victory because they were willing to give it to you. In the end, though, you cannot force them to do anything, and that was the point of my post.
Only if you have an enlightened despot.
Actually, that there is regulation about, and that’s why you haven’t seen it done.
Of course it is good for business, and of course they ought to behave this way.
But the reasons they don’t are the reasons I gave in my post in the first place.
>they are regulated, and VW’s aren’t.
Not yet…but keep this tyranny up…and they will be!
>Only insofar as they agree, and they feel like doing so, and aren’t legally obligated to do so (and sometimes not even then). The point being, there’s legal recourse if they don’t.
Actually, such public service entities do serve the public a lot more than you’re willing to give them credit for — and your assumption that they are as wily and arbitrary and unfair as you think might be more a statement about how you think games get to be? Legal recourse, yes — well, *you’re* the one who wanted avatars to have rights. Did you also think about how they’d get enforced against game gods? Just wait til the worlds grow! The law suits are already beginning to trickle out to RL.
>And any Linden with access to the server code can make every single bit of it incompatible with a one-line change. Or delete it all, with a one-line command. All of that reality users are creating is a soap bubble that can be popped at any time by a superuser (using superuser in the Unix sense here). That is the issue with privileged operato
Yeah, but would they *want* to? I mean, I can also turn off their game. They advertise their product as “your world, your imagination” — so to a certain extent, they have to maintain a credible fiction. My willingness to keep suspending the disbelief (knowing they could burst my bubble at any time) sustains their ability to keep extending me the space for my suspension to take place in. It is a contract of sorts, and I suggest it could be solidified more than it is.
When the land barons met with Philip Linden in September 2005 with a list of demands, I asked him if he would ever be willing to sign a Magna Carta. He said, “That would be an awesome document.” Well, yeah…and we need to keep putting it to him until he *does* sign it.
>none of the infrastructure of normal public accountability exists within a VW, and there are few forces driving it into existence
Then you haven’t met Prokofy Neva! LOL
Well, just because you can’t do everything, Raph, doesn’t mean you can’t do something. There are lots of ways you can get started. For example, let’s say the Lindens claim that they never overstack servers, that if it is a class 3, it should never have more than 4, and then a public project like Max Case’s neighbours takes the data from the servers provided by a HUD device and shows that in fact, no, there are 6 stacked and they’re overbooked. So with enough of those reports, you can force accountability, they start to unstack, at least those where they get complaints. It is a human system. It isn’t Heaven. Its gates *can* be stormed. You just have to get started.
>everything in the server is dependent on the server until such time as regulation says otherwise.
Well, there are lots more things like that in RL than you seem to be willing to admit. Everything in a child’s life depends on a parent, they could make them miserable or happy with a flick of a wrist, and yet, most parents try to be good to their kids. I don’t get why just because these people run hardware and software with rigid, mechanic operations and execution of commands that we can ask them to *change stuff*. We can. And the record shows they *do*.
>I am talking about the existence of the real universe and its laws of physics, versus the existence of the virtual universe and its laws of physics.
Ok but we don’t have to get too engrossed in that. Don’t you filter out much of your knowledge of this to get through the day? can you actually see the planet turning on its axis? To a certain extent, for you, reality is mediated, and you’re only tuning into parts of it and filtering bunches of it out — your ordinary day of consciousness and perception, subjective as it is and limited to space and time, is a kind of virtuality to reality’s reality that is a rough equivalent to a virtual world. So, don’t get too obsessed about these differences, seems to me.
>But what we are talking about is a failure where the ground Manhattan rests on ceases to exist.
The ground at least under some buildings *ceased to exist*.
>Again, this is a regulatory issue, and virtual worlds have a ways to go before they can be regarded as that sort of public good.
I’m here to tell you that it *starts now*. You must become aware of the public weal. Indeed, your failure to do so is bad for business, and if you don’t regulate yourself and devise ways for real and synthetic regulation, then you’ll be regulated by outside forces of RL that will probably be incompatible with the technolibertarianism that got you to where you are today, complete with all the hubris and the absolute certainty that no entity is ready to regulate you yet.
>The challenge comes about when there is something that users want that is not in their business interest. That’s when users conclude that they aren’t listening.
I agree that there is an outrageous sense of entitlement among users. But users are entitled, I should think, at least to an explanation about why something can’t be done, and an explanation that it costs too much money or would require too many staff people, or isn’t technically feasible. There’s no limit to what people will endure sometimes if you at least explain the *why* of it.
>An MMO dev has the power to alter Planck’s Constant. An MMO dev can change gravity. An MMO dev can wave a hand and reverse the strong and weak forces. There isn’t anything we know of in the real world that can do that.
That’s only if you assume that everyone will play by the rules, or play the game that is limited by those rules, i.e. the forces and the wand, etc. But people make up their own games, they play the meta games, and as surely you must know as a game dev, some of the greatest fun that players have with a game is trying to break it, shaking it really hard to see if it will crack.
>Only if you have an enlightened despot.
Does he want more customers erm…subjects or not? It takes two to have a totalitarian government.
>In the end, though, you cannot force them to do anything, and that was the point of my post.
? Well what if they deprecate a script, or change a code, or remove some thingie, and then the new game patch no longer has any of that old stuff, and there is no turning back? What, the game gods are going to get mad and revert to an old version of the game? Of course not. The customers complained, they changed the game, *and the world is changed*. That *changed world* is the fact on the ground and proof that a social compact is not only possible, but necessary — then the game devs must live under the new game patch rules just like the players because the cost of turning back is too great.
>But the reasons they don’t are the reasons I gave in my post in the first place.
I can only come back to the short list of achievements of social movements in SL, whether defeat of the prim tax or defeat of officer recall. They don’t…until they do.
Prok, I have no idea why you keep directing so much of the commentary at ME. Seriously — is your beef really with me? I’m agreeing with you on most everything!
Yes, regulation will come, and it probably needs to come. Even if all the VW admins did everything you dream of, it’d probably still come, because regulation follows commerce, and commercial consequence of VWs (from both the administrative and the user sides) is rising.
Of course they serve the public the vast majority of the time. Frankly, so do the virtual worlds. The decisions undertaken are rarely “arbitrary,” they’re just based on incomplete information — something the users suffer from just as much as the admins. The decisions are also rarely “wily” — organizations are rarely smart — and “unfair” is usually also a matter of perspective.
Of course. The hope would be that some amount of rights and responsibilities are encoded by cultural norms before regulators show up, so that then regulations will codify the way we want things to be, rather than clueless regulators’ idea of how they should be. And by “we” I mean users, primarily.
This difference is fundamental and critical because it speaks to the amount of power over your virtual fate that the admins of a given world have. It’s just a disproportionate amount of power, that’s all I am getting at.
I sincerely hope you are referring to “you” as in “VW admins in general” and not me in particular, because otherwise, I’m baffled. After all, you are making, in this paragraph, exactly the same argument I have made, both in this post, and in many other writings. 🙂
Actually, that has happened many times in the game worlds. Both the changes demanded by customers, and the reversions too.
All I am saying, and the point of the post I made above, is that no fundamental alteration of the balance of power occurred with those. That does not diminish their importance (and there are simialr lasts of achievements by protesting populations in game worlds, btw). But it does mean that the fundamental issues I listed underlying the relationship between users and admins remain.
Well as I saida bout this, I think that the worlds that succeed or the subcommunities that succeed will be those that do a good job of recreating a central authority. They will topple one set of dictators only to scramble to erect another one. In this case it will probably be a different flavor of developer anyway as it will be people with knowhow and talent for design erecting and governing sub-worlds that attract lots of players using tools or grammars defined by some overarching set of god’s (who’s governance will be with respect to the defining the grammar of possible subworlds and will almost certainly still be absolute over that realm).
[…] A recent post by Raph Koster got me to thinking about why is it that MMOs never really seem to find the right mix of entertainment that would hook me as a player for more than a few months. I think its safe to say that I’m in total disagreement about a player governed virtual world as presented by the OP that Raph was responding to. The primary reason being that the ‘players’ who would end up governing are most likely not people I would trust my long term entertainment prospects to. […]
StGabe’s #19 comment
This has produced a very sudden thought in me, that I’m sure has been thought of by a good number of others, but I feel inclined to spill it here anyways so I can think it out.
…and as I was thinking it out, I realized that it’d been done. Any timeline with a history of MUDs, and MU*s can spell it out.
So yeah. Back to square one. My square one, anyways. I guess there’s a reason that there isn’t really a successful (depending on how you define the meaning of success) group of people who have ever been without a central authority.
>Prok, I have no idea why you keep directing so much of the commentary at ME. Seriously — is your beef really with me? I’m agreeing with you on most everything!
It’s not personal, Raph, I’m just taking you for a kind of leader of your class of game devs, that’s all. Aren’t you? I don’t see how you could call it agreeing, however, as you spend a lot of time giving the reality check to my notion of virtuality, i.e. with the kind of cyber equivalent of “freedom of the press belongs to him who owns one.” Yes, you’ve got the servers, but I have the stuff to put on the servers, if nothing else, even if you (the “you” of the class of game devs) put out content galore, I have my game play — my game play itself is a kind of branded content.
>Yes, regulation will come, and it probably needs to come. Even if all the VW admins did everything you dream of, it’d probably still come, because regulation follows commerce, and commercial consequence of VWs (from both the administrative and the user sides) is rising.
Yes, so why make that process an adverse one, if self-regulation could be conceived before it is regulated by external forces.
>Of course they serve the public the vast majority of the time. Frankly, so do the virtual worlds. The decisions undertaken are rarely “arbitrary,” they’re just based on incomplete information — something the users suffer from just as much as the admins. The decisions are also rarely “wily” — organizations are rarely smart — and “unfair” is usually also a matter of perspective.
I hardly think it’s credible to posit that decisions of game gods we don’t like are “based on incomplete information”. Usually what people on the pro-game-dev side of the aisle say that the company “has to be concerned with their bottom line,” and that entitlement-happy players don’t get what the cost is.
I don’t have enough gaming experience to make as broad and as confident a staetment as you make about the lack of arbitrariness, I just happen to have been in worlds which had a lot of arbitrariness in them, TSO and SL. When I say “wily,” I mean that they deliberately scrape all the data they can from all the servers, then serve this up as “proof”. Who could deny server statistics? For example, if you gripe to the Lindens, hey, you are land-glutting on the auction, it’s sinking the value of the Linden, they’ll say, no, the auction is on demand, so there must be demand, people are buying, but no, you say, you’ve sold 3 times as much land this month as last, that’s a land glut, and they’ll say, no, the population is growing, and you’ll say, no, not by THAT much — and it’s endless. They have a thing they need to do: keep the price of land at an equilibrium for lots of reasons. So they have the patter ready to explain that always, even though it’s patently “unfair” and everybody can see what they are doing.
>Of course. The hope would be that some amount of rights and responsibilities are encoded by cultural norms before regulators show up, so that then regulations will codify the way we want things to be, rather than clueless regulators’ idea of how they should be. And by “we” I mean users, primarily.
Well…wait a second. All of a sudden regulators are clueless? Maybe, maybe not. You *do* believe in encoding the rights and responsibilities, right? so you’re willing to concede that *somebody or something* has to monitor their implementation, correct? So wouldn’t there have to be a regulator or inspector, if there are rights?
