The Man Behind the Curtain

May 11th, 1998

Most of our citizens actually lay eyes on their officeholders and the hopefuls thereto about as often as they see circus elephants and with the same lack of intimate contact. A man behind the footlights on a platform is a little bit unreal; he might as well be a movie.
But the people… are still interested… to have one show up at the front door is as delightful a novelty to most of them as would be a chance to ride that circus elephant. That unreality, the candidate on the platform, on the billboard, or in the newspaper, suddenly becomes warmly human and a little more than life size.
In addition to being a novelty… [it] is a flattering compliment… the idea will be kicking around in the back of [the voter’s] mind. “Here is a man who really seems interested in us ordinary citizens…”

Ask any old Usenet hand: things have gotten worse. There’s more people. And they are ruder. They are cruder. They flame more. The signal-to-noise level has been falling for years now. And it’s all your fault.

“Yours,” that is, assuming that (as is statistically likely), you’re not one of the old Usenet hands yourself. Chances are you aren’t–the explosive growth of the Internet has meant a shattering of the old sense of community that used to exist. Once upon a time, the Internet was the playground of the few who had the technological savvy to reach it, the fortune to be somewhere that offered access, and the knowledge of its mere existence. In other words, an audience that was extremely selective: generally highly educated, and working in either academic or high tech fields.

These days of course, these folks are feeling very much pushed out of their old playground. Now that the cat is out of the bag, the Internet is forever changed. Many of them are looking forward to Internet 2 as a salvation, but the fact is that the sense of small, insular, familiar community that those people knew is forever gone, simply because people will know about Internet 2. Cyberspace is no longer a well-kept secret. And that means really fundamental changes in how the Internet community evolves.

Back when Robert Heinlein wrote today’s opening quotation in Take Back Your Government!, his manual on practical politicking, he probably had no idea that someday they would be quoted in a discussion of virtual communities. On the other hand, he probably would have been tickled to see the book used thus. Old hands in cyberspace have been quoting Heinlein for a long time; his libertarian politics found a friendly reception among the well-read science-fiction readers who populated the early Internet, and it’s not uncommon to see quotations from his writings as Unix messages of the day or the like.

The thing that led to the frustration many old-time Net hands had with the arrival of the mass-market Internet is exactly what Heinlein is describing: the personal touch. In general, human beings tend to react better to personal contact than to impersonal interactions. We’d rather talk to a real person over the phone than to a machine. We’d rather get a personal letter than a form letter, and failing that, we’d prefer a form letter that at least pretended to know who we are. And when we are not known, we are psychologically disinhibited, and act out more freely. To maintain tight community, everyone must be known.

This, of course, flies in the face of the inevitable anonymity that the Internet provides. Distrust is therefore rampant. And it creates a real problem for the administrators of a virtual community as well, because they are in a position worse than “might as well be a movie,” as Heinlein puts it. You see, they are supernaturally powerful. And if there’s something that we tend to fear and distrust more than someone we don’t know, it’s someone we don’t know who has power over us.

This dilemma isn’t going to go away ever; when it boils right down to it, we’re always going to have someone out there who has the power to turn our virtual world (which we may well have come to value deeply) off. And that’s assuming that no in-game administration is required. But of course, it is.

But it does mean that the in-game admin faces a bizarre problem. He is exercising power that the ordinary virtual citizen cannot. And he is looked to in many ways to provide a certain atmosphere and level of civility in the environment. Yet the fact remains that no matter how scrupulously honest he is, no matter how just he shows himself to be, no matter how committed to the welfare of the virtual space he may prove himself, people will hate his guts. They will mistrust him precisely because he has power, and they can never know him. There will be false accusations galore, many insinuations of nefarious motives, and former friends will turn against him. It may be that the old saying about power and absolute power is just too ingrained in the psyche of most people; whatever the reasons, there has never been an online game whose admins could say with a straight face that all their players really trusted them (and by the way, it gets worse once you take money!).

There isn’t very much that can be done about this, particularly as your virtual world grows. Many a mud has found that the feelings of intimacy and of trust faded as the playerbase grew, just as those early Netters found their once-civil newsgroups devolving into endless flamewars. But it does mean that admins must at some point relinquish the role that they once held among the playerbase. When the game is small, they are able to talk one-on-one, soothe hurt feelings, resolve problems using personal judgement, and adjudicate delicate issues such as one player’s accusation of cheating against another. But as all large companies know, as government knows, and as online worlds are coming to learn: the bigger you get, the harder it is to know your audience that well, and the less trust they will give you. And the problem becomes exponentially worse over time. The only solution is to not put your admins in the position of judging unverifiable facts, or else they will abdicate all pretense of fairness. They will, in fact, be acting unfairly, because there is no way of knowing the circumstances.

What does this have to do with practical matters? Well, let us consider this list of possible actions that a Killer might take against another player in UO if it had no combat system at all, or did not allow player versus player combat.

