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Restart, Restore, or Continue Creating Democracy?
The Importance of writes "LawMeme's James Grimmelmann, whose work has previously been noted on Slashdot, has written a new piece about virtual life and death in MMORPGs, and what that means for online democracy. Any serious discussion of democracy online that features comments on "The Secret of Monkey Island" has got to be good."
Plus gaming industry created 5000 new jobs last year. How more democratic can we get ;)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Re-elected baby!!
Hi, I'm Guybrush Threepwood. I want to be a pirate.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
I don't mind playing a good LAN party game with people I know, but back when I was pretty good at Quake II, and started to try out MMRPG's like the "Ultima Online" beta, I realized that I just didn't enjoy playing the online games for one simple reason:
Most of the people online acted like assholes.
Too often, I'd log into a Quake/Quake II server, and get some punk calling me a MotherF---er because his team was losing at Capture the Flag. I got tired of Ultima Online when, during the beta, some jackass got in the way of the door and wouldn't let me walk out.
Diablo? Town killed by someone who thought it was fun to use the cheats to kill people.
On the whole, I tend to like the gamers I know in person and through my writings. But in online games, it seems that there are hordes of people who never learned to act above the age of 12, and need a good kick in the ass - or just never be allowed to play with anyone else online again.
It's probably the #1 reason why Nintendo still hasn't moved into online gaming in a big way (so far, Sega's Phantasy Star Online is their only online experience) - they don't want Jimmy's parents complaining about how their child got ragged on as a "Pikachu-f---er" during Pokemon Online.
The author's right - the penalities for "bad" behavior in an online format might work with some who have a community in the game, but for those who just want to be a dickhead, it's hard to do much other than ban them, since they have little emotionally wrapped up in the game.
Eh - just my opinion, and I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I for one welcome our new democratic police state.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
On every forum on games, music, sports, or anything not directly related to "our continued survival as a race", there'll be some idiot who chirps up some "this is a waste of time, think of the children!"
Today, you're that idiot.
There's plenty of places to out your insightless politic - games.slashdot.org isn't one of them.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
And I enjoy a good read about games, gaming, nerdy stuff in general. But that article was kind of meatless. Like a soup made of mostly water. I didn't see any profound concepts or ideas or even a point other than, "in games you can die and it's interesting that people can choose to kill or help others in games."
The blurb on slashdot was MORE interesting than RingTFA - which why people not wasting 15min of their time reading the article will probably mod me down for flaimbate and overrated.
Ave Molech Setting
I think there's a larger point here too -- destructive forces usually come either from outside a community or from someone who has voluntarily withdrawn from that community. People within the friendship network cannot attack that network without attacking part of themselves, and are reluctant to do this. It's why real-world wars occur between groups that don't understand each other or have chosen to disassociate themselves from each other -- a necessary part of the process of "othering."
And this, like online democracy, is important because people are the same people in different media -- they just have different levels of investment in the community.
The online world provides us with a model for solving real social problems: don't increase the legal threat of punishment (for that depends on being caught) -- increase people's sense of belonging to a caring community, and threaten their feeling of status in that community if they violate its norms. That's the real way to solve real-life social problems.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
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. Would we actually have world peace if people weren't so "isolated" as they are in the real world? 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.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Democracy is not the reason why most games fail, its due to the lack of socialism. In every single online game I have played, I have seen a sharp division between the "leets" and the "noobs". The so called elite players will do their level best to create a social system that is beneficial to themselves, whilst the noobs quit in disgust due to the inequality. The very nature of PvP is that the strong survive and the weak find other games.
:)
Now since the problem has been identified, whats the solution? Some games have taken out Player vs Player aspect, for example Horizons (www.istaria.com) or a game called Shattered Galaxy (www.sgalaxy.com) has something called a power rating system, the stronger the player the more noobs he has to fight.
Attaining equality is easy, however, attaining it whilst still allowing people to get on the levelling treadmill is hard. I am sure that developers all over the world are looking at ways to appeal not only to their most loyal hardcore fans but also to the travelling lowbie.