>This difference is fundamental and critical because it speaks to the amount of power over your virtual fate that the admins of a given world have. It’s just a disproportionate amount of power, that’s all I am getting at.
Raph, it’s disproportionate, merely because they grab it, then keep up the myth that it *must* be so. But who says? I’m all for pushing back.
>I sincerely hope you are referring to “you” as in “VW admins in general” and not me in particular, because otherwise, I’m baffled. After all, you are making, in this paragraph, exactly the same argument I have made, both in this post, and in many other writings. 🙂
Yes, VWs admins in particular. You’ve made these arguments, true, but…you are a member of a class and defend your class interests at some point.
>Actually, that has happened many times in the game worlds. Both the changes demanded by customers, and the reversions too.
I knew you were going to say that, and I can only say, ok, games that are at the forefront of technology? The games that are going to be the ne plus ultra — that we began talking about? The games at the bleeding edge?
All I am saying, and the point of the post I made above, is that no fundamental alteration of the balance of power occurred with those. That does not diminish their importance (and there are simialr lasts of achievements by protesting populations in game worlds, btw). But it does mean that the fundamental issues I listed underlying the relationship between users and admins remain.
I think each building block you can put up in a world that is a social accomplishment such as even the short list I gave on SL is a real thing. After the telehub buyback, the Lindens will think damn hard before they go coding a really destabilizing feature and springing it on people without their knowledge (even if they can override their consent). This is how corporate practices change in RL as you know. Environmentalists, say, launch lawsuits against companies that pollute the environment; limiting their liability to litigation then becomes a value for companies that is pragmatic, regardless of how green they are or want to be.
I think all the outcry over the FIC (a term I invented and developed), the feted inner core of the game company’s friends who are privileged and often get the features they wish, has led to them both becoming more transparent and institutionalizing the FIC as well (i.e. instead of bringing people in secret to the lab to have discussions about the platform features, now they will do it openly and in more organized fashion in batches.)
I’m well aware that people in game populations rise up in protest, too, but I wonder if you can cite any concrete action or demonstration that led to permanent changes in the software. There’s no “officer recall” in the software now because enough of us got mad and wanted them to get rid of this hippie stuff. They’re getting rid of even more hippie stuff now.
Re: StGabe’s comment about “they will topple one set of dictators only to scramble to erect another one.” Maybe, but I think eventually they will come back to the point where they left, where they have a common grammar book with others.
Proke-
– Is there any system of regulation you can think of that defends your favored type of value-added entrepreneur that doesn’t make gold-farming parasites untouchable?
– Voting with your feet isn’t simply a matter of moving to a different online game; you can actually start up your very own VW where you’re a developer and you can grant your users whatever Metaverse-shaking Bill of Rights you want to.
You should try it, I’d be curious to see how it goes. Look at it from the other side. If you’re as good at value-added content as you claim to be (and I’m not saying you aren’t) it could be a fairly successful game. Write up that Magna Carta, sign it, and see if people flock to your VW.
Then come back here and tell us about it. Manage to pull it off, and Raph will bow and shake your hand, the rest of us will fete you, and you’ll have changed the world.
Just make sure you also share any “exterminate the brutes” moments you had with respect to your users along the way, so we can all have a good laugh. 😉
One can agree with the goals and even some of the methods, yet still want to provide helpful reality checks. 🙂
Oh, believe me, it’s true.
Devs aren’t in the game the way that the users are. They don’t know it in the same ways. They have too much data and not enough information. They don’t always know the right questions to ask — they can scrape results out of the DB but that doesn’t mean they mine all the right data or make god conclusions about why things are as they are. It’s like trying to see the world through a pinhole, and on top of that, you are in a reality-distorting bubble, besieged by constant demands, and you have no way of really knowing which demands are legitimate and which are just self-serving. You want to keep people happy, but you also want to stay true to your beliefs about how things should be done… and you compromise, and compromise, and apologize, and agonize, and then get yelled at some more.
Yes, dev teams are clueless and lost. Every time I see a conspiracy theory about how a company is doing some grand manipulation of the playerbase, I laugh.
The results are arbitrary. The decision-making process, in the minds of the devs, is not. Everything gets talked about, argued over in the hallways, met over. It’s just blind men meeting over an elephant, when the new code is implemented to stop the rope monster, all the players who are angry about the tree trunks complain. Both sides are usually failing to see what is going on.
There’s no doubt in my mind that regulators coming into the realm of virtual worlds with no experience will in fact be ignorant about vast swaths of community practice (player AND admin side) and will lay down rules that are misconceived. It happens in all sorts of arenas all the time.
I honestly don’t think that the tech level matters in this particular case; we’re talking about the influence that users can have on developers, and the tech level of the server really isn’t that significant. Even the size of the world isn’t significant: in fact, the protest of a single user may carry more weight in a smaller world than a larger one.
You do know why develoeprs resort to setups like this, right? Because the noise level from the general population is such that no discernable information can be extracted from it without prohibitive amounts of time. So the devs resort to people they can hear. People they can engage in a conversation with. People who seem bought in, people who seem to understand what life as a dev is like.
Best practice is to try to make sure that said group is diverse enough to actually represent the userbase as a whole. But listening to the userbase as a whole is just damnably difficult and also emotionally exhausting.
A dev team that chooses to have a FIC is better than a dev team that chooses not to interact at all. And some day, maybe the FIC will evolve into elected representatives. (Something I pitched a few times with SWG’s correspondents program, but it never went anywhere).
Sure, the entire sequence of policing mechanisms being debated with Amaranthar were cases of exactly such.
Raph,
All of this strikes me as bogus, frankly, and I suppose it’s just because I’m not as familiar with it, and obviously not as into gaming worlds as you are.
Imagine if I rewrote your paragraph like this:
“Central Committee members aren’t in Trashkanistan the way that the citizens of Trashkanistan are. They don’t know it in the same ways. They have too much data and not enough information (and they get a lot of false, flattering reports from their sycophantic regional Party bosses and zealous Party members). They don’t always know the right questions to ask — they can scrape results out of the DB but that doesn’t mean they mine all the right data or make god conclusions about why things are as they are (and blinded as they are by a belief that they are “scientific” and have too much information, they see less and know more). It’s like trying to see the world through a pinhole, and on top of that, you are in a reality-distorting bubble, besieged by constant demands, and you have no way of really knowing which demands are legitimate and which are just self-serving (and you tend to shut off complaints through attrition by ignoring them or jailing the louder complainers). You want to keep people happy, but you also want to stay true to your beliefs about how things should be done (never changing a line from the way they were delivered from Vladimir Ilyich himself, who Lived, Lives, and Will Live)… and you compromise, and compromise, and apologize, and agonize, and then get yelled at some more (until your Central Committee collapses).”
See, countries are run that way, and geez, look at what happens to them! All that’s happened is that you’re running a particularly sad Trashkanistan with a centralized, fossilized authoritarian or even totalitarian government which has nationalized the means of production, and all the major industries (the servers, the software). No wonder people try to emigrate.
Imagine if you were to rewrite the paragraph like this:
“Devs aren’t in the game the way that the users are, so they do frequent public opinion polls weighted for error, they do focus groups, they do walkabouts, and they create a viable complaints system managed by competent staff with adequate feedback. They don’t know it in the same ways, but by refreshing their own ranks with resident advisors, resident representatives, and listening to a resident ombudsman and even taking action on such institutions’ advice, they can compensate for this deficiency. They have too much data and not enough information, so they free the media and create incentives for non-profit think-tanks to emerge to collect and analyze the data for them and take fresher, rapid, more in-depth snapshots of the world.
They don’t always know the right questions to ask — they can scrape results out of the DB but that doesn’t mean they mine all the right data or make god conclusions about why things are as they are — so they let indigenous and independent experts develop in various fields and listen to them; they have a free media so that they can be on talk shows for people to hear what they have to say. It’s like trying to see the world through a pinhole, and on top of that, you are in a reality-distorting bubble, besieged by constant demands, and you have no way of really knowing which demands are legitimate and which are just self-serving — so you let the free press sort it out through letters to the editor, you have the residents create a constituent assembly or parliament or even just a gathering on the lawn and either elect or acclaim leaders that can serve as interlocutors — you also be sure to do usability tests, spot checks on alts, surprise inspections of your liaisons, walkabouts, etc.
You want to keep people happy, but you also want to stay true to your beliefs about how things should be done — however you are starting to realize that they hide-bound beliefs invented by this guy sitting in a library in Germany in the 19th century aren’t so viable anymore and you begin to examine competing philosophies… and you compromise, and compromise, and apologize, and agonize, and then get yelled at some more, but that’s fine, you’re here to serve the public, oxygen is the lifeblood of democracy, and you need liberal democracy for prosperity.”
Indeed, having a national broadcasting system, even one as controlled as Russia’s, would be a huge help, especially if it had resident advertising and auctioning of airwaves. Why couldn’t it be at least as viable as Trashkanistan…
>Yes, dev teams are clueless and lost. Every time I see a conspiracy theory about how a company is doing some grand manipulation of the playerbase, I laugh.
Yes, and yet there is ample reason to suspect at least some manipulation and conspiracy. As William Burroughs put it, “Paranoia is having all the facts.” The p2p/telehub debacle in SL is evidence of that.
>The results are arbitrary. The decision-making process, in the minds of the devs, is not. Everything gets talked about, argued over in the hallways, met over. It’s just blind men meeting over an elephant, when the new code is implemented to stop the rope monster, all the players who are angry about the tree trunks complain. Both sides are usually failing to see what is going on.
Well, and at least one side is at root convinced that they are superior because they made the rope monster and they secretly view the players as chumps for caring very much about the rope monster. So it’s their proprietary rope monster to make or take away, the rope monster has no value unless he interacts with *the other half of the content of games, which is the game play of the people.*
I think this little-studied social capital that creates the real value of games — the game play of the people playing and interacting with the properietary product of the game devs — is something that increasingly has at least a black market value if not a real market value and ultimately it will decide whether the rope monster gets to stay.
I can’t help thinking here that maybe what they need to do is to stop making games, or at least let the games be games for those willing to endure them and have those problems, and start making worlds more like countries?
>There’s no doubt in my mind that regulators coming into the realm of virtual worlds with no experience will in fact be ignorant about vast swaths of community practice (player AND admin side) and will lay down rules that are misconceived. It happens in all sorts of arenas all the time.
Well…sure, except…you’re invoking that endless “apres moi le deluge” of the despot — the game dev who wants you to bond with him in this little conspiracy to deny my game-playing-customer non-inventoriable content you need, and be hooked on the game-dev content you create and shut up. Guess what, any cursory inspection by, I dunno, Amnesty International or something, applying even basic UN rules for say, prisons or something, might find fault with admins and players. Absurd? Well, no. Often what this synthetic world symbiosis needs especially in the sicker worlds is an outsider who can see what the problem is and point out the obvious. Yes, there might be unfair, ignorant rules. That’s why it’s in your interest (you as a class) to have more input and more self-governnance and interactivity.
>we’re talking about the influence that users can have on developers, and the tech level of the server really isn’t that significant. Even the size of the world isn’t significant: in fact, the protest of a single user may carry more weight in a smaller world than a larger one.
