Protests, Politics And Parties In MMORPGs

The Importance of writes "LawMeme's James Grimmelmann has written an interesting piece on protests, politics and parties in MMORPGs. In particular, he talks about the 'tax revolt' in Second Life."

There is a true social contract

If I don't like how life is in a game, I'm free to leave at any time and start a new life elsewhere agreeing to the new rules of that society.

Re:There is a true social contract

If you don't like something, even something that you are paying for, just shut-up and leave is one approach. I'm sure that many businesses would prefer that a few people do this and most people continue putting up with what they get than to have to address issues. But when issues are raised and changes made, the system is generally improved for the customer and usually even for the business. Protests can be frivilous, but they are often valid and usefull.

my favourite online protest....

The naked riot of 1997 in Ultima Online:

From AlterNet: [alternet.org]
History has shown gamers that online protest can result in positive change, as exemplified in Ultima Online's 1997 naked riot demanding bug fixes and server upgrades. Not only were some of the rioters' issues addressed by the game publisher following the incident, but the event was widely reported, and gamers worldwide have been inspired to acts of virtual civil disobedience ever since. Remember that your worst enemy, aside from integrated branding, is inaction. Electronic Arts clearly wants players of The Sims Online to be wildly imaginative, and has already recognized that the online world is unpredictable.

Re:my favourite online protest....

What the players are protesting essentially is the taxation of their role as content providers.

From what I've read on Second Life (which admittedly has been this article as well as the interesting story a month or 2 ago about people being abducted ingame by aliens), players create most of the content. Content is most MMORPGs is produced by developers who are paid to do so. In SL, the players are seemingly given a toolkit to build what they want. So rather than have pre-rendered dungeons or quests, players can "build" a UFO which goes around randomly abducting other players. rather nifty. And for their efforts at coding the new item, they are being taxed.

So they're essentially being taxed for content that in other games is produced through the real-life subscription fees. Seems a bit unfair. So they are protesting. And, as the writer of the article points out, the very act of protesting within the game is part of the game, and part of the fun.

(then again, i could be completely wrong, as I've only recently heard about second life)

Re:my favourite online protest....

It's deeper than that.

Remember, the article starts off talking about the rampant inflation inherent in MMOGs - items are constantly produced, and nothing ever really goes away. (and, as a result, the poor (in this case, new gamers) find it a LOT more difficult to make money, whereas the rich have an easy time accumulating more wealth to compensate for inflation.

The tax was introduced as an attempt to counteract this, and to ensure that property values for EVERYONE stayed as close to nominal as possible, at the "expense" of a relative few of the richer players.

Does this sound familiar? It should. This protest is a virtual recreation of the on-going real-world economics battles between Left-leaning and Right-leaning policies.

Do you spare the rich by saying "hands off, make money however you can", but in doing so make life harder on the poor? Or do you intentionally tax the wealthy few to make life better for everyone else?

And the great thing about MMORPGs is that you can use them as an experimentive toolkit for economic policies, without risking the lives of millions of real citizens.

I could see economic think tanks intentionally creating MMORPG worlds with different starting conditions, just to see how they evolve.

Inflation?

"Remember, the article starts off talking about the rampant inflation inherent in MMOGs"

Which is, of course, utter bollocks. The problem, if there is one, is rampant _deflation_ of prices: items that would have cost 2000 whatsits when they first appeared cost 20 whatsits today because they're so common. It's only the brand-new and very rare items that cost a lot.

"the rich have an easy time accumulating more wealth to compensate for inflation."

Why do you need to accumulate wealth when goods cost 1% of the price they sold for when they first appeared? A new "poor" player in Everquest can equip themselves with items for a thousand platinum that would have cost many tens of thousands when the game was young... and make that thousand platinum in a few hours of killing spiders.

Frankly, whenever I read an article complaining about "inflation" in MMORPGs I know from the start that the author doesn't know what they're talking about.

Re:my favourite online protest....

