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

There is a true social contract

[Anonymous Coward]

If I don't like how life is in a game, I'm free to leave at any time and start a new life elsewhere agreeing to the new rules of that society.

Re:There is a true social contract

[frovingslosh]

If you don't like something, even something that you are paying for, just shut-up and leave is one approach. I'm sure that many businesses would prefer that a few people do this and most people continue putting up with what they get than to have to address issues. But when issues are raised and changes made, the system is generally improved for the customer and usually even for the business. Protests can be frivilous, but they are often valid and usefull.

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:my favourite online protest....

[eggstasy]

As a member of the group who created the tax protest, I can tell you very well what it was about.
In SL, each region is a server with clearly defined limitations - 10 thousand prims, which stands for primitive shapes (cube, sphere, cylinder...)
Instead of getting a fixed amount of space, like what happens when you purchase some space for a webpage, the developers thought it would be better to create a virtual economy to distribute resources to everyone.
Just to give you an idea, a prim costs 10 Linden dollars and is taxed at $1 per week, more if its far above the ground, if its very large, or if it is a light.
Taxes are meant to prevent rapid resource depletion. Without an economy in place, a malicious user could fill up a server in seconds, and a particularly creative user playing normally could very well fill it up on his own.
As you can see, the limits imposed by the game constraint our imagination a bit, and force us to learn some efficient 3d design techniques, keeping the details in the textures and doing only the basic structure with actual polygons.
This is what everyone's angry about. They came to SL with the expectation that they could build to their heart's content, and started doing so, but quickly hit a wall where their income could not pay for their taxes anymore. So naturally they felt frustrated because they didnt want to delete anything. The tax system has been tweaked a bit and now everything is going fine.
If you guys have any questions about SL or the tax protest I'll do my best to answer them.

Apt protest.

[Thomas M Hughes]

Dissent appropriately took a very American form: the project's Washington monument had been replaced by a giant tower of tea crates; the baseball stadium rendered unusable by similar stacks; the Route 66 gas station set ablaze by an insurrectionist midget shooting off seditious fireworks.

Those insurrectionist midgets with seditious fireworks...sounds an awful lot like real life. One of those insurrectionist midgets attacked me the other day for my own stance on taxes. This is just another sign that the Internet mirrors real life rather realistically.

Raph Koster

[Mr.123]

Still hard to believe that Raph Koster has come so far since LegendMUD. I started with that mud in 95 and played on and off for 5 years wasting thousands of hours. Although the mud peaked at only about 80 players, it was still very enjoyable. The man use to take part in his own MUD, building a tight and interesting community.

He's definitely a talented designer also knowing the importance of a good mix of playerbase is essential to sustaining a in-game society. I can't vouch for any of the graphical MUDs he's been part of but I will always remember LegendMUD and late late nights doing quests, rescue parties, and infamous clan wars. (Knights and Grendels baby!)

Pardon my French but...

[WIAKywbfatw]

...that's a complete load of crap.

Lord Of The Flies is a book that illustrates how easy it is for us to fall into anarchy without the presence of a society to keep us in check.

The book isn't about failing systems of government, it's about how, in the absence of any form of government, we quickly we fall back to a selfish "survival of the fittest" state with the strong preying on the weak.

The boys don't try to set up a system of government, they try to live by the rules that society has taught them. But, pretty soon, they realise that without society watching over them, those rules are easily disposed of - and weaker figures like Simon and Piggy suffer as a result.

Witness the near-deification of the conch, the hunting, the return to "normal" behaviour when rescue arrives, etc. This isn't a book about government or society, it's a book about a lack of government and the breakdown of society.

No book more clearly illustrates the mentality that turns ordinary people going about their daily business into a rioting, blood-thirsty mob than William Golding's masterpiece. When it comes to examining how easily we can descend into anarchy, LOTF is the bible.

Pretty sad

[SuperBanana]

protests, politics and parties in MMORPGs.

Meanwhile, US citizens are barely registering a whimper of protest at the draconian laws passed every day in the name of "patriotism" and "protecting the homeland".

It's pretty sad that people organize "protests" in a fucking -game- but won't stand up for their rights in real life. What is the matter with you people?

Re:Pretty sad

[kfg]

Very simply because in real life you can get really arrested, really have your life ruined, really get shot dead.

In a game you can act out in complete security and comfort. All you risk is maybe having to find another game to play.

Conversely, of course, this also means there is no real valor or heroism in games either. You just get to act out heroism. The next day you can back to the cube farm, or mailroom, or whatever, to earn the payments on your nice car.

In short, the game, however closely it may mimic real life, is just a game.

Anyone who loses sight of this simple fact is heading for trouble.

KFG

Re:Pretty sad

[Pendersempai]

It's pretty sad that people organize "protests" in a fucking -game- but won't stand up for their rights in real life. What is the matter with you people?

