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."

Comments

my favourite online protest....

[wo1verin3]

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.

Re:my favourite online protest....

[fireduck]

What the players are protesting essentially is the taxation of their role as content providers.

From what I've read on Second Life (which admittedly has been this article as well as the interesting story a month or 2 ago about people being abducted ingame by aliens), players create most of the content. Content is most MMORPGs is produced by developers who are paid to do so. In SL, the players are seemingly given a toolkit to build what they want. So rather than have pre-rendered dungeons or quests, players can "build" a UFO which goes around randomly abducting other players. rather nifty. And for their efforts at coding the new item, they are being taxed.

So they're essentially being taxed for content that in other games is produced through the real-life subscription fees. Seems a bit unfair. So they are protesting. And, as the writer of the article points out, the very act of protesting within the game is part of the game, and part of the fun.

(then again, i could be completely wrong, as I've only recently heard about second life)

Re:my favourite online protest....

[JayBlalock]

It's deeper than that.

Remember, the article starts off talking about the rampant inflation inherent in MMOGs - items are constantly produced, and nothing ever really goes away. (and, as a result, the poor (in this case, new gamers) find it a LOT more difficult to make money, whereas the rich have an easy time accumulating more wealth to compensate for inflation.

The tax was introduced as an attempt to counteract this, and to ensure that property values for EVERYONE stayed as close to nominal as possible, at the "expense" of a relative few of the richer players.

Does this sound familiar? It should. This protest is a virtual recreation of the on-going real-world economics battles between Left-leaning and Right-leaning policies.

Do you spare the rich by saying "hands off, make money however you can", but in doing so make life harder on the poor? Or do you intentionally tax the wealthy few to make life better for everyone else?

And the great thing about MMORPGs is that you can use them as an experimentive toolkit for economic policies, without risking the lives of millions of real citizens.

I could see economic think tanks intentionally creating MMORPG worlds with different starting conditions, just to see how they evolve.

Re:Taxation is theft

[garote]

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.

Solution?

[shirai]

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.

Tributes and Memorials

[Tailhook]

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.