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One Journalist's Second Life
Jerry23 writes "The Second Life Community Convention site is carrying pre-release excerpts from O'Reilly Publishing's 'Only A Game: Online Worlds and the Virtual Journalist Who Knew Too Much' due out in 2006 (direct link to 10-page PDF). From the introduction: 'When virtual journalist Peter Ludlow was banned from the digital world of The Sims Online for being a bit too good at his job, it wasn't the end of the story but the beginning of the headlines that would capture readers around the world. Only A Game follows Ludlow's career as a virtual journalist as he and colleague Mark Wallace take us behind the scenes into not just The Sims Online but a fascinating universe of worlds that are far more colorful-and, at times, more disturbing-than their creators would have you believe.' As online *worlds* grow to earn their name, the last line of the PDF asks the million dollar question: 'How big is your game?'"
Ludlow's experience is not surprising. Every online games company on Earth plays god, believing that they have the sole right to direct the evolution of "their" world despite the fact that 90% of its value comes from the synergy of its players.
It doesn't seem to register with these corporations that without the interaction between gamers, all they have is a Massively Single-Player Offline Game, and that all their servers and networks and GMs and content providers just burn up dollars as a recurring cost and provide no return at all. More so than in any other producer-consumer relationship, the players in MMOGs are priceless. Yet, their desires are so often ignored.
This isn't going to change, as it's in the nature of company management to want to control. Until someone finally produces the prototype of that open and distributed metaverse that everyone is always talking about, the Ludlow experience will be repeated, time and again.
Second Life may be the closest to an acceptable platform that we have experienced so far, but if anyone annoyed Linden Labs in the same way that Ludlow annoyed the owners of TSO, you can pretty much guarantee that he would be murdered yet again.
Only a distributed world will be free of that, and even then, coercion from those who dislike what you are doing will still exist.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It never occurs to him that he doesn't own the server. In any gaming world you only have the rights that the -owners- allow you to have. For them to risk lawsuits and legal charges solely to satisfy a single user's bizarre sense of entitlement is stupid.
Even more so when he's now playing on a system where it is FREE.
This is like the guy who comes into your store, and buys a soda (or nothing at all), and thinks he can now start telling everyone what to do and how to do it. It's pretty damn arrogant if you ask me, and shows just how clueless this guy is about the internet, the law, and business in general.
If he really had any clue at all, he'd start his own game world.
We all like to bitch about developpers playing God and whatnot, but honestly I think running a MMO like a democracy would fail for several reasons:
1. The average player has _no_ clue of game design and the implications a change has.
E.g., more than half the players don't seem to understand that the numbers on a MUD or MMO are meaningless by themselves, and mean anything only as ratios to the other numbers. E.g., that (going by Blizzard's claim that an extra group member gives you roughly +10 levels) if I gave you twice the hit points and damage per second output, but put you against enemies 10 levels higher, you're exactly back to square one.
So everyone just whines for a shortcut, for a bigger number on their weapon or whatever, without even understanding what they're asking for or where that shortcut leads. (Usually towards a "click here to be level 60 and receive all the best equipment" kind of game. And then they'd whine that the game is boring.)
That doesn't apply to only DPS numbers, btw. Other issues, such as PvP or the economy or combat/crafting mechanics are whined about just the same by people who don't even understand what they're asking for and what the effects would be.
Briefly, I'll take a good designer any day instead of a horde of monkeys randomly clicking on voting buttons.
2. Griefers. Virtual governments have the same problem as in-character justice and other such tried-and-failed ideas. Namely: there's _nothing_ you can do in-character to someone who doesn't stay in-character and sees their character as disposable to start with.
Same here: there _will_ be a bunch of people voting just to cause the most disruption and damage, because it doesn't affect them.
3. Some issues aren't even feasible to solve that easily. Those companies have finite (if large) funds after all. If they end up having to check on and babysit every single player, sorry, your $13 a month just isn't enough for that.
E.g., sure, a guy can get a lot of political capital by playing the bogus "waah, I'm a victim! EA supressed my free speech when I ranted and raved against their game, and blew bogus issues like virtual prostitution out of proportion" card. But honestly, even if you voted that EA cracks down on virtual vice, how would they enforce that and at what cost?
I can tell you firsthand that none of the major MMOs have a "/blowjob" command or such. It's the players being inventive with other commands (e.g., a prayer kinda command was used on AO to sorta look like a blowjob, until the devs took it out) or just with typed text, IRC/AOL style. So if anyone voted that EA cracks down on that, EA would literally have to read everyone's chats with everyone else, and go through lists of all emote commands used, etc.
And then someone else would make a fuss about how EA violates their privacy. More voting, more posers playing virtual politician and agitating the masses, lather, rinse, repeat ad-nauseam.
4. For that matter, it would be just too much of an expense and effort just to keep up with the posers trolling for attention that way. Especially if you give them attention: nothing gets a troll going on and on like getting attention. And once you've officially invited them to play politician and have to democratically debate with them every bogus issue they come up with, that's what you gave them: lots and lots of publicity and attention.
I can see that getting out of hand fast. Every single ban (e.g., for outright cheating) would be brought up as some major political issue that needs to be debated and voted on, every single new spell or NPC would be debated to death too, etc. It would take a whole PR department just to keep up with the uphill battles of proving that, no, ffs, that guy isn't a martyr persecuted by the publisher, but someone who used hacks and cheats.
Etc.
Basically, dunno, democracy sounds good and fine, but I don't want to pay 2-3 times the monthly cost just so the devs can afford to implement it. And I can do without the open invitation for every poser and troll to play politician.
The iron fist rule of the publisher isn't perfect, but it works reasonably well. I can live with that.
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