Lawmakers Game The System

Thanks to Wired News for its article discussing government officials and massively multiplayer game designers sharing ideas on the best ways to deal with community feedback. Neil Eisner of the Department Of Transportation explains: "We're both dealing with large populations, and (like with the public-comment process for legislation) the public helps them design the rules for the game, or petitions them to change the rules to have things happen." Raph Koster of Sony Online adds that it "was startling to me... that (the federal comment process) is identical to how we build our patches and patch notes", although since the government has "a legal obligation to protect the privacy of people submitting comments on legislation", this means some disadvantages compared to MMO feedback, as Koster explains: "We get to know the people who are good testers, who are good at catching bugs. The federal government is legally not allowed to do that."

Comments

go read this, it will tell you why not :

[DrSkwid]

Things You Should Never Do, Part I

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 69.html

Re:go read this, it will tell you why not :

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and the article advocates re-working individual pieces of the code as the grandparent post suggests. The article you mention only says you shouldn't throw everything away.

That having been said, the difficulty with changing the laws in this manner is that you have to have two votes, one to add the new law, and another to repeal the old. Both have to pass or you have problems:

addition passes, repeal fails: contradictory laws
Repeal passes, addition fails: You have no law

You have the same principles of code interaction with laws that you have with programs. You never really fully understand the impact a line of the law has. Court rulings serve an important purpose here, to clarify and 'patch' laws. Court rulings have clarified that first amendment rights do not apply to certain types of speech. We didn't need to repeal the first amendment and add a new amendment to achieve that.

I find this interesting

[ducomputergeek]

I used to run and develop a version of the Promisance Browser-Based game system. At its peak, had about 100 active players and found that only about 20% participated in the forums and larger community. From what I have read on the subject, only about 10% of people ingague in say active forum participation and those tend to be from the 5% that are the most addicted and the 5% that are trolls and hate everything you do.

Re:democratic game requests

[rflahert78]

I agree. I played this game for a few months and was really impressed with the way they designed the whole thing. There was a system where just about anyone could create a "bill" that you then had to get a certain number of people to sign off on before it could be voted on. Then "citizens" were notified when a vote had begun and could go and help decide things that could be implemented in the game to change the way it was played. If everyone felt that a certain feature was being exploited and made the game to hard or to easy they could vote a new rule in to change it. It gave you a real sense of being a part of the game.