OK, fair enough.
>You do know why develoeprs resort to setups like this, right? Because the noise level from the general population is such that no discernable information can be extracted from it without prohibitive amounts of time.
Oh, baloney, Raph. That’s what all dictators say. “The people are not enlightened enough for democracy…the people have to study democracy…the people aren’t matured yet to have democracy.”
First of all, “teh ppl” can become more coherent when you take those dumb-ass voting tools and fix them up with just a little bit of common sense — have options for parliamentary factions or single-issue platforms to emerge by having people with similar topics negotiate and merge their proposals and votes into one bloc on a revised issue they have in common. Next, you put in the right/the feature/the mechanism to vote NO. That’s basic. Then you create means to have voting not just on this or that game/world feature in some narrow or technical manner, but also put in the right to put up policies that involve political decisions and changes.
The game devs can ignore a lot of this, but at least obvious walls of shame will be put up. They can’t go on blathering and claiming they only view through a pinhole if 7000 people vote against the bounce script, if their trusted FIC partners who keep screaming about how elevators and guns have to be preserved and therefore bounce scripts tolerated — they can begin to see that they are a distinct, and not even liberal minority ( we all know that in the interests of preservation of the democratic society itself, the liberal minority must at times prevail over the less enlightened majority). There’d be 7000 in part because the voting mechanism has become more coherent and meaningful and is PUT IN WORLD DUH instead of out on a website where nobody ever hears about it and where it is mainly used to show off to funders how “democratic” it is.
I realize these aren’t *your* concerns Raph as you aren’t really “in” SL but it’s precisely because I think SL has advanced so much further in terms of even having this voting thingie that I think it deserves even more pressure for change — it’s worth it.
>So the devs resort to people they can hear. People they can engage in a conversation with. People who seem bought in, people who seem to understand what life as a dev is like.
*rolls eyes*. You mean they resort to listening to people who *tell them what they want to hear to preserve their privileged position*. There is a whole art and science to such sycophancy!
Why do I have to understand what life like a game dev is like? You know, that fellow from There who was hired by SL told me that once on the Herald, “You must not be a game dev,” and I had to trash what he said — he was making the claim that all those game patches don’t disrupt performance. Please!
I mean, you get up early, you make the donuts, Raph. They’re *good* donuts. But…Why is it so *special*? why am I *always in the wrong, always outside the arcane knowledge circle, always going to be “unable to understand?” It’s just developing a game, it’s not rocket science. Come on, you can’t articulate the issues for the layman, the way democratic governments or fair courts of law are compelled to explain the difficult facets of complex modern society to the ordinary person?
I’m amazed that synthetic worlds, which have so much power for acceleration, amassing information, coordinating people, storing knowledge, transfering information, aren’t being used to create *more* democracy of the effective and creative and prosperous kind, instead of *less*.
You did it again! Did you miss the sentence that read, “…some day, maybe the FIC will evolve into elected representatives”? 🙂
I quite agree with your analogies. I started bemoaning the paternalistic, centrally-controlled admin systems years ago. And it was an old issue then, because it’s exactly what made LambdaMOO choose to go to a full player-run democratic system.
But LambdaMOO’s system failed in the end, for a variety of complicated reasons. Building democracies in cultures that have no tradition of them is hard. (That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try).
The example of admin-selected advisory groups is relevant here. First, the admins are unwilling to go to full democracy, but they understand that they are in a bubble; this is why they create something like what you call the FIC. It’s an enlightened move, relatively speaking, like glasnost in advance of actual democracy. The benighted thing to do is not to have the input at all, or to actively suppress it.
I agree that going to a full democratic solution would be preferable (though I do think that for entertainment purposes there has to be a controlling intelligence, many things even in the game worlds are not specific to entertainment — plus, the imperfect knowledge issues still apply). But democracy relies on a few things, many of which we struggle with in the real world as well, such as an active free press, an educated populace, and a limitation of monetary influence on the process. There are significant hurdles to overcome as regards these in virtual spaces.
I was being somewhat sarcastic as I was writing. Yes, of course it’s a self-reinforcing worldview. Worse, the more charismatic and passionate the leader, the more they can become trapped in a bubble of their own making, true believer fans, despite what they themselves might want.
It’s not that you need to be a game dev. It’s that for any given issue there are a multitude of sides. The player side is not always right, and the game dev side is not always right. In fact, usually there isn’t a “right” at all, outside of a few bedrock principles. That’s how governance and society is in general.
If the power is transferred nearly wholesale to users, let’s say, and their votes therefore outnumber those of the devs, they will be voting on issues that will almost certainly have unnpredictable effects within the codebase. Direct democracy doesn’t scale very well, which is why we gravitate towards representative systems in the real world — and once we have representative systems, we allow the elected reps to vote their own minds, because they are then privy to information that is different from the information their constituents have.
In truth, paranoia is thinking you have all the facts.
They’re probably right.
How would you know?
>You did it again! Did you miss the sentence that read, “…some day, maybe the FIC will evolve into elected representatives”? 🙂
No Raph, I just didn’t take it seriously, and since it was a long blog already, I didn’t respond, but hey, come on, since when do the oprichina ever “evole” into elected representatives??? ??? I’m going to elect people who were in the game dev’s pocket, helping to maintain his authoritarian rule? I can give you lots of Rl examples of how that works. Nobody “evolves” into an elected representative — that is the cherished fantasy of dictators everywhere!
>(That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try).
yes, we should try, absolutely
>That’s how governance and society is in general.
The difference is the level of accountability and sense of public interest — or necessity to serve the public. All that’s missing, somehow.
f the power is transferred nearly wholesale to users, let’s say, and their votes therefore outnumber those of the devs, they will be voting on issues that will almost certainly have unnpredictable effects within the codebase. Direct democracy doesn’t scale very well, which is why we gravitate towards representative systems in the real world — and once we have representative systems, we allow the elected reps to vote their own minds, because they are then privy to information that is different from the information their constituents have.
Raph, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to call this a really good example of tekkie literalism. It’s so much of a style and a trope that it’s almost hard-wired into the way of thinking. Everything is *always* taken to its literal extremes. The players can’t be let at the code because gosh, they’d mess it up and just give themselves gold to sell on ebay all day, or milkshakes, or rare Afghan dogs, and heck, we can’t have them doing that. The people are an ass, etc.
Why take it so literally and to such an extreme? Who said anything about direct democracy? I’m not at all persuaded that the game gods’ direct democracy stuff they’ve lifted from various RL electronic democracy gambits are viable at all. That isn’t because I’m for authoritarian leaders and fake participation like corporativism or something, but it’s because I think when you talk literally about direct democracy you run up against all the usual problems:
o whoever codes the democracy wins — they can throw it and weight it (like Cory didn’t put NO in)
o no free and competitive mass media=demagoguery, whoever shouts loudest on the forums wins
o no means of educating voters
o flash-mobbing
o “family voting” — dom gets the subs to vote, charismatic leaders gets his whole posse to vote his way, mafias, RPs, affinities — all flash mobbing, group voting
o framing the vote is particularly difficult, whoever frames well wins
o apathy, lack of information — only five percent read the forums
and so on — this is all well-rehearsed. In fact, there’s good reason to suspect that direct voting might be the *worst* possible thing to put in games. I think until you first start with committees of correspondence and then a constituent assembly, you can’t have a viable voting system that meets the community’s needs anyway.
Well sure, the elected rep can vote according to his own mind. But the idea, or so I thought, with the newfangled possiblities of electronic democracy is that we can just gather lots more information, even factoring for the Google effect and the flashmobbing and such. And that somebody voting his own mind will have more accountability.
Just because democracy is hard and flawed at this stage doesn’t mean we should abandon ourselves to game dictatorships.
I don’t mean that the system in any one game will evolve into representative democracy. I mean that gestures like having representatives at all opens the door to representative democracy, once both the userbase and the admins get comfortable with it. I expect it to take a while to happen.
I assumed you meant direct democracy because your past examples all seemed to me to be of direct voting on specific code proposals, rather like California referenda. I agree that direct democracy is a bad model in virtual worlds.
That isn’t what I said at all! I didn’t go in the “bread and circuses” direction in my post anywhere. Why do you always choose to impose the worst sort of reading on what I say? What I said was, educating the populace (and by this I mean admins AND players) is hard, and a tough obstacle to overcome.
That said, I still agree with your last sentence.
Proke…
… how about the idea of producing a game, and giving people the alternative you seek?
Being a good web-based rabble-rouser is fun and all, but actually constructing a positive alternative is more useful. You should try it. 🙂
For the record: rocket science is way easier than game design. Game design has to deal with… PEOPLE. Rocket science just has to deal with fluid dynamics.
It would be a bad idea for me to defend dictators at this point, wouldn’t it?
Jim, it’s hard to take seriously such facile put-downs. Games deserve criticism, and it’s *more than ok* to critique them and mount even the most thorugh-going criticism of games and worlds without having to *make* them or even *play* them because they are increasingly going to have a lot of effect on us all. MORE than ok — and precisely because of the attitudes held by people like you, that games and their devs are supposed to be above criticism, that we’re all supposed to be in endless genuflection. Hell, no.
In a country, I don’t get told, oh, YOU go and make a government or YOU go and make a country, it’s accepted that as a citizen, I can criticize.
In fact, I do a tiny version of this game-making by having my rentals business in SL. I set up sims, try to create conditions for people to live, put out houses, etc. I have a microcosm of all the problems faced by LL and other administrators precisely because I am administering hundreds of customers — the issue of how much time to do on orientation for newbies and what works to overcome the learning curve, how much and to what extent to subsidize new people, how to make them retain, the line between pushing them away with too much theme and content or not giving them enough theme and content, etc. etc. I look at all these problems and solve them or don’t solve them at my own tiny level every day.
In fact, I run this system, which is just a modest rentals system, not a world or anything grand like that (the people use it as a tool to make their own worlds)as best I can, by constantly elaborating the rules (the leases), by trying to keep the system as open as possible, by trying to solve the conflicts in it. etc.
>I don’t mean that the system in any one game will evolve into representative democracy. I mean that gestures like having representatives at all opens the door to representative democracy, once both the userbase and the admins get comfortable with it. I expect it to take a while to happen.
Gestures? I don’t need “gestures”. I need real accountability. And why such discomfort? What on earth are these game gods hanging on to that is so special? The people who own Six Flags or Disneyland don’t get like this, do they? We’re back to my original premise, which is, why do you get to be different (as an industry) than anyone else, not like government, business, or even religion, but something so beyond, so privileged that we’re always to be in genuflection mode or crushed like vermin? If you were *just a game* and not the origins of the Metaverse (gasp!) then I’d care less, but since you are, I care more.
In RL transitional societies, this idea that you can take a perestroika-liberal sort of class, a class of trusted regime friends who slightly liberalize (bring in perestroika) and stay only five minutes ahead of what the regime is willing to allow, is like yesterday’s newspaper. The minute the regime can be cracked enough to be overthrown, the perestroika liberals are overthrown along with them. Nobody stays around to do half-measures or hold hands with regime-friends-turned-liberals, they push them aside. They are irrelevant. The society evolves so much faster and and so much more broadly. To the extent the regime and those liberals hang on to that moment and hang on to their status, to the extent that they become “comfortable” is the extent they are hated and really removed from even being allowed to turn on the electricity if they’re the only ones who happen to know how to turn on the electricity.
