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Protests, Politics And Parties In MMORPGs
The Importance of writes "LawMeme's James Grimmelmann has written an interesting piece on protests, politics and parties in MMORPGs. In particular, he talks about the 'tax revolt' in Second Life."
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The naked riot of 1997 in Ultima Online:
From AlterNet:
History has shown gamers that online protest can result in positive change, as exemplified in Ultima Online's 1997 naked riot demanding bug fixes and server upgrades. Not only were some of the rioters' issues addressed by the game publisher following the incident, but the event was widely reported, and gamers worldwide have been inspired to acts of virtual civil disobedience ever since. Remember that your worst enemy, aside from integrated branding, is inaction. Electronic Arts clearly wants players of The Sims Online to be wildly imaginative, and has already recognized that the online world is unpredictable.
I tried the star wars MMPORPG because friend insisted it was "the greatest thing ever".
Its so freaking boring...the tutorial fine, but the game, you get to a world, and it consists of guys looking for raw materials so they can level up characters, so they can then look for different raw materials so they can level up characters...
I'm only saying this because I think the mentality of people who play these games is not part of what most people consider "normal", and therefore, the current MMPORPG population is just a collection of weird geeks.
So if you try to draw a conclusion from that population, its a bad idea.
Reminds me of a time in one game I play called Dragonrealms, where they changed how some aspect of experiance in the game worked, so all the healers in the game refused to heal any wounds. Between that and the general chaos it caused, the experiance system was changed back quickly. Sometimes a little in game riot goes quite far.
I do believe your logical chain above is rendered entirely worthless by this bad link: "As a result, being wealthy is less desirable" The rich do not got rich just so they can save society. They get rich so that they can ignore most of it.
To compare the real world with games is a far cry until more (mainstream) games adopt a "free world" system. Last time I checked, Everquest players weren't having virtual wars over spawn points and players weren't forming political parties based on which class or race should be beefed/nerfed.
Some people would argue a bullet to the forehead has the same effect... does that make protests in real life any less legitimate?
I allways saw it as a statement to young adults as to why they're not considered full members of society - our understanding of it at that age sucks.
Everything will be taken away from you.
It is your own argument that is rendered worthless by a lack of reading comprehension. I said nothing about "saving society" or altruism. I simply said that society as a whole benefits from the projects and enterprises funded by the wealthy. If the rich are punished by having more of their property and earnings taken away than others, it will be less desirable for people to become rich, and there will be fewer private funds available for projects such as independent media, manufacturing, mass distribution, and yes, mass entertainment such as the game consoles many people here love. I doubt the state will fund a public video game console project.
The addiction to online gaming is real, and has existed since long before Everquest. MUDs, a text-based role-playing game, were every bit as addictive and dangerous.
It was quite disturbing throughout my time at university seeing fellow students drop out due to these games. Hell, even I had problems with them - I missed plenty of assignment deadlines all in the name of some rare sword.
This isn't going to change, but hopefully society as a whole will learn to acknowledge how strong a role these games can play in some people's life. Perhaps they will even become a tool for creating new communities, merging the physical with the virtual...
The wealthy don't fund much at all.. the working people do. In the game it was the creative people that were actually working to make big cool things for everyone to enjoy. (Why did you think they were wealthy?) Seldom do the wealthy get off their fat asses and go out and create new cool stuff. Employees think of the ideas, engineers and scientists make it possible, artists make it look good, factory workers make the parts, and construction workers build it. Even the janitors are making an effort to keep things flowing well for those working on the projects. It's all paid for either by Joe Consumer or by tax dollars. The CEO and stock holders aren't contributing much of anything to the project.
Don't misunderstand me to say that nobody that is wealthy contributes. There are people who have become wealthy by their own creativity. It's just not the fact that most of those that are wealthy at any given time are of that sort. Not even most of the neuvo rich. I'm sad to say that most of the self made rich do it by knowing the right people and the right legal/business loopholes and being somewhat ruthless. They might be clever but they aren't contributing much to society.
