Slashdot Mirror
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."
The community should be more active in the design phase of video games. It should make for a better game with more comments from the public about how the game should look and play.
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These guys are putting together a free 3D action/adventure game.
Free Wii Points
I'd probably feel different if I'd ever been threatened based on the way I voted, but since no party or politician I've ever voted for has got into power I don't think that's likely to happen.
As I am sure you would all agree, at a certain point you stop patching and redo entire functions in a program. So why doesn't the government enforce the laws on the books and repeal (remove from the books, etc) laws that are being contradicted in the patching? Just like you optimize code (removing the crap) they should optimize the laws.
...this is only when you want to make a difference as you say it. It's a no-brainer to acknowledge that you can't do that if you keep your face hidden (no offense intended). However, then it is your conscious choice to do so. Anonymity means that if you don't take that choice, you can remain hidden and not be counted anyway because your democratic government thinks you should be.
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."
This is not true. I can come up with at an example that should work from a practical standpoint off-the-cuff.
You can build a black-box database that can identify the same persona as being the source of multiple input submissions. This box must be given supeona-proof status. There are a lot of improvements you could make to the thing, but this should work at a basic level.
Now, this may or may not be acceptable in terms of data logging. However, statistical analysis of the text will inevitably allow linking of comments to some degree, and if the MMO guy is right about a practical benefit to logging, this should work. There would be some onus on users to not submit information that could be linked back to their real identity, but that's true of just about any anonymous feedback system I can think of.
There are people much more experienced in this field who could give a much more intelligent answer than I do -- if the gov't wants a good system that can provide a certain set of functionality with certain privacy restrictions, they and similar folks should be talked to. It's hardly an insoluable problem.
May we never see th
"When they told us that, several of the gamers said, 'Well, you're doomed then. Without some degree of accountability, you're going to have problems.'"
That's not the only issue. Most readable MMOG-related websites maintain a contingent of flame-happy antibodies to kill any infectious stupidity, and those that don't slide rapidly into sycophancy. I really can't see your average busybody soccer mom taking well to being told to die in a car fire, especially not under the auspices of the federal government.
Microsoft delenda est!
No. I think this is truly important. We have an opportunity here that we are taking too lightly. These Massively Multiplayer games are probably the best models of theoretical societies that we have ever seen. We have an obligation, as interested parties, to see that there is some validity in their existence. I truly believe that there will come a time when the theories and practices as viewed in these virtual worlds will influence the physical world as we know it. Mr. Ludlow was banned from a virtual existence for espousing real beliefs. Let us not allow this to be the trend of a medium that most of us have fought to keep free.
Althought those two area that holds the same kind of public feedback , they are still very diffrent in that the goverment affecting every people life by thier action . not so in the game industry that you can choose right away what the best game fot you.
As so many online games and forums such as slashdot have proven, their will always be people who manipulate, troll, or game the system in a democracy. Most systems use a form of dictatorship to keep people in line. Slashdot has editors who not only ban crapflooders, but decide what things people get to even think abouto on the site. Apparently more egalitarian systems such as Kuro5hin start slipping into failure modes and the editors have to uncloak to fix them. Online games of course have game masters and sysops that have the power to ban naughty players. ;)
The same applies to governments of all sorts.
So if it becomes clear that any sort of government on the masses is going to susceptable to cheats, hacks and manipulators, the conclusion must be that the thing must not be allowed to become too important.
Game and internet forums already have the built in, regardless of what some slashdot readers might think
To keep government from becoming important, the individual must choose to be responsible and independent of the government, lest they become manipulated into little slave cells by the greedy and unscrupulous.
Five years ago when I decided on the spur of a moment to join one of the two Team PvP servers in Everquest, I never thought I'd spend the next 3 years there. As I became more involved and the game continued to evolve with new expansions, being on a PvP server became increasingly difficult to just have fun on. I posted on those damn forums every single moment I could, I worked up relationships with the GM's, I e-mailed Abashi more than I'd care to admit. And for what? In the end they chose to simply remove the looting aspect from Team PvP servers so people wouldn't feel so bad when they were zone ganked because someone had more memory than someone else.
