I have a new book out, sort of
(Visited 5221 times) Game talk
Nov 012006
It’s not really mine, but rather Beth Noveck and Jack Balkin’s. It’s The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, and it has a great list of contributors, including Richard Bartle, Yochai Benkler, Ted Castronova, Susan P. Crawford, Julian Dibbell, A. Michael Froomkin, James Grimmelmann, Dan Hunter, Greg Lastowka, Beth Noveck, Cory Ondrejka, & Tracy Spaight. The topic is right in the title, of course. I believe the piece of mine that is in there is Declaring the Rights of Players.
10 Responses to “I have a new book out, sort of”
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I’ve had a lot to say about your Declaration of Rights of Avatars in the past, and I could sum up one big problem here:
“The aim of virtual communities is the common good of its citizenry, from which arise the rights of avatars.”
This is housing rights within a putative “collective good” — it’s the collectivist side of the theory of rights rather than the concept of inherent individual rights.
I think it’s a bad idea in games and worlds because it elevates groups into mobs able to determine what they believe is the common good. The common good envisioned by mobs (or even groups)isn’t always the best thing for a real liberal, democratic society.
Example: the entire population, if it voted, in New York State, might vote for the death penalty and against abortion. Many would argue that the more liberal and democratic and enlightened position would be to permit abortion and not permit the death penalty. And in fact, that’s how it has come out in the United States as a cultural/social/legal norm in many states because despite the masses, the mob, the group, the more enlightened and freer position prevails against the notion of the state being authorized to kill citizens or the notion that no woman has control over her own body. See?
Who is to determine the common good? Game gods? Wannabe devs? Fanboyz? no thanks!
I think there may be a flaw in your rights of players thesis, one pointed out by Mao Tse-Tung. Majorities usually enforce rights because majorities have the final decision – the resort to violence.
In the case of MUDS, VWs and MMOs, the hardware admin holds the only gun.
But in any case, congratulations on the book 🙂
A “real liberal, democratic society” isn’t always the aim of either games or virtual worlds.
Cael: I was under the impression that the majority does NOT enforce rights; they appoint someone else to do that. From the local sheriff up to the president (who then appoints someone else to do it). Why can’t virtual worlds appoint an operator and Keeper of the Code?
Michael: Because it may be understated, but everyone since Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus has understood who really permits people to rule or not to rule. The Mob will have its way, one way or another.
Those who forget this might prosper in the short term but eventually they come crashing down – see also Louis XVI or Marie Antoinette.
I suppose it’s possible that a VW could be effectively operated by its players but there we begin to run into questions of deiism – was the VW created as collaborative effort? Who pays for it to keep running? Who truly understands how it works? Who created it?
When every player (or perhaps “resident” would be a better term) can answer these questions with a simple “me”, then either you have a population of one or a truly democratic VW.
“The common good envisioned by mobs (or even groups) isn’t always the best thing for a real liberal, democratic society.”
Hmm…. So.. in a “Real liberal, democratic society” – an enlightened minority would tell the poor slobs what they actually wanted, and should have voted for. Not what they had actually voted for in an obviously outmoded view of democracy, where people voted democratically?
gee that may reflect current game design 🙂
I think that a liberal, democratic society is actually something more pedestrian, mundane, and middle-of-the-road and even conservative. It’s not the hard, radical, utopian, left-wing vision that many people imagine when they say the word “liberal”.
The United States has a liberal, democratic society. And so do lots of other countries in the Community of Democracies coalition whether India or Russia even. That means they have one-person, one vote, in elections that may be rigged to some extent, may be influenced by big business or oppressive state apparats, but hey, they’re elections which is more than you can say for some countries that have none.
Liberal? Well, if they aren’t killing minorities and oppressing women and suppressing dissent in some egregious ways, they’re in. These things are all relative.
So the poor slobs in fact are the liberals if all they are willing to tolerate are things like not murdering or jailing minorities and dissenters and having some more or less equal relationship between men and women. You can literalist-parse this to death, which people always do on forums like this when they sneer at concepts like liberal democracy, but despite being the worst system, it’s the worst — except for all the others. That’s all.
I don’t fetishize democracy by voting, so that the people voting whether Algerians or Hamas vote into power those who undo democracy itself — that’s not *liberal* democracy. I’m merely giving a summarized, forums sort of version of what Farid Zakharia and many similar thinkers say all the time in magazines like Newsweek, where, if you saw it there, you’d likely agree.
It’s a known tension of liberal, democratic societies that certain liberal ideas, like protecting minorites, ensuring reproductive rights, etc. are not always endorsed by the majority, technically speaking. That is, somehow, a consensus is found, where something like Roe v. Wade does finally get established, but then of course certain segments of the society keep whittling away at it, always unhappy.
You can often find people living on two tiers. They accept that the broader public commons has people, ideas, things in it they don’t like, and practices they don’t want for themselves or their children. Yet they leave it that, taking a “live and let live” approach, as long as those other sectors who might indeed be minorities don’t begin to encroach on them, i.e. with some heavily politically correct agenda that forces them to do stuff like, I dunno, drop their Christmas creche in their town square. They are content to live on their other local tier, with their more conservative believes, ignoring the broader plane where all kinds of other beliefs and practices take place, as long as it doesn’t oppress them. And that’s more or less how it works in a lot of places, until it starts to break down, usually when somebody begins to suddenly elevate themselves to speaking for “the poor slobs” and suddenly says “oh, an enlightened minority would tell the poor slobs what they actually wanted” and “oh, they must not be democratic” : )
Cael: The mob does not always exist. It frequently does not exist in virtual worlds. But say the servers are in San Francisco or something, and like the President of the United States, whoever is voted into power to watch over the code moves to San Francisco, with a stipend generated from some kind of business model.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about.
I am not suggesting player-operated VWs; I am suggesting player-appointed or elected operators of VWs. Sure, there are problems. Perhaps the VW must necessarily be open-source, or open-source only to those who are approved (perhaps by the players?) into an elevated category of candidates for operatorship.
So you end up with three categories of power: the player (or He Who Can Vote), the elect (or He Who Can See the Code), and the operator (or He Who Can Turn It Off).
Regarding questions of who pays for it, the subscription model may have its problems, but it certainly does not fail; hardly: consider it the cost of residence. Instead of targetting profit, distribute the costs of maintenance amongst the playerbase, so that each new paying player decreases the cost of living for everyone.
You can do a lot with it. I’m sure it has its own problems, but I’m not thinking of any at the moment, so I shall blithely assume they do not exist.
Is my idea fundamentally flawed, or is there a problem that can be addressed?
To be honest, Michael, even though you raise some interesting points about appointed operators, i can’t really say whether or not your model is flawed. That would require process cycles i’m currently spending on something else 🙂