As in this game the goal of the creative people wasn't to get rich, it was to be creative. Released from the ritual robbery by the wealthy many working class artists, scientists, and engineers would act those needs out in real life. Instead you end up with these people making brochures and researching the taste of toothpaste. Yeah, so lets give all the money to the rich. It helps society a lot that they can afford three large homes and a dozen fancy cars.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
If they are taxing just because things are so easy to get that they aren't fun any more then why not make them harder to get? Or make them wear out with use or time. Seriously, that is why consumer goods break so often.. because otherwise people wouldn't need to buy them very often.. so huge corporations wouldn't exist to supply people with new can openers on a regular basis. We could make these things last longer but we choose not to. So do the same with your game.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Perhaps the solution to the tax is to incorporate some form of manufacture, sales and profit. One would have to limit or provide cost to the manufacturing/labor to make this work. The primary problem with the inflation, it seems, in all these games is that the money supply is virtually limitless once you know how to get it. Instead, stop the money supply (for the most part) and rely on commerce to take over.
:)
In a game like Ultima or other combat based games, this might have to be revised but it seems like Second Life is more about life. So anyways, your stadium is taxed more but people come and visit it and you charge for it. This makes you a net profit.
Okay, I realize I may be missing some of the boat since I don't play MMORPGs but I think it would be vastly interesting to model these RPGs in a manner similar to real life. This would make it even more interesting if/when "twists" are thrown in as they might reflect interesting revelations about what might happen in real life. Or even "playing" with economics a little.
By the way, in the Ultima or combat style MMORPGs, you could still limit the money supply but one would need to realistically have the villages sacked every once in a while by a band of orcs, dragons or whatever. Then the good warriors have to go and get it back.
Finally, I've always had an interesting theory about economics. The old line is that nothing happens until something gets sold. Yet in many ways, government focuses on "taxing" things which of course reduces the amount of items sold. I propose an interesting experiment to be to reduce taxes for spending a certain portion of your income within a month. For example, let's say 50% of your income within a month. This means that the poor would likely be spending this amount anyways (and be subject to those savings) and the rich would be encouraged to spend more to help vitalize the economy. I'm sure I haven't thought this entirely through yet but I'd be interested in hearing some responses to this. I get this feeling, however, that the criticisms can be worked through.
By the way, this would have to be matched through some accounting system that matches bills to taxes and of course would require automation to make it viable. This may involve privacy concerns but, of course, you could opt out if you wanted to keep something private or come to some other solution.
At any rate, ideas like this could be interesting to test in a real economically based, paper-money limited, MMORPG.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Actually, a better reference would be the stranded kids in R.A.Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, where they do set up an interim goverment, only to have it rendered obsolete.
Snapshot Review Tunnel in the Sky
greetings,
on the vein of opensource, have someone else try something like this:
1)A team of developers create, design and code the game, which is opensource. Lets call them The Founding Fathers
2)People who want to play, must pay a fee. This fee is to maintain the server, and pay the developers -as usual
3)After a period, comes election times. other developers step in, make their new propossal to the game and gammers vote.
4)So, this guys take the administration and improvement of the game on his hands, they rule the game and get paid for it trough the gammers fees.
5)GOTO 3... and you have a ever evolving game with democracy.
HOWEVER, you're close to the mark. What could happen is economic think tanks should start sponsoring MMORPGs. Set them up with an established social\economic structure, then let the characters run loose in the world to see how it fares "in reality." (I realize it's not REALLY reality, but it is far, far closer than has ever been remotely possible in economics before.)
Publicize the game, make sure people know before hand what sort of world is being set up. This should, in theory, attract those people who have an interest in that style of economics. There will always be choads, but the majority of people gaming should stick to the worlds with rules that best suit their idea of what a society should be.
Or, now that I think about it, even better - run several games using the same basic "world" simultaneously, but with the different structures. You're allowed to "immigrate" from one world to another (you realize Objectivism isn't for you after all and decide to give Communism a shot), but absolutely *not* to run multiple characters. This would be a permanent banning offense, since it would completely skew the study. (this would allow them to test not only which countries are most profitable, but which attract the most citizens)
It wouldn't be a perfect test, to be sure. The fact that it requires a fairly high level of computer knowledge would skew the results considerably from a strict statistical point of view. However, this is the first time in history that economists can actually *experiment*. We might actually be able to rip a lot of the dogmatic ideology away from economics, put the theories to *practical* test (without risking millions of real lives) and then have a huge slew of data to draw from in application to the real world.