Misquoting someone important - "With great power comes great responsibility", If the gameplay was set in a way that it is beneficial to help lowbies, then I am quite sure most games problems will be solved, till then I will keep dodging the "I ownz joo, noob" comments
I know exactly when I starting hating the programmers at Sierra On-Line. It was Space Quest 2. You crash onto a planet and begin looking around for a way to escape. Only problem is that every single thing on that planet is trying to kill you. Let's see, I think I'll walk over here... oops! Didn't see those faint dotted lines that marked a trap door over a spike pit! Here's a maze of vines I have to carefully manuever, pixel by pixel with the keyboard arrows... whooops! I touched a vine, and now the plant is eating me! Hmmmmm, I wonder if I should take some of these berries to eat. Nope! I guess my convulsing, and now dead body indicates I shouldn't have!
But here's the worst puzzle on that planet - every single tree is too slippery to climb except for one which has a slightly different description, indicating you can probably climb it. So you type "climb tree" and guess what? Roger Wilco gets his hands and feet stuck on the tree, critters descend from the tree limbs, and eat him.
GAAAAHHHHHHH!! Not only did Sierra On-line games kill you for making a wrong move - they killed you for doing something entirely logical! End result? You creep through the game with a trembling hand, expecting death at every step, stabbing the "Save" key every 30 seconds or so.
LucasArts was a breath of fresh air. In "The Secret of Monkey Island" there was only one way to die. One! You had to be foolish enough to stay underwater for more than twenty minutes. And in "Monkey Island 2" you couldn't die at all!
And even better, you couldn't do anything in either game to permanently ruin your chances of winning. What's that, you forgot to read the combination at the beginning of the game in Space Quest? Too bad for you, when you need it 10 hours later! Hope you saved that game! But what's that, you insulted Governer Elaine Marley so much that she threw you out of her room in the mansion of "Monkey Island 2"? No problem! Go back in and she'll sigh and give you another chance! Try all the funny conversation choices! It's OK, you can always do the right thing later!
Of course certain LucasArts games had elements of risk (you could kill Indy in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" if you weren't a good fighter), but for the most part their philosophy was "Explore - solve - have fun! Don't worry about trying different things - you can't mess anything up permanently."
Which, IMHO, made for a much more fun adventuring experience than wondering if you're die the very second you step onto the next screen because you wandered out into the desert one screen too far. Thank you so much, Sierra On-Line.
"Democracy is inherently evil"
You seem to have a rather negative view of people. The fact is, I'd rather have Mob Rule than Elite rule, which is what we (oh so Ameri-centric, I know) have right now. I can talk to the mob.
Places that have attempted real and wide-spread democracy (not just in government, but elsewhere, in schools, workplaces, etc.) have had pretty fair success. Granted, the best example I can think of right now is maybe the Zapatistas in Chiapas (though there are plenty of others, Paris in May 68, the anarchist part of Republican Spain, the aarchs in Agleria, Italian social centers, etc.), but that doesn't mean it couldn't work.
I really think the only way that people will get engaged with the rest of the world and maybe be a little less alienated (again, Americentric), is to spread democracy everywhere.
And as for tempering mood swings, psh, if that was true we wouldn't have the Patriot Act, for instance.
If I were to go up to some random person on the street and call him some of the things that I've been called online, even some of the tamer things, they'd knock my ass out. That, however, would be the least of my worries. If I were to perform this action on a regular basis, word would very quickly spread about my rude behavior and soon nobody would want to have anything to do with me. It would take a long time to repair that damage to my reputation.
When somebody is online, however, they generally feel that they can behave like that as much as they want. What's anybody going to do about it, after all? If people ostracize you socially, you can just log out and come back when the heat dies down. Worst case: create a new account and start over. In real life, not only can people not escape punishment like that, we also have harsher measures to deal with them, like restraining orders, fines, and prisons. You can't just leave whenever you feel like it. If you could, the whole system would fall apart.
