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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."
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.
The community should be more active in the design phase of video games.
Yep, because influencing the way games look like is soooo much more important than influencing our legislators lawmaking, isn't it?
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.
Listening too much to the community can be very detrimental to the development process, however, since you might lose sight of your original ideas and planning, and wind up in an unstructured mess of widely disparate ideas.
Heinlein always said (from a future perspective) that all democracies failed when people voted themselves bread-and-circuses.
In other words, people would vote to get something for nothing.
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