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

Nationalism in a borderless world

[Samir Gupta]

I've always wondered what it would be like in the world if barriers for people to interact with people from other parts of the world, whether geographical or language were removed. And I believe we may soon find out, via MMORPGs.

One of the emerging trends that I see coming is the ability for international players to freely communicate and interact with each other, free of language barriers. Nintendo, SEGA, et al. have been working on this problem for quite some time now, and have even started to commercialize it. It's one of the emerging trends in MMORPG game design will create interesting interactions and facilitate global play to a greater extent than is now.

Some early results can be seen in the GameCube/DreamCast title "Phantasy Star Online" where you can select from a menu of sentence patterns, subjects, objects, etc. We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield, maybe augmented by a player-aided cache of words and phrases, with dynanmic improvement in translation accuracy using in-game human feedback and machine learning.

I am really looking forward to the time where international players freely interact -- it will be an interesting sociology experiement to see how national and cultural means, norms and paradigms manifest themselves in a virtual world free of linguistic, political, and physical barriers.