Horses and the user-governed world

 Posted by (Visited 16919 times)  Game talk
May 242006
 

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:

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