Of course, turning off the servers is a big plus for the regime (the game gods). Increasingly, all it will take to overcome those disgruntled soi-disant liberals turning off the electricity just because they can is another set of game gods to spring up somewhere else with other servers with better conditions.
>I assumed you meant direct democracy because your past examples all seemed to me to be of direct voting on specific code proposals, rather like California referenda. I agree that direct democracy is a bad model in virtual worlds.
I’m not sure we agree for the same reasons. I cited those examples only because that’s all we have, we only have that kind of specific coding proposals that are a yes/no switch (and we can’t vote no). However, there are more complex policies, like the telehub buyback, that develop in response to a variety of stimuli, either lobbying groups, forum posts, RL media coverage, threats of RL legal action, whatever.
>That isn’t what I said at all! I didn’t go in the “bread and circuses” direction in my post anywhere.
Yes, but as you know, the bread and circuses stuff is always lurking under every discussion and is never put to bed entirely.
>Why do you always choose to impose the worst sort of reading on what I say?
Um, because “assumption” is what the Blessed Virgin Mary did to go up into heaven? I dunno. Don’t forget that a) I don’t know you in RL or sim life; 2) I’ve never played your particular game so I don’t know your soul from the inside out like I know the souls of other game devs; 3) I’ve read about your game all over but that’s of course not like playing it at all. 4) This is a public debate about not you personally or even your professional set of games but a larger debate about the game gods v. the players. And I *do* appreciate you being willing to have it.
>What I said was, educating the populace (and by this I mean admins AND players) is hard, and a tough obstacle to overcome.
Yes, hard, but you have to start somewhere. Nobody ever gets started. The game gods endlessly cite the people being asses as a reason never to do anything.
Oh goodness… they are MUCH MUCH worse! At Disney World, people that do things the parks dislike are tracked with cameras, and a network of underground tunnels allows black-clad operatives to surface from below and whisk them away and out of the park (no, I am not joking). And Disney is notorious for enforcing IP things way beyond the point of reason, such as barring Mickey Mouse from being painted on a fence at a day care center. By comparison, VW admins are fairly laid back.
Why the discomfort? Because
– admins spent money and they want a return and they fear the users will prevent that (damaging the environment in some manner)
– admins feel entitled because they feel they did all the work
– legal issues scare the crap out of them, and surrendering power to the users does not mean surrendering liability
– admins want to control either out of megalomania or out of a desire to provide the best possible experience to users
These are all understandable, even if not necessarily justifiable in your mind (and in some cases, my mind either).
All I can say is, the essay that I linked last time was in fact an essay written directly to the players of UO while I was running UO. In other words, an effort at education. And I don’t think I am the only one out there engaging in that effort, nor do I think that players have been at all silent. So I don’t think saying “nobody ever gets started” is really accurate. I think there’s not only been a lot of starts, but some real steps taken along the way. It wasn’t that long ago that major operators had concluded that it was a better idea not to have a community department. That has changed now.
But it is a slow process.
Proke-
– It’s not meant as a facile put-down in any way. I’ve got some criticisms of current games out there on the market, and it’s been a dream of mine to put together a game, so I’m going out and doing it. 😀
I guess the smileys aren’t adequately conveying the (naive?) enthusiasm I’ve got for my own project, and the conviction that the field is still open enough for other people to take the same path I am.
Feel free to dismiss me as a dreamer if you wish, but dismissing me as a scoffer is unjust. 🙂
– You’re right, in the real world, you can’t simply go out and form your own country. But that’s one of the fundamental differences between the online world and the real one– cyberspace is as big as we make it. The social contract has a great deal more options for opting out than the real one does, and creating something new can simply be a process of deflating the old, rather than destroying it.
With lots of very hard work, the same sense of penny-pinching that created El Mariachi, and the ability to inspire a number of other people to work with you, you can create your own world. And if people won’t stand for the treatment they’re getting from the current crop of developers / admins, and if your world points the way to a new age of enlightenment on the web, your world should become very popular.
– The “exterminate the brutes” line was in no way meant to imply you’d come over to the Dark Side, as it were. I think Raph — and anyone reading these threads, come to think of it 😉 — can attest to the fact that sometimes, no matter how much goodwill you approach community members with, and no matter how high your ideals are in the first place, some people who post to the boards will just be damn frustrating.
But that doesn’t mean you’ll give up. 🙂
In a country, I don’t get told, oh, YOU go and make a government or YOU go and make a country, it’s accepted that as a citizen, I can criticize.
That’s because you can’t, mostly because people already did that, over and over again. And most people are also dead by the time they finish. How much of government criticism is worth listening to, anyways? I’ve heard “President/Presidential Candidate is an idiot” so many times it’s idiotic in and of itself. The criticism is useless, because these people don’t understand the processes of government. Others do. They have engaged in smaller versions of government and learned what it’s like to be a President, even if it’s not of a country.
The equivalent to saying “Go make a game” is “Start your own democratic organization”. This isn’t, “Go make a MMORPG”; this is “Roll your own MUD: ten users who you have never met is enough.”
In fact, I run this system, which is just a modest rentals system, not a world or anything grand like that
Right. And that makes you qualified to talk about similar systems at any scale, minus things that don’t scale (like one-on-one customer service; it’s difficult for a CEO to chat up ten thousand customers a day). But you seem to think that this gives you the knowledge to talk about games. It’s the same thing as walking up to Stephen Hawking and explaining to him why his ideas about black holes are just flat-out wrong.
You don’t do it because you don’t have the education. A citizen in a democracy is obligated to pick up an education in order to participate in political discourse; just being a citizen doesn’t cut it. The same goes for any organization. I don’t drive over to a city I’ve never been in and know nothing about, storm into their city hall, and say, “You should do things THIS way!”
Actually, I’ve thought Proke’s approach to Raph’s blog is more like being a PK in UO. Violent? A bit. Sets a negative tone that may scare some off? Yeah. Offensive to some? Sure. Highly competitive, in a Poster vs. Poster kind of way? Most definitely. But it keeps things active and interesting.
Very much a killer-type. With the same weaknesses, when it comes to going up against Explorers– limited experience of the subject can hurt.
Raph, Maybe you have a point about Disney. I wasn’t thinking so much about how they treat bad actors or how they fiercely defend their IP, I’m aware of that, I was referring more to the dynamic they have with ordinary customers, and as a company, subject to more rules of regulation and more accountability than virtual worlds.
>- admins spent money and they want a return and they fear the users will prevent that (damaging the environment in some manner)
But residents spent money, too. Some of them spent LOTS of money. They are like junior game devs or business partners, in fact. If anything, the fear of these people is that the company will so damage the environment themselves, by poor monetary polices, bad ideas for features, failing to heed the signals. I quite understand that the admins have *way more* money and *they own or lease the servers* and we’re “just guests”. Is this any way to run a railroad, however? No. The admins consciousness of their dependency on their prosumer junior devs and business partners, as well as their numerous ordinary consumer customers, has to be greater, and they must become more sophisticated in dealing with this public. That means more levers for accountability and participation.
>- admins feel entitled because they feel they did all the work
I’m going to reject this utterly. Admins do not do all the work of games, I’m sorry. And they sure don’t do all the work of social worlds. I do a hell of a lot of work, too. And I’m only a small business compared to others. The amount of customer service I have to do is staggering, or that any person in this setting has to do — and a lot of it consists of teaching the world’s features to people who haven’t mastered them yet. But take any game — the vast amounts of passing on of game lore that gets done by the customers — many people learn games not from game manuals or tutorials or reading websites but by demonstration and trial and error with the help of friends who have either brought them into the game or helped them as newbies. I think this type of unseen and unpaid and unglorious work needs to be appreciated by game devs and admins.
>- legal issues scare the crap out of them, and surrendering power to the users does not mean surrendering liability
I’m glad it scares the crap out of them. To the extent it can scare the crap out of them, the ordinary consumer has some leverage and some check on the overwhelming powers of these game gods. In fact, they will come to see that unless they do surrender some of the power they will have more liability not less.
>- admins want to control either out of megalomania or out of a desire to provide the best possible experience to users
Who is going to determine which end of this stick we get, the megalomania part or the best experience part? That’s what the struggle is about — for the soul of admins. It’s a struggle worth fighting, and for their good as well.
>All I can say is, the essay that I linked last time was in fact an essay written directly to the players of UO while I was running UO. In other words, an effort at education. And I don’t think I am the only one out there engaging in that effort, nor do I think that players have been at all silent. So I don’t think saying “nobody ever gets started” is really accurate. I think there’s not only been a lot of starts, but some real steps taken along the way. It wasn’t that long ago that major operators had concluded that it was a better idea not to have a community department. That has changed now.
This is all well said and documented, and I accept your points. There’s a lot of getting started, and your example of the opening up of “community departments” is good proof of the changes the players have had on the game devs even without formal democratic tools. There are probably other things we could find like that. You’d have to agree that many, many more people need to get started in many more games and worlds.
>But it is a slow process.
Things often accelerate in the Metaverse in ways nobody predicted, no? Objects in the mirror, and all that.
This seems pretty typical of your comments here. He said “Admins feel they did all the work” not “admins do all the work.” Reminds me of when I saw a sticker on a water fountain that read “Lead free by government standards” and I couldn’t help but translate that to mean “Contains lead”. So you are rejecting something that isn’t what is said. In fact, it’s about 100% in the other direction. He said “Many Admins feel that they do all the work, but we all know it’s not true, and even most admins would admit it’s not true, but still on some level they feel that way, with a few exceptions here and there; I’m just generalizing to make a point.” But he said it with fewer words.
No, Rik. Because they *feel* that way it’s very important to come along and tell them *it’s not true*. Your comments are also pretty typically tekkie-literalism. The water is free *by government standards*. That’s good enough. For all intents and purposes, there isn’t lead, if it isn’t in a sufficient quantity to damage. So why be so persnickety about it? It’s lead free by the standard that matters. In the same way, if sometbody “feels entitled” because they “feel they did all the work,” gosh, I need to set them straight and clue them in. We’re doing work, too. And we *feel like* we’re doing most of the scut work and not getting paid.
Yea, sure, except you didn’t tell the hypothetical admins anything, you told us here on the blog, and we already knew it. If your response to the statement “Admins feel entitled” was to go to some admin and tell him he’s not, or to go to some admin forum and tell them they aren’t, then you would be setting them straight. Instead you are preaching to the choir, except that you are claiming to disagree with us at the same time.
(Two paragraphs cut because they distracted from this central point. Thanks for reading.)
Proke-
If you’re not willing to do the same work as the devs / admins did– putting together your own game (and there are actually tools out there to make it less work than it was when the devs first put theirs together) that hurts your credibility somewhat.
How are you supposed to know whether something you want is totally impossible to implement? How do you know that people have tried it, and failed for a specific reason that they haven’t bothered to share for one reason or another– like they’re too busy chasing down bugs, hacks, cheats, or creating new content?
And I’d like an answer about how gold farming, object sales, and buy low / sell high mercantile concerns fit in with your view of player rights.