And then, of course, if God had a sense of humor we'd discover that Marx was right all along. ;-)
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
I played DAOC excessively for a little more than a year. In that time, several players on my server died for one reason or another. It hurt to discover that someone you encountered in virtual battle, possibly many times, had cast his last spell or ganked his last noob and assumed room temperature.
If the dead has any virtual friends a memorial will get organized. These get announced on various forums and in-game. In the case of DAOC, at almost no other time will you stand among the enemy without being in battle. At these times, however, possibly hundreds of players gather and have good thoughts about the departed. Honor prevails and people behave.
So lets not get too worked up about a little virtual disobedience. There is a lot more than that going on inside MMORPGs. Ironically, one can imagine that the virtual turnout for the dearly departed will nearly always outstrip the real life version by an order of magnitude. Figure that out and you might have something interesting to get worked up about.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Except for the family of 5 trying to work on $30,000 worth of income...
No matter what way you try to slant it the flat tax is a boon for the rich and the bane of the middle class nad the poor.
This certainly demonstrates one of the paradoxes of the MMORPG. On one hand, it has to be fun, and everybody has to be able to do everything in it. On the other hand, you somehow have to create the illusion of a living, working world.
And it is an illusion. To satisfy the first condition, the moment you have a built-in quest, the players are rendered powerless to change the world around that quest - a town in danger from a Dragon is always in danger from a Dragon, no matter how many times the Dragon is slain.
But, there are certain concerns that make running an MMORPG a very tricky balancing act:
1. The company must retain control over the game. This essentially renders democracy in an MMORPG impossible. The moment the players actually have a controlling interest in the game itself, the creator of the game is placed in the impossible situation of being responsible for what happens inside the game, but being to control it.
(This is the reason, for example, that when you create a character in any MMORPG, the company running the MMORPG owns the character. If you own the character, you can make demands on the company that are unreasonable in the greater scheme of things, the company HAS to give in [as the character is your property], and since the company owns the game, they are liable for anything you do.)
2. For the game to survive, the players must form a viable community. This means that the game must be fun, but also encourage people to contribute to the world in ways other than slaughtering monsters (such as creating items in UO and EverQuest). In the end, it is the people that the regular players come back for, not the game itself.
3. The game must be balanced, both in design and community. And that is the hardest of the lot, considering the first two factors. Too much inflation and the majority of the players are driven away. Have a closed system, such as the real world, and all of the resources get eaten up by the first players in the game, leaving everybody else in a state of poverty (which happened in the early days of UO). The tax system in Second Life is an interesting solution, and possibly the best I've heard so far (as just pushing new and better stuff into the economy creates inflation).
The big issue is whether democracy can end up existing in an MMORPG. Quite frankly, I don't think it can. It is one thing to petition a developer for a change, which is what the protest basically amounts to, but quite another for the players to dictate to the developers what can and can't be done in the game. The moment you have the gamers in full control of the game, the game will start to die - there will just be too many voices fighting for control at once.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Or a culture whose role models are governments who steal and accumulate the most from individuals, a culture where success is inevitably tied to the fatness and "fairness" of the government, a culture that worships situational mindless protest of the status quo without presenting adequate alternatives, and venerates a body of socially coercive policies without the need for reason.
Conrad and Goulding seem to have it about right. In the absence of existing social structures, our activities tend to become dominated by the brutality of the worst individuals. Nice people cannot exist intermingled with the brutally selfish without suffering losses or fighting back. It doesn't matter so much what the distribution of people's inclinations toward "niceness" are. The brutality of physical reality is the basis of our existence and will dominate on the ground until groups of "nice" people coalesce in cooperation to fight against it, and actively brutalize against the individuals that are willing to take advantage of the basic physical rules of brutality. Both "modes" of behavior are possible for humans and are evident the world wide. To pretend that we're at nature kind-hearted creatures that desire to share everything without regard for selfish interest pretends that primitive communism is our natural state, and that governments should never have come to exist.