If they're busy playing EQ then they won't be doing shit like this : Four-strong county council party flies club class to a conference in New Orleans at 2,699 pounds a ticket.
A trip that cost local tax-payers 58,000 pounds!
(for some reason slashcode won't let me enter £)
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Its one thing to talk about government knowingly, its another thing to have a good command of the English language:
The federal government is legally not allowed to do that."
Should be:
The Federal Government is legally required not to do that.
There is a huge difference between 'not allowed' and 'required not to'.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The article states:
... to be part of the justification for taking their comments seriously."
"In other words, Koster explains, the government has a legal obligation to protect the privacy of people submitting comments on legislation and, therefore, it can be difficult if not impossible to assign any kind of special weight to a comment from an expert on a topic.
"You're not allowed to look at the history of the given proposals that person's made in the past to see if they have a good history," Koster argues.
with the following caveat:
"There's not a whole lot of anonymity," Stuart Shulman says. "Most people want you to know where they're from, who they are
The first statement is hopelessly naive. The second only partially hits the real point.
Politicians do have screens to identify high-value high-credibility input. These include:
- Reputation
- Power
- Money
Together, these traits are wielded by lobbyists. Lobbyists, by practical definition, yield influence through reputation, power, money.
Reputation. A highly reputable source of input can have a very high impact to legislation. When the National Academy of Sciences (historically very objective, and producer of excellent research) makes a finding or suggestion, it certainly has more weight than the Federation of American Scientists (which, although it has over 60 Nobel-prize winning endorsers, was founded on a political stance against the A-bomb).
Power. Legislation always involves compromises, and input coming from a very powerful party usually takes much more weight. When the Sierra Club, America's largest (and oldest) environmental advocacy club, makes a statement or sponsors research that could have legislative impact, you can bet that legislators will give it more thought than many other groups.
Money. When a certain company is a legislator's former employer or when the company is funnelling money into a legislator's pocket/campaign-fund, you can certainly bet that that company will have a big say in legislation.
Everybody with a stake in legislation has a chance to make their voice heard in a democracy. But face it, some voices just will be louder, clearer, and more persuasive. That sometimes works to the benefit of society (FSF, EFF, etc.) as well as to its harm (Big Tobacco, oil lobby, etc.) To beat the game, you've got to play the game.
Slashdot has editors who not only ban crapflooders, but decide what things people get to even think abouto on the site. Apparently more egalitarian systems such as Kuro5hin start slipping into failure modes and the editors have to uncloak to fix them....
So if it becomes clear that any sort of government on the masses is going to susceptable to cheats, hacks and manipulators, the conclusion must be that the thing must not be allowed to become too important.
Your post operates on two assumptions:
1. There is no such thing as fair administration.
2. Slash, K5, etc. represent the pinnacle in public commentary systems, and cannot function without admins.
Item 1, while probably true in an absolute sense, is not true in a general sense. Reasonable administration is entirely possible, and I would argue works pretty well here. We already assume that it works in our gov'ts - for example, in the US, we assume that Congress is capable of administering law creation.
Item 2 may or may not be true, but it's certainly too soon to tell. Massively multiposter forums have only existed for a couple decades, and have only acheived true mass within the past 10 years. It is still a science in it's infancy, there's a lot of room for advancement.
The "don't let it matter too much" theme I agree with, sort of. Slashdot works because the amount of investment in impartiality of the system is in proper proportion to the weight of the subjects at hand. K5 works, even thought the subjects tend to be weightier, because there is a larger investment in the impartiality of the system. One might argue that the US gov'ts current failings are, likewise, a direct result of the lack of investment in impartiality of the system - EG: rather than pay the price of campaign finance reform, we have chosen to take the less expensive route of letting our politicians sell their votes.