Don’t be ridiculous, Jim. My name is Prokofy or Prok, not “Proke” BTW. You don’t have to make your own country or government to engage in criticism of the government or country. That’s absurd, and I don’t have to “make a game” to be credible. I play or live in games, and I have a microcosm of world-making in my little patch of rentals, and I view that as more than sufficient, indeed actually quite useful, given that game devs are looking through a pin hole, and I’m not looking through a pin hole at least at my square meters.
If something is impossible to implement, the game devs write that on the voter thingie *shrugs*. They often do that on the Linden voter thingie, explaining that if you as to implement Raph Koster’s Avatar Rights and the Bill of Rights, as one wit did once, that this is “impossible to implement” or “can’t be done”. This drew a lot of laughs, so they then hastened to explain that since it was a *policy* and not a *feature* it couldn’t be coded, but only discussed. And of course, there’s lots of ways for devs to get feedback.
Your notion that these game gods get to be busy chasing down bugs, hacks, and cheats in my world where I create new content is out of date. It’s yesterday’s text MUD. They don’t get to do that without a pushback from me. Why are they chasing THESE bugs and not THOSE? etc.
Your comment about gold farming seemed based in some notion of games and gold-farming that isn’t relevant to Second Life, so I gave it a pass. There isn’t some simplistic formula, as much as you’d like to misportray it as such, to buy low and sell high in Second Life. It’s more like buy middle and work like hell and develop it and hope it sells high, or get lucky and buy low but often get screwed and have to sell low, etc. It’s not this facile gold-farming sort of activity you imagine.
If you can clarify you query beyond those obvious points then please do.
I had a longer answer to Michael Chui that got lost, and really it should be a separate blog, but here goes again:
1. You sure can walk into a city as a stranger and criticize it. You sound like you abide by the Russian proverb “Don’t take your charter into another person’s monastery.” Well, but you can, and do all the time. There’s a larger problem here which is the technolibertarian’s refusal to accept universal values and the rule of law as valid premises, a celebration of particularism, and the “united we stand/divided we run free at last” school of thinking. In fact, if I’m stopped by a corrupt policeman in a town, and they try to get a bribe, I go to city hall as a stranger in this town and I complain. If somebody shots a racist slogan at me and I’m a minority, or they refuse to serve me at a lunch counter, I might get state or federal authorities involved to deal with the problem, I sure as hell will, as a stranger in this village, set them straight, appealing to higher values.
2. Government doesn’t require that people become as educated in the “technology” of the government to the extent that tekkies demand that we all become “educated” in the arcane procedures of their domain, which is largely mystification anyway. In fact, to the extent government is legitimate, it has to constantly dumb down and explain itself and simplify by 200 percent. The jury system, for example, requires that the state make its case to complete strangers, randomly selected, who often have only a 12-year-old’s reading ability, and who often didn’t even read the newspaper accounts of the crime. In order to deprive someone of freedom, the state doesn’t require that the people have law degrees; it only requires that some people have them, and that they make their case in simple terms to others. This ability to dumb down, explain, be accountable, etc. is one that tekkies routinely deflect.
3. IT culture is notorious for having certain habits of behaviour and thinking. We all know what it’s like to have some over-educated condescending idiot lord it over us and require that we queue up to go through him because he’s got the address we need to plug into the right templates to get our Outlook Express working to avoid those dumb Ox errors. I began this effort here merely as a call not to have those mapping the Metaverse and making its pieces be exclusively from this culture with these mores.
At least I’m not Mikhail anymore.
If you get stopped by a “corrupt” policeman, then you have a right to complain, not because you are a member of that city, but because you are a member of a higher level of organization that puts you and the city on equal footing. This is, I assume, what you mean by “higher values”. You are, in short, doing what you are accusing the “tekkies” of: telling others to play by the rules you subscribe to. Notice that what your examples speak to is the assumption of shared values; my example was the imposition of one value set onto another’s.
This ability to dumb down, explain, be accountable, etc. is one that tekkies routinely deflect.
You’re effectively asking that a group of people trained to do one thing take up the responsibilities of a completely different system. What you should be asking for instead is the establishment of a group of people whose job it is to interface between “tekkies” and “normal people”.
This is a straight suggestion; I think it’d go over better with people and its implementation would be easier to handle. You basically need people who are capable of doing the “dumbing down”, but who are also fluent in technobabble.
technolibertarian’s refusal to accept universal values and the rule of law as valid premises
Most people accept the idea of universal values, including tekkies. The difference is that they don’t accept your universal values as theirs. Christians have been pretty dead set that believing Jesus is the only son of God as a universal truth for (at least) the past century; doesn’t, for example, a Jew have the right to disagree? Don’t tekkies have the right to disagree with you on what the universal values are?
I began this effort here merely as a call not to have those mapping the Metaverse and making its pieces be exclusively from this culture with these mores.
This isn’t the place to make that call. What you should do, I think, is find people you think should be involved in mapping the Metaverse and making its pieces and convince them to GET involved.
>If you get stopped by a “corrupt” policeman, then you have a right to complain, not because you are a member of that city, but because you are a member of a higher level of organization that puts you and the city on equal footing. This is, I assume, what you mean by “higher values”.
No, the higher values aren’t housed in me, or am I catapaulted personally to a status of being ‘equal to the city,’ I’m merely appearing to a higher law, above both me and the city I travel to.
>You are, in short, doing what you are accusing the “tekkies” of: telling others to play by the rules you subscribe to. Notice that what your examples speak to is the assumption of shared values; my example was the imposition of one value set onto another’s.
No, the reason they call them “universal values” is because they’re…universal. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” If you don’t find them self-evident, that’s something that can be debated, but I’ betting that you’ll find enough of a set of truths to be self-evident such as to create a body of law that can then establish the rule of law. No need to lurch to extremes. I don’t impose truths that are self-evident — they’re self-evident. We can agree that corrupt policeman looking for bribes on the highway or thugs shouting racist slogans are wrong, and I as the traveler can invoke a higher law and higher authority over them without having to elevate myself as an individual, with my subjective understanding of the situation.
>This ability to dumb down, explain, be accountable, etc. is one that tekkies routinely deflect.
>You’re effectively asking that a group of people trained to do one thing take up the responsibilities of a completely different system.
It’s done all the time in RL. It’s called “civilization”. Games and social worlds aren’t exempt. As they fill up with more people with common sense, from different areas of life, they’ll compel the game gods and their fanboyz to recognize this.
>What you should be asking for instead is the establishment of a group of people whose job it is to interface between “tekkies” and “normal people”.
Perhaps, but tekkies can also just stop excusing themselves from having common sense about these things and explain them in open terms comprehensible to educated laymen.
>This is a straight suggestion; I think it’d go over better with people and its implementation would be easier to handle. You basically need people who are capable of doing the “dumbing down”, but who are also fluent in technobabble.
Is it dumbing down? In part. But it’s also cutting through the layers of privileged obfuscation.
>technolibertarian’s refusal to accept universal values and the rule of law as valid premises
Most people accept the idea of universal values, including tekkies. The difference is that they don’t accept your universal values as theirs.
Actually, they don’t. I find a really funny amalgam of hypertrophied particularism, “I’m brilliant and therefore I can set my own moral and legal code” and stuff like paganism or various hierarchical systems that are suddenly put forth as “liberation” when they’re often the opposite and represent not revolution but devolution.
Oh, stop it. One of the things that the particularists and literalists do is claim there aren’t universal values we can agree on — though I just mentioned two of them — and then they get all grumpy that someone urging the accession to universal values is “putting one over on them” usually of the ReaganBushAmerica type.
>Christians have been pretty dead set that believing Jesus is the only son of God as a universal truth for (at least) the past century; doesn’t, for example, a Jew have the right to disagree?
Oh, please. Don’t be ridiculous. The universal values drawn from Judeo-
Christian civilization don’t require that the world buy into a belief that Jesus is the only Son of God, nor do they disallow the views of Jews and their history — that’s the reason they call it Judeo-Christian, duh. That’s a pretty facile and silly put-down.
Judeo-Christian civilization has a pretty broad and lasting legacy regardless of whether you take literally this or that figure like God or Jesus or Mary — there are notions like the inherent dignity of the individual, the existence of one truth, yet many paths to the truth; the idea that there is a higher power so that we are not endlessly subjected to a million tyrannies of subjectivites — indeed, that concept, of the Higher Power but the many paths to the truth is perhaps the greatest legacy of the Judeo-Christian past, and one in which game gods seem determined to break down in either of two directions: 1) no, there’s only game gods in charge, there is no higher truth, but only our guild, defying the “I am the Lord They God, you shall have no strange gods before me” concept of the ten commandments, and the other direction, 2) no, there aren’t many paths to the truth, but only one — code is law.
>Don’t tekkies have the right to disagree with you on what the universal values are?
That’s the sort of trollish answer I’ve come to expect in debates like this. I’m willing to bet as hateful as you are toward some putative notion of “Christian values” or “Jewish values” or “Islamic values,” each of which you’ll see as encroaching on your person freedoms, you’ll be willing to concede some basic premises that are in fact legacies of all these “people of the book” monotheistic religions. So it’s not about “disagreeing” with me but about conceding that yes, there is something above the game gods, and yes, we don’t have to be mired in a sea of particularism and bent under the oppressive weight of their arbitrary objectivity.
I began this effort here merely as a call not to have those mapping the Metaverse and making its pieces be exclusively from this culture with these mores.
>This isn’t the place to make that call. What you should do, I think, is find people you think should be involved in mapping the Metaverse and making its pieces and convince them to GET involved.
Well, why? The discussion about the metaverse mapping was here, not on, I dunno, gamegirladvance.com or something. And for someone like me, it’s not going to be about technical work or finding people to “make the pieces” but it’s going to be about consumer advocacy and supplying correctives to those who wish they could just make all the pieces without anyone “getting in their way” and then put it over on us.
Proke–
– An MMO is not a country. A country club, maybe. You’re not forced to participate in an MMO because you were born there; in fact, you actually have to pay to stay there. There are barriers to entry, few (if any) barriers to exit, and alternatives exist for more or less the same price. Let me guess… SL is the only MMO you’ve ever played.
– Game devs aren’t looking through any smaller a pinhole than you are, with your square meters. Best practices demand that devs go and see the world from their players’ point of view from time to time. As a matter of fact, they probably have a better view of their creation that you do; as long as the good idea “signal” isn’t drowned out by the vitriolic noise that covers most boards.
– Ever been in on a Software Change Control Board meeting? It’s bad enough when you have over six people in on it; I can’t begin to imagine the sort of chaos that would reign as a result of allowing all your users to be present, deciding which bugs got squished first.
Should they be able to submit bugs? Of course. Do they know how the code works, or what the coders’ relative strengths are, or what the build schedule is, such that they know how to prioritize them? Unlikely. Or even which are squishable? How about the “bugs” that are in there by design?
– In the end, liberal democracy rests on the idea that all are created equal. This isn’t true in the MMO-verse. Some people have access to the code or on/off switch, others don’t; that sets them apart.
This isn’t going to change by web-based rabble-rousing (as much fun as that is; and I’m speaking as one who’s done it. 😉 ) That, honestly, can only destroy. Things won’t change until someone actually goes and hammers out a game according to the principles you’ve outlined. And if you’re not willing to help do it– with the actual code and such — you’re not bringing it any closer to existence. It’s really that simple.
