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."

Comments

The key to incumbency

[kurosawdust]

Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Select Start

Re-elected baby!!

Keeps me away from online

[Dark Paladin]

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.

Penalties

[amplt1337]

This is precisely what happened when I used to mud a lot -- the people who try to go on and act as spoilers are people who convince themselves that they're playing a one-player game, basically; they don't take part in the communities and [usually] view those communities with great disrespect. They convince themselves that the community ties, social ties, and personality ties (created with characters) are unreal, which is why they can feel ok describing the graphic rape of another player and laugh it off as "just a game." They don't have the investment and can't see it the way other players do.

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.

Re:Penalties

[Dark Lord Seth]

This is precisely what happened when I used to mud a lot -- the people who try to go on and act as spoilers are people who convince themselves that they're playing a one-player game, basically; they don't take part in the communities and [usually] view those communities with great disrespect. They convince themselves that the community ties, social ties, and personality ties (created with characters) are unreal, which is why they can feel ok describing the graphic rape of another player and laugh it off as "just a game." They don't have the investment and can't see it the way other players do.

Oddly enough, I'm one of those people you just decribed, though much more passive in a way. MUDding was a nice thing, I was convinced the internet was a place without power-hungry assholes and various assorted sycophants and MUDding taught me otherwise in the most cruel, devastating and memorable way. 3 years on a MUD has shown me that there simply are NO social or personality ties from mere in game stuff. It's more of a simple aristocracy with some sort of elite ruling class; the people who play the game longer then you, know more admins then you, who met eachother for real unlike you... These kind of people who play the players, not the game, are far worse then those bare few like me who differentiate themselves from emotional ties to net people.

I've seen the most stupid relationships in MUDs form into real marriages, I've seen MUD disputes rage in real life and cause a divorce, I've seen relationships form, grow, wither and die on MUDs. I've seen betrayal over a silly net relationship, envy over in game objects, hatred because of a simple disagreement and bitterness over petty arguements. I ask you; who is off worse? They who take the internet way too seriously or those like me who simply don't care about net people?

International relations 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. 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.

Re:International relations in a borderless world

[Urban Garlic]

> 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.

Unlikely -- the most important demographic feature of MMORPGers is not their ethnic or national origin, it's that they're self-selecting in their desire to participate in an online community. Observing the effects of cultural and linguistic differences in these fora is interesting, but it's a mistake to imagine that they are little models of the real multiethnic world, whose most important demographic feature is precisely the opposite -- nobody self-selects to be born in any particular place, and except for the wealthy, moving is hard, so geographic proximity does not select for willingness to participate.

The point is that while MMORPGs remove some barriers to participation, they introduce others, most importantly the willingness to be involved. That makes them poor models of the real world.

Re:International relations in a borderless world

[scalis]

This was an interesting parent I must say.
I have been running a NeverWinter server for quite some time and my experience is that people (in the Neverwinter community) both act and design their characters in different ways depending on where they live on the globe. Japanese players design their characters in brighter colors than americans or europeans and tend to focus more on modern style social barriers and bonds as opposed to the americans and europeans that focus more on chivalry and physical power/might.
Asian players focus their plotting and consipiracy around honor and personal issues while americans and europenas focus more on power, greed and [acted] jealousy.
I am NOT saying this is the way things really are, just that this is what I, filled with my own values and prejudice, have noticed. I'd love to hear from others what their experiences are when dealing with different people playing out characters of their own choice.

Also, the surrounding settings and overall design of the game definitely affects how the players will relate to each other and act in the game. As a little note to my parent poster i'd like to say that I think this would definitely have a great impact on any social experiment and conclusions drawn from it...
The idea to remove the language barrier would ofcourse be a welcome addition to the online gaming community as far as I am concerned and I wish you all the best in trying.

Re:Bah!

[TedTschopp]

You know what... I'm going to agree with you here... What is life and culture? I would argue that it's the ability and the results of discussing things which are not required for the continued survival of the race.

So, Thanks very much, I have a life, and part of it is an experment in virtual worlds and the political systems in them.

LucasArts had a GREAT philosophy

[g_adams27]

I remember the exact scene the author describes, with Guybrush Threepwood falling off a cliff, the dreaded "YOU HAVE DIED! Restore/Restart/Quit?" box appearing briefly, only to disappear as Guybrush boooiiings back onto the cliff ("Rubber Tree"). And even though I was only 14 or so, I knew exactly what it was - a satire of Sierra On-Line's games.

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.

Action and Reaction

[Daedalus4096]

Personally, I think this guy has hit the nail on the head. Most people (or at least most people I know) log into online games so that they can get away from the general lousiness of the real world, if only for a time, and to do it anonymously. They do, however, expect or at least hope that general civility will be maintained in this alternate reality. But without consequences for one's actions, how can that possibly come about?

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.

I don't agree...

[MarcoAtWork]

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?

Why online games suck

[fluxrad]

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.

Re:Get a life . .

[kfg]

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

faggity-ass politically correct movement

[handy_vandal]

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".

The Essential Problem with MMORPGs

[CodeBuster]

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.

Key to accountability...

[*weasel]

...is karma, visible karma of some type.

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.

Gupta is a troll

[ChaosDiscord]

Quoth Gupta's signature (just in case he changes it):

Samir Gupta, Ph.D New Technology Research Department Nintendo Co, Ltd. Kyoto, Japan

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.

• Clustering GameCubes - No, GameCubes are not a terribly good system for doing clustering with, anyone doing so is doing it on a lark, not as real work.
• Some strange ideas on reducing crashes - One of the goals of an operating system is to reduce the impact of a crash or malicious code, running everything at the highest level doesn't really gain you stability. Catching a NULL pointer dereference is handy, but recovering from it is nearly impossible; anything that caused a null pointer dereference this frame is likely going to cause it again next frame.
• GameCubes have Zen Buddhist design - Ummmm, right. There is nothing like a bright purple box to "fitting into the big picture without standing out."
• Nintendo is excited about Peer-To-Peer game distribution, odd that the only real reference is on Slashdot.