What? I warned him!
a painless execution is the absolute worst punishment any game society can impose on the characters who are its citizens. Torture is not an option. Imprisonment and fines can be imposed, true, but as soon as the player behind the character finds that these punishments are too onerous, she can simply terminate her account
I don't agree, actually IMHO 'virtual jail' -is- the worst possible punishment if implemented properly: while you are sentenced you
- can't create new identities or log in as a different character (assuming they're all in your name in terms of billing) for as long as the sentence lasts
- can't just leave the computer on and walk away, the sentence time would go down only if you are performing some action (ideally not fun, say, playing tic-tac-toe games with the computer which is not easily scriptable and really boring: every move gives you, say, 5 seconds off your sentence).
- can't chat with fellow players or move about, you'd be put in a virtual cell in a virtual prison.
Also I really can't figure out why MMPORGs don't implement police/jails etc. after all you could have all the various dynamics that currently exist in society (punishment for crimes, opportunities for people who like to play cops/guards, risk/reward for trying to organize a breakout, risk/reward for accepting bribes etc. etc. etc.)
If you delete the player account somebody will just recreate a new one and, helped by their guild, fairly rapidly regain lost levels/items: a sentence of, say, 40 hours of jail (tic-tac-toe) would be much worse, don't you think?
-- the cake is a lie
Abstraction.
Ever notice people in their cars waiting in line are a hell of a lot more rude than people *standing* in line? Same principle...when people feel abstracted from the rest of the people around them they tend to give in to whim and emotion to a greater degree.
But that's not going to change. The only interesting question (which was not, interestingly enough, brought up by this article) is "Will the internet decay into a shithole completely devoid of personal accountability or will it slowly evolve into a place where people realize that everyone they're chatting with have feelings too"?
I'm rooting for the latter, but it's too soon to tell.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
And how does one go about examining democracy and its inherent problems? How does one go about changing them without throwing nations into turmoil and playing God with millions of innocent lives? How does even buy a clue about what to change?
Exactly the same way I go about designing a car that's safer, has higher performance and greater efficiency without risking the lives of test drivers and the general populace.
I model it. Virtually. On a computer.
Go figure.
KFG
Regardless of what barriers the internet's nature dissolves (color, geography, etc), my observation is that people will simply find or create some other divide to align themselves upon.
You are currently reading this post on slashdot, a forum dedicated to technology and related issues. Obviously, this is not a place for someone interested in knitting socks. Your interest in slashdot is a kind of communication barrier, as you are unlikely to communicate with someone with interests that do not overlap yours. Is this wrong? No, it is simple human nature. You're simply making the most efficient use of your time by following your interests.
So essentially, the internet population organizes itself around artifically created barriers of interest or ideology.
As for MMORPGs.. they tend to be the underbelly of the internet when it comes to interactions between groups. The rest of the internet, you have what, message boards, chat rooms, etc? The worst you could get there is a ban and a boot. When you give people assets to protect and weapons to smack each other with, guess what happens?
That's right, Shit Happens.
I'd go on, but I think you can work out the rest yourself..
*hoofprint*
Alas, it's no longer politically correct to use the phrase "faggity-ass politically correct movement".
Now you're supposed to use the phrase "differently intolerant".
-kgj
I played Asheron's Call for 3 years as a 'hardcore' player (40+ hours a week). Played in multiple worlds, and I played with a lot of people. In the PvP world (Darktide), the entiriry of your life was pure Chaos. High level players would sit in the 'newbie' towns and just kill newbs repeatedly. The only way out was to have another high level friend escort you away from everyone else.
On the 'normal' servers, it was totally different. True you had your jerks / scammers etc, but for the most part, people helped each other out. I was in one of the largest guilds for the world for a couple years (even sat on the executive board) and it was interesting to see the dynamic as users pulled resources together to buy the guilds mansion (you honestly couldn't support a mansion without a largish group to donate resources). People in the guild helped each other out on missions, on getting upgrades in armor and spells, and everyone benefitted.
Everyone's experience in the online world is different, but for the most part people will surprise you.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
It's still a pain. I hate when my character can't step over a fence that reaches to its knees, crawl through a hole where you don't fit while crouching, can't knock out the enemy, tie him up and explain the misunderstanding without killing, break any (arbitrary) wall with explosives or pickaxe (loved that in Moria) or use anything not available in the game engine.