Advocacy and litigation is very unlikely to change anything, for the reasons I outlined in my first point above. Most judges would throw it out with the comment, “If you hate the game, why do you play?”
> An MMO is not a country. A country club, maybe. You’re not forced to participate in an MMO because you were born there; in fact, you actually have to pay to stay there. There are barriers to entry, few (if any) barriers to exit, and alternatives exist for more or less the same price. Let me guess… SL is the only MMO you’ve ever played.
Jim, that’s just it, in fact a MMO *is* a country. Indeed it *is*. It’s not just that Philip Linden says “I’m not building a game, I’m building a country.” It’s that more and more, people are spending their time online. They are monetarizing their time. They are using the proceeds to fund RL costs, sometimes even fully. They are making some of their primarly business, entertainment, and romantic relationships online. If so many people live in these worlds and for such long amounts of time, and if they get and spend in them to such a significant degree, when why aren’t they countries? What is a country, anyway, but a kind of fictional notion of borders and culture and history that if another, more powerful country comes along, can be wiped out and become “virtual,” too (think of Tibet).
Saying hortatorily that a MMORPG “isn’t a country,” usually with a huge dollop of distaste and even scorn, is simply not persuasive for those of us who feel as if they sure walk and talk like countries, and if they walk and talk like countries, we sure as hell want the people running them to behave more like the people who run countries. That’s just it, eh? You can have those game gods escape responibility by saying enough times that “it’s not a country, it’s just their private club, it’s just their proprietary software, if you don’t like it, there’s the door.”
The concept that you define a country by whether you are “born there” or “have to pay to stay there” is a bit silly. My kids were born in America. They don’t have to “pay to stay there”. Somebody else might be born in Russia and emigrate — and they might or might not “pay to stay there” depending on age, disability, or the willingness of friends and relatives to support them. “Pay-to-play” as a defining quality to distinguish “game or country” doesn’t really help you — especially given that so many games have free trial accounts or basic accounts. It’s free to come and stay in the country of Second Life. No “pay-to-play” there – yet you’re willing to say SL is a game, not a country — and yet by your lights, it’s precisely a country precisely because you “don’t have to pay to stay there”.
As for the barriers, well, there are and there aren’t. I dunno, did you ever try to get a Russian visa? Ok, how about a visa to North Korea? Did you ever just walk into Canada by accident through the woods? There are barriers and there are barriers! Maybe SL is only at the country club stage, and not the country stage, but you know, some countries exist mainly as glorified country clubs, too — I dunno, is a place like the former Soviet republic of Georgia really a country club or a country? It wouldn’t take much (and didn’t take much 85 years ago) to knock over this country and send the country club of foreign diplomats, Westernized elite, etc. packing. In fact, I’ll bet your there are more countries in the world run like country clubs rather than countries, and that means the things you think are country clubs like Second Life in fact have a fair shake at being called countries, given their growing population, economy, GNP, and the most salient fact for most people: that it is where their heart is.
– Game devs aren’t looking through any smaller a pinhole than you are, with your square meters. Best practices demand that devs go and see the world from their players’ point of view from time to time. As a matter of fact, they probably have a better view of their creation that you do; as long as the good idea “signal” isn’t drowned out by the vitriolic noise that covers most boards.
I borrowed the “pinhole” comment from Raph, he was the one saying devs have a pinhole. I figure if they made the game, of *course* they know more about it, but they tend to have a plan, and plan their work and work their plan, and tend to screen out – not due to noise, but discomfort — the signals telling them that their plan isn’t working.
The decibel level of the vitriolic noise is a function of the deep yearning and aspiration people have for virtual countries to stop being Pinnochio and be real boys.
I’ve played The Sims Online, A Tale in the Desert, Guild Wars, Sociolotron, Runescape and I’ve also looked in on Active Worlds, Eve, and Project Entropia. I read a lot about these games. I’ve played some offline games whether Myth or Syberia or whatever. This constant banging on me as a games neophyte is a misplaced bang. You figure only someone who has played all your shoot-em-up games is qualified to critique them. Hell, no.
– Ever been in on a Software Change Control Board meeting? It’s bad enough when you have over six people in on it; I can’t begin to imagine the sort of chaos that would reign as a result of allowing all your users to be present, deciding which bugs got squished first.
Um, no, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it might be as complicated as having five of the world’s great powers coordinate actions to stop a genocide in another country in which 2 of the powers have vital economic interests and 2 of the powers have a shameful colonial past, but…that’s just me. Your undying belief that the IT world is “special” and has certain rules and norms and mores that just pertain only to it, and can never be understood by others, and never operate under the law of any other area of human life is something I can’t even view as quaint, I have to view it as inherently dangerous.
>Should they be able to submit bugs? Of course. Do they know how the code works, or what the coders’ relative strengths are, or what the build schedule is, such that they know how to prioritize them? Unlikely. Or even which are squishable? How about the “bugs” that are in there by design?
What’s so special about these areas? They are rote actions, controllable by people. People can examine them, and comment on them. They aren’t the Music of the Spheres.
– In the end, liberal democracy rests on the idea that all are created equal. This isn’t true in the MMO-verse. Some people have access to the code or on/off switch, others don’t; that sets them apart.
Baloney. And that’s the crux of the issue. In a little game run by a little software company, the right to be the only one to access the code and the on/off switch is similar to someone running a little gentleman’s club or even just a bar — the patrons can’t all be coming in at all hours, they can’t be raiding the liquor supply, they can’t decide to turn all the lights on the disco floor purple, or whatever. You’re the proprietor, you take admissions at the door, you have rules, you bounce the unruly, you don’t allow everybody into the control room.
But this isn’t some little club. This is the Metaverse. That’s the point. They don’t get to KEEP doing that — claiming special privilege, special access, and special filtering of only their friends and their fellow cadres. They must move to a greater public accountability.
>This isn’t going to change by web-based rabble-rousing (as much fun as that is; and I’m speaking as one who’s done it. 😉 ) That, honestly, can only destroy. Things won’t change until someone actually goes and hammers out a game according to the principles you’ve outlined. And if you’re not willing to help do it– with the actual code and such — you’re not bringing it any closer to existence. It’s really that simple.
Oh, baloney again. More web-based rabble-rousing is needed, and frankly, lots more RL interaction from entities that don’t bother to focus much on games and worlds. The game gods want to keep them in the dark, imagining they can’t let in the public or their elected representatives without destruction of games themselves through overregulation — this is the “apres moi le deluge” trick often pulled.
I can’t expect that game coders who live by the ethic you first described, “some people have access to the code or on/off switch, others don’t; that sets them apart” to suddenly renounce their power and privilege and go about the public-minded exercise of building a game or world by different rules. I reject the idea that you have to code to make law — code isn’t law, it’s only part of law, and not even the most intelligent part. Law is higher than code, and shall always be.
>Advocacy and litigation is very unlikely to change anything, for the reasons I outlined in my first point above. Most judges would throw it out with the comment, “If you hate the game, why do you play?”
They’ll be saying that less and less when they see the amount of damages and losses being claimed. For now, the TOS makes all the things virtual and nil in value; as more and more people come forward to show the real damages there will be more compelling evidence.
Everything in your list is true of some country clubs. People spend a lot of time there, make deals that pay the rent, fall in love and play the “old” golf.
[…] Horses and the user-governed world […]
With all this mention of baloney, Prok, I’m getting hunggrrrry! 😉
*stares* Wow. I can’t believe that claim was made.
Actually, in a way, Prok is correct. You do pay to stay in a country, in a way; usually in the form of taxes. If you don’t, they do things like banning you from standard access. Like… jail.
Prok is also correct about law trumping code. Think of it this way:
Programmers are like law enforcement officers, military or civilian. Their job, really, is to take an idea and make it a reality via code. They’re not actually supposed to be the top dogs; they never were. Which is why I suggested translators: such people would take the role of representatives and senators, fielding the opinion of the public, converting it into technospeak, and passing it to the coders for implementation.
That said, Prok also interpreted the statement incorrectly.
The on/off switch is a necessary evil, and furthermore, is reserved necessarily to an elite. Unless, of course, you think that you should be able to vote for that; some coders have tried that.
The best RL metaphor for the on/off switch (even though Raph says there isn’t one) is a doomsday device, the most tame of which is a nuclear winter. (Run a search for 10 ways to destroy the Earth.) Hitting “off” is like triggering the destruction of the entirety of existence. It’s simply not there anymore. Should that be put to a vote?
Asheron’s Call 2 was shut down (the off button was hit) because Turbine could no longer generate profit off it (or something like that). (Link) Does Turbine have a legal or moral obligation to maintain service for it? Or is it Turbine’s right, as the initial creators of the world, as its primary maintainers, despite the thousands of man-hours poured into its world by those who opted-in, to pull the plug when they choose to? What if a world becomes an explicit money sink for those who run it, and further, its citizens are not inclined towards paying for it? (This is analogous to the United States’ deficit, naturally.) The obligation, if there is one, would effectively bankrupt them. This, too, is not conscionable.
What if it’s not an economic deficit? What if its maintainers are so sick of dealing with its citizenry that they don’t want to suffer it anymore? Do they have the right to stop?
Oh, and Raph’s post on the subject is here:
https://www.raphkoster.com/?p=222
Once more into the breach… 😉
– My “SL is the only game you’ve ever played” assumption was not a non-sequitur, as you assumed– I honestly thought you’d never left one game and gone to another that you liked better. It’s pretty easy. Much, much easier than going to another country– much easier than going to another city, or another job, in fact. Which is one big reason why I believe games will never be regulated in the way you’re proposing. Leaving for greener pastures is just too easy. (It’s also a big reason why I’m encouraging you to put together those greener pastures.)
– I’m not sure that insisting (hortatorially?) that a MMO is a country is particularly useful either. It’s not like they’re going to be recognized by the UN anytime soon. And the people running them are running them with more of an eye to their players’ happiness than any other leaders in this world; because otherwise, their players will leave and join someone else’s country.
And you might be surprised how many people actually like the sort of tribal authority devs wield. (Though you might believe they want it for themselves, in game terms…) There was a discussion of whether Player Associations or Player Cities should be democratic on the SWG Beta boards was dominated by players saying, “No, they shouldn’t be! What if some group of griefers goes and stuffs your PA / City with alts, and then votes the long-standing mayor that we all like out of office?” In fact, this was pretty much the consensus among the players, much to Raph’s surprise.
– A lot of people lose their hearts in Middle-Earth, or Disneyland, or some socially-constructed quasi-space like Pro Football Fandom. Doesn’t make them countries (or in some cases, any less fictional).
– Sorry Proke, you picked the wrong high-falutin’ comparison…. 😉
Speaking as someone who’s actually a) sat on PCCBs, b) tried (trying) to design a virtual world, and c) professionally mucked about with Keplerian Orbital elements, (the Music of the Spheres you mentioned…) I can say the third is by far the easiest of the three. And I know for a fact that the first two aren’t any easier– in fact are considerably more difficult — when people who don’t know what they’re talking about have a say.