Please stop grandstanding. I feel confident guessing that many more protests happen every hour in real life than have ever happened in any massively multiplayer game anywhere.

We protest what affects us. We protest what we care about. If I lived in Australia and spent a signifcant part of my life playing Second Life, you'd better believe that I would be far more interested in changes in Second Life than in America's laws.

Further, as the article indicates (did you read it?), online protests are often mostly recreational. If playing a game is fun enough to spend hours doing, and protesting within that game is even more fun, then many players will protest. If you somehow made protesting the PATRIOT act the most enjoyable out of the three, then they'd do that instead.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that being upset or offended is a right, not a responsibility. It follows that protest should be similarly optional. No one is stepping on your toes by being apathetic about the PATRIOT act, so your vitriolic straw man doesn't seem terribly justifiable.

Screw taxation as social engineering

[Anonymous Coward]

This game tax was supposed to fix runaway inflation by changing behavior by giving 'players an incentive to get rid of things they don't really want any more.' In the real world people are getting sick of taxation as social engineering. Taxation should be about funding the government.

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.

The best protest

[AvengerXP]

Cancel your subscription. That's what I did with Star Wars Galaxies. The game clearly isn't ready for release.

Re:I tried an MMORPG...

[Tackhead]

> 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...

...and then, because they can't do anything without giving up their skills, they surrender all their skills and start over. And this is supposed to be something different than just quitting and reloading?

> 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.

At least the premise of Second Life sounds half-interesting. ("There is no content. Here are tools. Build it yourself. Play it yourself.")

By comparison, Star Wars Galaxies is "There is no content. There are no tools. Pretend you're inventing content." (Don't level up, you evil powergamer! There's so little content, and there are no tools for players to create add-on missions, but that's why you're paying $15/month, so you can roleplay... you know, imagine the content and roleplay what you'd be doing if the content was there! :-)

I'm a weird geek. SWG fans make me look positively normal. Bah. Gimme NWN. Hell, gimme Bard's Tale and Wizardry. If I wanna roleplay social interaction, I'll roleplay a party of six on my old-school CRPG. And not one of those characters will know the word "pwn".

UO Lake Superior protest

[Motherfucking Shit]

Several years back, the Lake Superior shard (UO game server) was having serious problems. So a bunch of folks who played on that server hopped over to the Atlantic shard to protest. For whatever reason, it was red dress instead of going naked: Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2, they put us in jail

Of course, naked protests aren't unheard of. I don't recall what this one was about, but we were a merry band of nude archers: Naked Posse

Frigax

Re:Taxation is theft

[tgibbs]

You utilize a classic socialist argument, the economy as zero-sum game. The resources collected by the wealthy can be used to generate even greater benefits for society, such as easier access to things like information and a wider variety of products. I doubt a poor person living off the public teat could fund the businesses that build your home, deliver your food to the grocery store you visit, and finance the research that led to your computer.

No the argument that the wealthy should pay more taxes because they reap a disproportionate fraction of the benefits is an ethcial argument, not an economic one. The economic argument you make is itself a zero-sum argument, because it frames it as an either-or choice between expenditure of wealth by the state for the benefit of the poor and expenditure of wealth by the rich. But remember, the wealthy don't go away because they are taxed. As long as the tax rate is less than 100%, there are benefits to wealth. So the economic question is at what point the reduction in the trickle-down benefits to society from the self-directed expenditures of the wealthy exceeds the benefits to society, both incidental and direct, of the public expenditure of those tax revenues for the public good. Certainly, in the US, there has historically been no apparent correlation between low rates of taxation and high rates of economic growth, suggesting that tax rates have always been below the levels that would significantly curtail the beneficial economic activities of the wealthy.

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.

It has to be said...

[BiOFH]

Second Life?
Are the creators sure these people had a 'first' life?

[Chief Wiggum] Mod it down, boys! [/Chief Wiggum]

Bollocks

[heironymouscoward]

LOTF is just well-dressed propaganda, teaching youngsters that without the guiding adult hand they inevitably descend into primitive violence. No coincidence it's such a favorite of teachers.

Life's real stories of youngsters abandoned shows something quite different. In the Polish ghettos, Nazi camps, streets of Rio and of Kinshasa... children form groups and look after each other.

The most flagrant examples of children acting violently are wars in which adults abduct children and train them as soldiers: Colombia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Liberia, and many other cases... it's the adults doing the damage.

Children don't have holy water running through their veins, but they do not embody naked evil either. They just try to get along. LOTF is a caricature, based on the idea of "original sin", saying that we ar civilized only because society keeps us in check. Bullshit. Society is an expression of our human nature, and civilization is a natural consequence of our innate desire for an easy life and our built-in mechanisms for conflict avoidance.

Re:Credit Required for Reg.

[smeat]

I tried out "A Tale In The Desert" and it has a free 24 hours of playing trial with no credit card required.

I highly recommend the game.

smeat

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.