To clarify the last rambling paragraph: Absolute impartiality is not possible, and so critical decisions should not be left to the system. But there are very few truly critical decisions in gov't.
Things like whether to nuke Cuba during the missile crisis should probably not be decided in an online forum (at least not yet). However, for a huge percentage of more mundane decisions, it is entirely reasonable to assume that with a sufficient investment of effort, a sufficiently impartial system could be designed. It could be made sufficiently impartial that the benefit of the public participation would outweigh the cost of the remaining partiality.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
How many people really get involved with politics unless it affects them? It's the most common remark, that people don't care unless they benefit. From the top/down, politics is about personal gain, whether it be Senators and/or Reps who must juggle the good of the nation versus that of their own constituency. You'll often see the same in MMO's, where the loudest voices are quite often those who have something to eitehr gain or lose.
The largest outcry of customer response in MMO's have typically been the extreme gamers with an agenda, or those who currently reside in an operational game that feel either disenfranchised or threatened by the development cycle.
During game development, you have the RP'ers who want elements that allow them the freedom to practice role playing, although each person may have a completely separate intrepretation of this. You'll have the hardcore players who'll want rather strict rules of PvP, as cutthroat as possible. You'll have other players, the perennial drifters from game to game, who want the perfect utopia.
Once the game has been launched, you'll have factions built within the gaming community. The vocal components will voice their concerns over whether certain aspects are unbalancing. In a class style system (which most are), you'll have classes, which fearing nerfs will be quite adamant in professing their perceived flaws so that they will pose less of a target to the masses. You'll have others, who might feel their class is disenfranchised and not seeing the same benefits from the company, wanting dev attention.
This is fine for MMO's where not only is "all characters are created equal" the creed, it's also, "all characters must remain equal, regardless of time, effort or ambition". MMO's cater far more towards the Lowest Common Denominator than you'll find in modern society. You can't take these same concepts of lowering the bar of achievement and transferring them to the real world, otherwise you end up with schools that don't teach children how to compete.
Basically people are only willing to speak up when it benefits them, since our "Commercialistic Democracy" as a whole centers around being selfish. People will cater to that which benefits themselves the most, and given a choice, they don't care unless it affects them.
Those who typically have an agenda are those you normally fear the most. People with a single item or issues they wish to push through. Yes, the US is founded upon fervent idealism, but far too often you have passion coupled with politics. Political issues that are far more emotional than objective, and yet you're creating laws for the populace. One thing you want to avoid is kneejerk "nerfs" in the real world, that purely emotional, otherwise you end up with such far reaching laws like the Patriot Act.
Good ideas should be judged on their merit whether they come from reality or a simplistic model or reality, since reality is hard to measure.
As was stated here before, MMOGs aren't a very good model to base real life on. Why?
1)Accountability. In MMOGs you can't get a punch in the face for making lewd comments to a member of the opposite sex for example. People are more 'loose' with their actions and statements without the imminent threat of physical pain or restrictions of their freedom. If the worst thing that can happen to you is a few days suspension or even a ban from the game....if you want to be counter-social there isn't much to stop you.
2)Input, and how it changes things. Every MMOG I've played to date provides lip service to user input for change, but it's false. As a gamer you can't really change anything the developer doesn't want you to. This may seem to be a parallel to real life until you realize that the chance is always there for revolution through the use of violence. I mean really, what are you going to do when something is changed hundreds (thousands?) don't like? Stamp your virtual feet and hold your character's breath till they turn blue? I suppose if you're wanting to model a dictatorship then it may be accurate. I know from personal experience at least one of these 'industry leaders' behaved more like Sadam or Adolf than Washington or Kennedy.
3) Don't like your elected officials? Vote them out! Don't like your developer? Here, have this nice can of Vaseline and a pack of Marlboros. It's either that or pack your toys and play in the other sandbox.
4) Freedom of Speech.
-Raph Koster
Don't like what your 'community' has to say about you? Filter it! Castro would be proud. I'm sure if he was involved the first thing that would happen is you'd have to prove you're an American citizen to post on slashdot.gov (I mean Koster, not the other dictator).