– Honestly man, I’m not just taunting you or dismissing you when I say you should design your own game, it’s meant as a helpful suggestion. Now, either this game / world is going to be produced by legislation and litigation, or it’s going to be produced by people going out and doing it. Well, take the legislation / litigation route, and it’s going to take thousands of likeminded, dedicated people at least the better part of a decade to produce… if not more. If it even works at all.
Take the “Design it yourself” route, and you need a couple dozen likeminded, dedicated people at least a couple/few years to put together.
You’re selling yourself short if you think that self-righteous bullying on someone else’s blog (in a thread that few, by now, are reading) is the best thing you can do to make the Metaverse happen. Learn to code, C++ or Java are good solid places to start, or learn to do 3D graphics / animation (Blender3D has a free download you can use, and a good Wiki tutorial to help you out.)
Go on, take the plunge. 🙂 Express your deep yearnings in constructive work instead of noise.
– Higher and higher legal damages / losses will probably backfire. For one, the TOS’s you’re so dismissive of are actually legally binding. For another, claiming large losses will probably lead more quickly to tort reform and legislation about frivolous lawsuits than it will lead to the sort of change you’re proposing.
And despite the fact that many online currencies are worth more in USD than the Iraqi Dinar is, I doubt courts will see them as anything better than sheer speculation. In fact, in terms of investment grading, the SEC would probably like to see tighter controls on their value on the devs’ part than the sort of freedom you’re envisioning.
If real losses of “wealth” are going to be the discriminator here, games will get worse, not better. You remember how the Lindens flooded the land market rather than allow land barons to fleece the rest of their customer base? That’s probably the clearest example, in dollars and cents, of “wealth” damage a set of devs can do to their playerbase. How could you write a law, such that that sort of control wasn’t the first to go?
And there are a few battles, more worth fighting, that need to be won in the courts first. For one thing, someone can be ejected from a more-or-less public mall for wearing a T-shirt that expresses an opinion that the mall owners don’t approve of. This isn’t protected by free speech (as you’ll probably agree with me that it should be). But until this is turned around, there’s little or no chance that an MMO will not be able to simply eject anyone they feel is a threat to the game… even ones whose only “threat” is to be a dissident like yourself.
Gotta sign off for now. Thanks for the stimulating discussion though, this is fun even if it’s not going anywhere. 😉
[…] Here’s a bit of synthesis and opinion following several recent blog posts on the subject of Metaverse 2.0 (thanks, Stefan). Start off with these three (Raph’s Koster & 3pointD & OgleEarth).First, for those who want to see Metaverse 2.0 (from here on, M2) as an open unrestricted peer to peer world, I’ll argue that custom worlds/apps like SecondLife and WoW will always exist, much as AOL continues to exist (and I don’t mean to insult anyone with the stigma of AOL users) despite or perhaps because of the wide open web. There’s a reason people choose MySpace vs. any number of free homepage hosting services. These private virtual worlds can and will continue to grow with time. […]
Hi, Jim!
>I honestly thought you’d never left one game and gone to another that you liked better. It’s pretty easy. Much, much easier than going to another country– much easier than going to another city, or another job, in fact. Which is one big reason why I believe games will never be regulated in the way you’re proposing. Leaving for greener pastures is just too easy. (It’s also a big reason why I’m encouraging you to put together those greener pastures.)
Actually, no. I found leaving TSO to migrate to SL to be very wrenching and saddening. It involved selling one of my sims on ebay for $157, he had had some amazing adventures, he was skilled up to the max, he had the Afghan dogs and even the founder’s Simmy, it was a crushing loss, really, the thought of him in someone else’s hands is just too sad, but he had to go in order to finance my virtual estate business. I feel the long, anguished discussions many of us had about the disappointments of TSOs, the difficulties of SL, having to leave others behind, trying to get them to make the crossover — well, I don’t want to trivialize the experience of leaving Ireland in the 1900s, but I think I could get at least get a glimmer of what it was like for our ancestors.
>I’m not sure that insisting (hortatorially?) that a MMO is a country is particularly useful either. It’s not like they’re going to be recognized by the UN anytime soon. And the people running them are running them with more of an eye to their players’ happiness than any other leaders in this world; because otherwise, their players will leave and join someone else’s country.
Actually, it’s hard to think of game/social world “countries” that have the good social tools of TSO and the good building/creation possibilities of TSO, and nobody really wants to leave the countries for these reasons. The idea that there are just all these countries out there that will “do” is false — there aren’t. People are always shouting “love it or leave it” on the forums, but hey, you can criticize it and stay, too.
>And you might be surprised how many people actually like the sort of tribal authority devs wield. (Though you might believe they want it for themselves, in game terms…) There was a discussion of whether Player Associations or Player Cities should be democratic on the SWG Beta boards was dominated by players saying, “No, they shouldn’t be! What if some group of griefers goes and stuffs your PA / City with alts, and then votes the long-standing mayor that we all like out of office?” In fact, this was pretty much the consensus among the players, much to Raph’s surprise.
Oh, I believe it, totally! Most people want to be told what to do; a smaller group would like to tell others what to do; few want to bother with democracy, yet the results of the countries that do bother with liberal democracy and open markets are what causes droves of people to immigrate to them.
>A lot of people lose their hearts in Middle-Earth, or Disneyland, or some socially-constructed quasi-space like Pro Football Fandom. Doesn’t make them countries (or in some cases, any less fictional).
Disneyland isn’t as immersive, you can always get sick on the hotdogs or sunburned or need to go to the bathroom really badly in ways you won’t in an immersive world, i.e. it’s not a feature of that world itself. I think the ways in which virtual worlds access your heart, mind, and soul are simply different than the way the constructs of RL access these human faculties. This just needs to be studied more.
>Sorry Proke, you picked the wrong high-falutin’ comparison…. 😉
Speaking as someone who’s actually a) sat on PCCBs, b) tried (trying) to design a virtual world, and c) professionally mucked about with Keplerian Orbital elements, (the Music of the Spheres you mentioned…) I can say the third is by far the easiest of the three. And I know for a fact that the first two aren’t any easier– in fact are considerably more difficult — when people who don’t know what they’re talking about have a say.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but I was referring to the ancients’ concept of the “music of the spheres” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_the_spheres) and what I meant by this was that “it isn’t as complicated as the laws of creation instilled in the created universe by the Creator,” not necessarily some actual mathematical concept you’re accessing.
>Honestly man, I’m not just taunting you or dismissing you when I say you should design your own game, it’s meant as a helpful suggestion. Now, either this game / world is going to be produced by legislation and litigation, or it’s going to be produced by people going out and doing it. Well, take the legislation / litigation route, and it’s going to take thousands of likeminded, dedicated people at least the better part of a decade to produce… if not more. If it even works at all.
Why? There are already these game devs that made games. Why can’t we work with this and urge them to get off their high horses, to continue this thread’s metaphors, and make worlds work better for people? Why 10 years? Everything accelerates in the metaverse.
>You’re selling yourself short if you think that self-righteous bullying on someone else’s blog (in a thread that few, by now, are reading) is the best thing you can do to make the Metaverse happen. Learn to code, C++ or Java are good solid places to start, or learn to do 3D graphics / animation (Blender3D has a free download you can use, and a good Wiki tutorial to help you out.)
Um, there’s nothing “self-righteous” about this, I’m just applying common sense and universal principles accessible to all. It doesn’t matter if only a few read it — you yourself said that most people prefer tyranny and happily follow the game god-tyrants anywhere and even form fanboyz’ clubs. I do my little part for making the Metaverse happen by running my SL business and continuing to comment on the issues of the world.
The “learn to code” crap is the usual creator-fascism we deal with constantly in SL. “Make something or die,” is the cry of the social darwinists and Randians on the forums. Why? “Someone will make everything,” in the famous words of Philip Linden. If someone will make everything, then the rest of us can concentrate not only on passive consumption of the creator fascists’ products, but can concentrate on the making of something non-inventoriable, which is the liberal democratic community.
I find with these tools like PSP or Blender, which I can only work just a bit in order to make a few textures or signs or odds and ends for my business, that you are either talented or you are not. Either you have a knack for working these things, or they are counterintuitive for you. Perhaps it’s an age thing — I noticed very young children even learn them faster because they have absorbed all the routines and loops of games taught them by game gods in offline games and various online games, too.
>Go on, take the plunge. 🙂 Express your deep yearnings in constructive work instead of noise.
Um, I’m already engaged a substantial part of every day in my work in SL which is hard work, and usually not very rewarding. The concept that people just sound off on forums is a popular one, but there’s no direct hydraulic connection between the writing someone does on a forum and what they can “produce” inworld. Indeed, the whole construct of “producer/creator/consumer/” isn’t one I can accept in such a stark fashion. Plenty of creators are forced to consume at least another creator’s products at some level; ever consumer ends up creating another product called “my game play” or “my house arrangement” that I think game gods and consumer-fascists (in whose interests it is to keep these harsh distinctions) are forced to contend with if they want customers.
>Higher and higher legal damages / losses will probably backfire. For one, the TOS’s you’re so dismissive of are actually legally binding. For another, claiming large losses will probably lead more quickly to tort reform and legislation about frivolous lawsuits than it will lead to the sort of change you’re proposing.
I think gradually, when more and more businesses of the big and RL type come into places like Second Life, they will force these changers faster than you think. They are likely to sit still for as long as the rest of us have to sit being told our Linden $ is “of no intrinsic value”.
>And despite the fact that many online currencies are worth more in USD than the Iraqi Dinar is, I doubt courts will see them as anything better than sheer speculation. In fact, in terms of investment grading, the SEC would probably like to see tighter controls on their value on the devs’ part than the sort of freedom you’re envisioning.
Well, that’s why their lawyers insert the language about the “no intrinsic value,” but that’s likely to change. Perhaps gaming commissions will be regulating these worlds faster than you think. I don’t see that any of us can claim there will be no successful lawsuits — successful lawsuits always surprise all the pundits when they appear.
>If real losses of “wealth” are going to be the discriminator here, games will get worse, not better. You remember how the Lindens flooded the land market rather than allow land barons to fleece the rest of their customer base? That’s probably the clearest example, in dollars and cents, of “wealth” damage a set of devs can do to their playerbase. How could you write a law, such that that sort of control wasn’t the first to go?
No, I totally disagree with your analysis that “land barons fleece the rest of the customers”. Indeed, the Lindens set up this very paradigm to keep operating this way precisely because they do flood and because then the very largest baron can keep buying and undercutting the others. Only when there are more land barons to compete successfully with each other and improve various niche markets can this huge discrepancy in wealth in the society, and the high cost of valued land, begin to even out. Indeed, by land glutting, the Lindens ensure that oligarchs can last forever.
When ordinary people can sell their land for what they paid, adjusted for inflation, or even a bit more, then the civilization can develop more. People are always wanting to curb land barons and stop them “exploiting teh ppl” — but the “teh ppl” want to sell their land, too, and make a buck. You can’t have that happen unless you are willing to stop regulation of the market. What we have now is over-regulation in the forum of Lindens deliberately land glutting to keep an artificial figure of $5/meter.
>And there are a few battles, more worth fighting, that need to be won in the courts first. For one thing, someone can be ejected from a more-or-less public mall for wearing a T-shirt that expresses an opinion that the mall owners don’t approve of. This isn’t protected by free speech (as you’ll probably agree with me that it should be). But until this is turned around, there’s little or no chance that an MMO will not be able to simply eject anyone they feel is a threat to the game… even ones whose only “threat” is to be a dissident like yourself.