They could kill the victim’s pet. They could kill the victim’s intended target mere seconds before the victim gets to. They could steal all the loot off of the corpse of the victim’s target before the victim gets to. They could release a tame dragon near the victim. They could stand in front of the victim’s desired destination, blocking access. They could do all of this without even saying a word, so that the issue of verbal harassment never arises.

You see, it is axiomatic that as your virtual world becomes more malleable and more versatile, that players will find more and more ways to, well, screw each other over. What’s more, there are thousands of them for every one of you. You will not be able to keep up with their ingenuity. (A designer should never underestimate the amazing ability of players to come up with new means to do each other harm). UO happens to have features that because of their newness and uniqueness, open up more ways for players to do harm to one another via indirect means. And as virtual worlds develop, matters will only grow worse–consider the day when you get the ability to dig trenches

In a world without any playerkilling, you as the victim actually have no recourse whatsoever except an admin. Who is someone you don’t trust, cannot know if you made up the situation (consider how most of the above actions are extremely difficult to detect via automated means), and who is going to have to take one person’s word over the other.

This is not a situation in which admins are likely to become more trusted. And it effectively renders admins useless as judges of human behavior as the game grows.

Growth is never an easy thing to cope with. And the new breed of virtual spaces are facing issues with scale that are new, and often new solutions are required. In yesterday’s essay I spoke of the traditional administrative model for a virtual space as essentially paternalistic; this isn’t meant to serve as an insult against those who inhabit the space, but rather to describe a system whereby groups are essentially governed via the charismatic personal contact of an authority figure. Just as in the real world, this system falls apart once larger bodies of people need to be governed or administered or taken care of. There is a reason why we evolved away from a tribal structure in the real world as our cultures grew; the same will–and must, really–happen in virtual spaces like Ultima Online.

At the last player lunch, a fellow told me that he was fascinated by how UO had recapitulated European history from 800AD to 1200AD in six months of existence. He commented on the parallels between marauding bandit gangs, the enclaves of feudal systems building secure spaces and leaving the wilderness to the less civilized people, the eventual overcrowding as villages covered the available building space. He also shrewdly guessed the character of our next set of changes based on historical precedent: house ownership and limits.

We, as humans, have been here before, over and over and over again. Just as the Internet grew and Usenet habitues no longer knew every poster; just as tribal leadership gave way to more organized and (yes) less personal forms of government; and just as Heinlein’s book on politics is now sadly dated (when was the last time a precinct worker rang your doorbell?), virtual worlds are now getting large enough that older solutions to administration no longer function. The importance of personal contact has not diminished in the least; but the difficulty of providing it has grown, and will continue to do so. Many of the choices made in UO regarding playerkilling toggles, safe worlds, and the like were made in light of this fact.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that players cannot start ringing doorbells themselves. As the overall administration grows more distant, the local one becomes more important. And, in many ways, more powerful, as it understands its local circumstances and may obtain the power to modify its local laws. This was the point of Heinlein’s book–that politics that matter are actually at the local level, and this is where you can make a difference. You do not expect your nation’s leader to fix your streets or solve the local bank robbery–that is what the City Council is for. And in UO we are embarking on the experiment of exactly that: providing local empowerment to the playerbase. Perhaps Enshu Ponfar’s City of Yew does not see itself as a symptom of the sweep of history–but by these lights, it is.

In the end, it boils down to the fact that the best government is the one that you can trust, which will be the one you know personally: the people close to you in your virtual community, who are held accountable precisely because of community ties. Your best government is going to be each other, because the man behind the curtain isn’t going to know you any more than you know him. Consider what Heinlein said:

 

  An adult is a person who no longer depends on his parents. By the same token a person who refers to or thinks of the government as “They” is not yet grown up…
There is more cynicism in this country than there are things to be cynical about. The debunking exceeds the phoniness. There is more skepticism than mendacity… [The skeptics] are around us, busy belittling and sneering and grinning at every effort to make of this country what it can be. What it will be.
For you there is the joy of being in the know, of understanding the political life of your country, the greater joy of striving for the things you believe in, and the greatest joy of all, the joy of public service freely given… there are no words with which to describe nor any way to convince you of its superiority to other joys; it is possible only to assure you that it is so.

There have been many skeptics on Usenet about these essays; Heinlein also says, “Don’t argue with a hard case.” But for those now posting about townstone systems and methods for player militias to jail offenders and the like–hang in there. If we keep recapitulating European history at this rate, we’ll be at the Magna Charta soon–and won’t that be interesting!

In the meantime, consider a quotation by a different author, Heinlein’s longtime colleague in science-fiction, Isaac Asimov. It may as well apply to playerkillers, who are as we’ve discussed those who “don’t get it,” those who fail to see it as Real. “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” And who else are playerkillers but those who are socially incompetent in this new virtual community?

-Designer Dragon