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.

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.

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".

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.