Actually, the t-shirt guy prevailed in that case
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/859744/posts?page=55
[…] It’s interesting that, aside from game design, one of the common topics you are likely to always see in any game discussion are complaints about the attitude and behaviors of certain players. Players complaining about players. The Guardian last week had an article regarding griefers and interviewed Lum and Richard Bartle. Similarly, in a post last week on his personal blog, Chris Bateman felt compelled to defend himself from a drive-by flaming. We also had on GO last week Geldonyetich’s thread about forums users and their impact. These aren’t references to people complaining, but instead these are examples in one week of a growing concern for the state of behaviors apparent in online gaming. I don’t think this is a moral issue. It’s not about censuring people or driving out the newbs or whatever. I think this is an interesting problem for a couple of reasons: 1) Learned Behavior The average gamer age in 2005, according to the ESA, is 33. A fact I found startling was that only 31% of players surveyed were under 18, leading to the speculation of an average age and a further breakdown that 44% of players are 18-49 years and 25% are 50+ years. This seems large, but the point is still meaningful whatever the data; namely, that there’s a majority of players out there who should know how to act with others. If the adults are the ones acting badly on average, what is this going to teach new entrants to genres and gaming in general? This isn’t an appeal to morals, it’s common sense. More experienced and more mature players should know how to govern themselves better and how to encourage better behaviors. Otherwise, there’s no guarantee things won’t be worse in the future — the future being tonight or whenever you’ll be playing next. 2) Growing Market With the story breaking from f13 and Sir Bruce the other day, we know that Blizzard has reached worldwide 6M users and is probably planning to expand its other successful titles to the MMO genre. Aside from that, we also all know from watching planned releases and industry buzz that there’s a sizable amount of investment going on by other providers looking to match Blizzard. The market is growing and so are the tactics and reach for demographics so far unmined for online games. Maybe it’s like the late 1990’s AOL example of a sudden surge of newbies to the Internet, but we’re going to see more new gamers from probably different cultures and backgrounds to MMO’s. How are these people going to react, and how will they behave based on some of the common griefing we all know about? They’ll probably reciprocate, since a lot of bad behaviors aren’t curbed. And in some cases, like with RMT farming, they’re rewarded. 3) New Designs If poor behaviors continue in a game and get enough visibility or provider concern, the provider usually has to respond. It’s more cost effective for them to prevent any common problems than to work at resolving individual user issues. This is why we see some providers rolling back innovative designs and launching new titles with much thinner and/or restrictive feature sets. For example, if enough people keep having negative experiences in PvP, then of course we’ll see some providers launch MMO’s without it. If combat imbalances and skewed economies from duping or whatever are a worry, then we’ll get MMO’s without any player crafting at all. Whether you’re aching for innovation or just a game with a different mix of common themes, if there are endemic bad player behaviors with those themes, that’s likely to scare away any designer from taking any chances. The designer will redeploy the feature or build it in a future title with a lot of extra oversight or curbs. Whatever you care about (e.g. socialization, PvP, trading, crafting), it’s likely you’ll be affected in the future by some new or existing title if there’s already seems to be a lot of griefing in your favorite design — or just a lot less enthusiasm to experiment. 4) External Governance There’s been lots of examples, but it’s proof enough that politicians and the people who service them are starting to find online gaming an area to exploit. It’s in the best interest of any provider to avoid bad publicity, but it’s really beneficial to avoid the kind of Hot Coffee press, because that brings a level of scrutiny and persistence to an issue that tags a provider for years. Forgetting about ESRB ratings and Jack Thompson for a minute, if politicians and their handlers (including the media) feel that griefing in online games is a tasty issue, it will chill innovation and probably affect directly the kind of play we’ve become used to. We can’t be na�ve about this or issues like net neutrality. 5) Costs It’s not always acknowledged, but the cost to maintain an online service’s code of conduct is probably significant. Usually, any phone call, email or customer “touch” has an n+$1 cost to a provider. Anytime human involvement is required to inform or resolve a situation it is a substantial cost for an online gaming company. Substantial, because they could otherwise just depend on a EULA or TOS or FAQ to govern player activities. And that’s money that could have been spent on infrastructure, new development, defect correction, new artwork, new design, etc. The more a community spirals out of control, the less flexibility a provider has to budget money aside for new things, or for items already promised or needed. It’s not just the costs of human CSR’s, it’s also the effort and hardware costs to build new CSR tools, to correct exploits, to provide and update documentation and more. Defects always have a cost, but when people exploit them, I expect the costs are exponential, since they have a rippling effect requiring CSR involvement, documentation, etc. And defects aside, just the costs to remedy individual harassment or whatever has probably a larger cost (since it takes more time to prove and resolve ) than just helping a player who is stuck in the geometry. So bad behaviors do cost and do take away from innovation or new releases. I think those are good reasons for us to take bad behaviors seriously in games and on their official forums (which are just an extension of the game itself). Enough developers have tried to comment on why things like forums and player governance are problematic, and how forum fires start . It seems to me enough people just aren’t getting it. Or else there are further problems, maybe from design or things like RMT, that increase the problem. Regardless, griefing and deliberate negativity have a bad affect, and gamers may be starting to realize these costs more.Let us know how you really feel _uacct = “UA-389212-1”; urchinTracker(); […]
[…] Player Governance in an MMO Dangerous Commoner Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 14 Location: UK 281 XP 0 0 0 268 0 View Inventory Posted: Fri May 26, 2006 9:07 am Post subject: Player Governance in an MMO I am fascinated by the idea of player governance in an MMO, which Ryan mentions in his article on the end game. It would not interest everyone, but then many people live in the real world without paying attention to politics; despite the impact that it has on their daily lives. For the sake of this post, I am going to assume an MMO with several city states as a basis for the examples. The same questions would arise if players controlled planets in a far distant galaxy, or nations across an entire globe. If the rules controlling participation in the governing of a city are in the hands of the government, will there be a trend to open up that government or concentrate power in the hands of a single ruler or clique. Will cities have any sort of independent judiciary, or will justice be administered by the government. Will there be any non-republican democracies, by which I mean cities in which decisions are reached by the people directly and not through their representatives. Will those in government use that participation to enrich themselves either through direct use of tax revenues or by accepting donations to make decisions favourable to the paying player? How will the tax versus expenditure balance play out. If tax revenues can pay for things that make the city better for players, will there be support for higher taxes that bring tangible benefits to the citizens? If a government is unpopular, will it be possible for a group of players to attempt a coup? If low taxes have left the city guard underpaid, will they turn on the government? In the real world there are substantial impediments to moving to a new country, such as distance from family, moving property, language and cultural differences. In an MMO these are less of a factor, therefore we could see people moving between cities seeking a place with the tax regime, political stability, or governmental system they wanted. Would states attempt to restrict people leaving? Would states put barriers in the way of incoming immigration? The MMO that provided for this sort of political development, would be a world in which players had an influence on how cities grew and shrunk. A world that did not reset itself every each server reboot. If NPC monsters tended to move away from well populated, well guarded cities, then we could see players in search of adventure moving, even if not permanently to a city in a less secure area. All of these questions intrigue me. I do not know if the same lower restraints compared to r/l on anti-social behaviour that are seen in existing MMO would make such a game impossible, but I would certainly be interested in trying to find out._________________Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. garvity Vassal Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 35 879 XP 0 0 0 618 0 View Inventory Posted: Fri May 26, 2006 12:44 pm Post subject: A Tale in the Desert has a really interesting player government system. Players can collect signatures from other players and then submit their proposals up for a server-wide vote. Players can create and vote on laws (game rules) and game features. Of course, in the end it’s up to the devs to implement the changes (or not), but that veto power isn’t used very often. There is also another aspect that involves nationwide elections for a "Demi-Pharaoh." A player elected to that position has the power to permanently ban a limited number of players. The power can be used to deal with griefers or for other less virtuous purposes. Needless to say, it’s a very interesting virtual political environment. Raph also wrote on this topic earlier this week: Horses and the user-governed world_________________MMOz.com Glazius Page Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 104 1623 XP 0 0 0 99 1 View Inventory Posted: Tue May 30, 2006 7:40 am Post subject: Player governance would work better in SWG than in WoW. Or rather, it _won’t_ work in anything with a raid-based "endgame", because all you need is one guild to drop a prohibitive "toll road" on the way to the next boss in the raid chain and your server drama asplode. Informal player governance is working in EVE. Powerful corporations can lay claim to certain areas of space and set up things like guardbots and repair stations. But ultimately, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, or something like that. Player governance will only take off if people don’t have to carve their own niches out of someone else’s hide. –GF Giblet Serf Joined: 01 Jun 2006 Posts: 3 Location: I dunno, but it smells really bad. 140 XP 0 0 0 95 0 View Inventory Posted: Thu Jun 01, 2006 10:00 am Post subject: Player run instanced cities might work for this. Lets say for example in eq2 a guild that has done quest X to acheive the rights to build a city gets its own instance where certain guild ranks can move and edit certain features of the city. Lower merchant costs for items but at the same time require a minimum weekly fee of coin and status to maintain the city so that merchant costs cannot be abused below the standard. Employ guards that will attack certain other guilds if they are foolish enough to entire your city. Or perhaps those guards will crumble beneath the might of unwelcome guests. Earn "city coin" based on the sales made by your city merchants and from the rent costs from anyone who lives in your city, so more popular cities can earn "city coin" and purchase upgrades for your town. Grow from a small village to a small town to a thriving walled metropolis to fend off the legions of orcs and packs of gnolls that attack daily. Omg, I think I just reinvented sim city The real fun will be the quests that can be obtained only via player owned cites. Npc’s should frequent towns at will and perhaps if your city is large enough some important member of a distant land will come seeking aid from the guild of your city…………just some ideas, i think i could be somthing really cool and offer the opportunity to add the "surprises" we all look for._________________Just stop thinking…Trust me it will be fun. Darniaq Serf Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2 0 XP 0 0 0 0 0 View Inventory Posted: Wed Jun 21, 2006 12:38 pm Post subject: Man. Really wish I knew about this place before now As it happens, [u]I agree with you on the concept of Player Politicians. The problem with implementation, in my mind, is two fold: A lot of development effort spent on features relatively few would care about. This includes those interested in running large groups (few) and those interested in the goings-on of those running large groups (few+). The guilds I ran and the SWG city I founded and co-ran seemed like full-time jobs for the few people interested and the rest I kept trying to get interested How often do city mayors in SWG truly turn over. I always felt like it was a semi-wasted role, something people did once a week when their votes came in and unlocked new abilites. I often wondered how many city groups just had someone make an alt to be the mayor for the few times the role was needed to be played. […]
[…] recent blog posts on the subject of Metaverse 2.0 (thanks, Stefan). Start off with these three (Raph’s Koster & 3pointD & OgleEarth).First, for those who want to see Metaverse 2.0 (from here on, M2) as […]
[…] recent blog posts on the subject of Metaverse 2.0 (thanks, Stefan). Start off with these three (Raph’s Koster & 3pointD & OgleEarth).First, for those who want to see Metaverse 2.0 (from here on, M2) as […]