Hardly. In a game 'money' isn't a commodity that runs out. People don't starve to death because you made a bad policy decision in EQ. The last time I looked mothers weren't crying because their SWG babies were killed during the batte of Endor. And try as I might, I can't recall a single Jenquai in Earth & Beyond complaining about the developer's healthcare plan.
Your whole perspective on life is changed when you can just push a mouse button and you're back alive again.
Saying a MMOG is a good model for real life is like saying paper airplanes are good models for stealth fighters. MMOGs are without exception ran like miniature dictatorships.
I suppose I should quantify my statement. MMOGs are good models for tiny communist island nations, not large democracies.
Like it does with movies, you mean?
Hollywood movies are extensively tested on the general public, and carefully tweaked based on their feedback. I guess we all love the intelligent plots and inventive movies that result, huh?
Design-by-marketing has costs as well as benefits. In general, it will turn bad products into palatable ones... but it also turns really good products into palatable ones. Most really good art is polarizing; for example, Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", half the audience came out of the previews and said "That was the best movie I've ever seen", the other half came out and said "That was the worst movie I've ever seen". If you apply the public feedback process, you get something which pleases more people, but the result is the infamous "Love Conquers All" edit of "Brazil".
Personally, I think we have enough Hollywood-style "Well, it was OK I guess" video games. What we need is more people taking risks, more people producing truly innovative and unique games like "Rez", "Ico", "Sentinel", and so on. Of course, I think that because those are the games I like to play. If you like playing "Generic Sports Game 200x" or "Movie Tie In FPS", you will indeed prefer the results of designers taking more notice of user feedback.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This discussion occurred in the afternoon/evening after State of Play. It was very interesting to learn about the rulemaking process. For those who aren't familiar with it, rulemaking is when government agencies convert policy decisions passed by congress ("reduce automobile emissions") into actual federal statutes ("all light trucks lines will reduce their average emissions by 5% by 2007"). Part of the rulemaking process is posting the proposed rules and then soliciting public comment. In the old system, these periods of feedback were announced via the Federal Register and feedback was submitted via snail mail. The result was that a small number of lobbyists and individuals who scoured the Register would submit feedback. The agency in charge of the new statute would then publish a response, and eventually, the new law. The government doesn't have to follow the feedback but is often influenced by multiple submissions with similar viewpoints. The new system (partially implemented) allows for automated searching of proposed rules and electronic responses. A requirement is that posting be anonymous. As readers of /. can see, this is a very gamable system. The lobbyists now have a cheap and easy way to scan all proposed rules for ones that touch on their area and a undetectable way to submit massive numbers of similar viewpoints from apparently multiple sources. The new system is supposed to make the system more democratic but the actual result is to make it less democratic. Somehow not at all shocking that the Wired article missed that.
Now, given that there were many smart game designers/developers in the room who've had experiences managing communities that are full of people who try to game systems, there were ideas put forth -- /. was even mentioned -- but the government folks who were there weren't particularly interested in hearing that there system was flawed. Instead they just wanted information on how to educate people about the new system.
It was an enlightening and terrifying view into how senior government employees attack problems.
That article explains why you shouldn't throw away an entire codebase and start over, which would be analogous to scrapping this whole America thing and having another constitutional convention. We can't do that, practically, for reasons that are well-described.
The article in fact encourages you to refactor, optimize, and prettify an existing code base, instead of throwing it out -- and I think that's exactly what the grandparent suggested.
The answer, by the way, to why we can't refactor our legal code, is that the constitution makes updating the laws as hard as it could possibly be. We can't run the new changes in an unstable branch and see how they work out (unless you count, say, Nevada or Vermont).
He's wrong. What shouldn't be done is a rewrite while abandoning the old code. Rewrites should be done every so often so that the experience from the old code can be put into a new architecture, but the old code should be continued to be maintained until the new code is production-ready.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"