Rocketjump was pretty much a bug. (I'm pretty sure nobody at ID thought to implement it as a feature. It became one much later)
Pencil&Paper RPG still rock.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The essential problem with all current MMORPGs is not that players cannot be punished effectively, but rather that the companies which host these games do not enforce their own policies against bad behavior. They do not enforce them because they have a vested financial interest in maintaining as many paying customers as possible over the expected lifetime of the game. This is the same reasoning process that companies go through when they decide that the privacy policy is less important than the revenue which could be generated by selling the information in violation of the "Privacy Policy" or "Mission Statement". Thus, the game company is likely to adopt policies which never completely satisfy any one faction of players, but which also never alienate them quite enough to give up what they have already "invested" in the game either. In this manner they continue to receive a stream of monthly payments from the largest possible audience of players/subscribers with the least possible amount of work in maintenance, administration, etc...
The best solution, in my humble opinion, involves the players as a stakeholder in the long terms success of the game not just by granting in game rewards, but rather by dividing the real world ownership of the company that administers the game among the players who support it. The effect of shareholder ownership and market forces would necessarily isolate and eliminate those players who choose to be jerks from continuing to harass the majority of the remaining players, only this time, since the players are owners the enforcement would have teeth. As the article stated, the main problem now is deterrence of bad behavior and the problem exists because of inadequate enforcement due to corporate conflict of interest.
Yes, players need tools. If a game allows a player to build a wall - someone will inevitably trap another player inside a box to torment them.
So the game needs to allow you to also -break- anything that can be built.
If a player can lock or block a door, they will find a way to lock another player on the wrong side of the door intentionally. Therefore the game needs to allow you to -push- such barriers.
the problem of course is that - even with all the right tools, if someone treats you like a complete *sshole, I'll never know it. They could have spent 4 hours trapping people in boxes, and I would treat them like anyone else if I hadn't seen it or happened to be in your immediate circle of friends.
massmog communities are too loose. Only 10-20% of players on any given server are playing at any one time. the odds of an effective server-wide community notification system are pretty slim.
So what's a good solution? karma. an aura. perhaps only visible with a skill or spell.
Every day that a player logs in, they have some karma points to spend on other players. positively or negatively.
you simply institute a law of diminishing returns, so that no one person or small group of people can give you enough karma to undo the negative karma a large group of people gave you - and there you have it. (probably put an upper cap on the amt of negative or positive karma a single person can give you and weight it)
you could even make it so that a person with negative karma themselves has their outgoing karma points reduced in 'worth'. so if an indescriminate killer calls you a jerk - it means even less.
Don't allow karma to gradually return to neutral over time (easily exploited). And most importantly -never- automatically assume any given action in-game is inherently good or bad karma. Leave it up to the players to decide.
You may have started a pvp fight with another player - but they may have stolen from you, or been hassling you. It could very well be justified. The game code can't possibly know - but a witness could.
You may likewise have killed a killer - but you could have done it out of greed or malice or an attempt to game the system. If no trustworthy witness deems it 'good', then there's no reason to assume it was.
The actions themselves can't be coded good or bad (UO's failed notoriety system being the prime example). Only another player has the proper context to interpret that.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Quoth Gupta's signature (just in case he changes it):
Gupta is an old troll. He's pretty good at generating a combination of techno-babble and plausible facts, but he sure as hell isn't really involved in Nintendo research.
Mind you, sometimes he's actually posts interesting ideas, but he claims that his ideas represent current Nintendo research. If any of his claims do match Nintendo actions, it's only by accident or external research by the author; it's not based on inside information.
I suspect Gupta gets a kick out of knowing that he is misleading people, "Look, they all believe I work at Nintendo and am privy to secrets, aren't I clever."
Apparently Gupta is getting lazy, this post is just a copy of his post from last month. (At the very least, this duplication should earn him a "Redundant") And that post is an almost word-for-word retrend of one of his posts from July.
Some classic Gupta for comparison. Some of his technobabble can be hard to sort through if you're not familiar with the field.
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