As a member of the group who created the tax protest, I can tell you very well what it was about.
In SL, each region is a server with clearly defined limitations - 10 thousand prims, which stands for primitive shapes (cube, sphere, cylinder...)
Instead of getting a fixed amount of space, like what happens when you purchase some space for a webpage, the developers thought it would be better to create a virtual economy to distribute resources to everyone.
Just to give you an idea, a prim costs 10 Linden dollars and is taxed at $1 per week, more if its far above the ground, if its very large, or if it is a light.
Taxes are meant to prevent rapid resource depletion. Without an economy in place, a malicious user could fill up a server in seconds, and a particularly creative user playing normally could very well fill it up on his own.
As you can see, the limits imposed by the game constraint our imagination a bit, and force us to learn some efficient 3d design techniques, keeping the details in the textures and doing only the basic structure with actual polygons.
This is what everyone's angry about. They came to SL with the expectation that they could build to their heart's content, and started doing so, but quickly hit a wall where their income could not pay for their taxes anymore. So naturally they felt frustrated because they didnt want to delete anything. The tax system has been tweaked a bit and now everything is going fine.
If you guys have any questions about SL or the tax protest I'll do my best to answer them.

UO Lake Superior protest

Several years back, the Lake Superior shard (UO game server) was having serious problems. So a bunch of folks who played on that server hopped over to the Atlantic shard to protest. For whatever reason, it was red dress instead of going naked: Screenshot 1 [shat.net] Screenshot 2, they put us in jail [shat.net]

Of course, naked protests aren't unheard of. I don't recall what this one was about, but we were a merry band of nude archers: Naked Posse [shat.net]

Frigax

Apt protest.

Dissent appropriately took a very American form: the project's Washington monument had been replaced by a giant tower of tea crates; the baseball stadium rendered unusable by similar stacks; the Route 66 gas station set ablaze by an insurrectionist midget shooting off seditious fireworks.

Those insurrectionist midgets with seditious fireworks...sounds an awful lot like real life. One of those insurrectionist midgets attacked me the other day for my own stance on taxes. This is just another sign that the Internet mirrors real life rather realistically.

it only makes sense....

that in a game such as Second Life, that something of this nature would happen. It is a game, that is totally openended, which lends itself to the creation of a "government". Take Golding's Lord of the flies for example. A bunch of kids set up a "system of government." this government ultimately fails, but the premise is the same. A group of people, with a common interest get together, in this case their country is a digital domain. It really is an interesting study in anthropology, if you ask me.

Pardon my French but...

...that's a complete load of crap.

Lord Of The Flies is a book that illustrates how easy it is for us to fall into anarchy without the presence of a society to keep us in check.

The book isn't about failing systems of government, it's about how, in the absence of any form of government, we quickly we fall back to a selfish "survival of the fittest" state with the strong preying on the weak.

The boys don't try to set up a system of government, they try to live by the rules that society has taught them. But, pretty soon, they realise that without society watching over them, those rules are easily disposed of - and weaker figures like Simon and Piggy suffer as a result.

Witness the near-deification of the conch, the hunting, the return to "normal" behaviour when rescue arrives, etc. This isn't a book about government or society, it's a book about a lack of government and the breakdown of society.

No book more clearly illustrates the mentality that turns ordinary people going about their daily business into a rioting, blood-thirsty mob than William Golding's masterpiece. When it comes to examining how easily we can descend into anarchy, LOTF is the bible.

Bollocks

LOTF is just well-dressed propaganda, teaching youngsters that without the guiding adult hand they inevitably descend into primitive violence. No coincidence it's such a favorite of teachers.

Life's real stories of youngsters abandoned shows something quite different. In the Polish ghettos, Nazi camps, streets of Rio and of Kinshasa... children form groups and look after each other.

The most flagrant examples of children acting violently are wars in which adults abduct children and train them as soldiers: Colombia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Liberia, and many other cases... it's the adults doing the damage.

Children don't have holy water running through their veins, but they do not embody naked evil either. They just try to get along. LOTF is a caricature, based on the idea of "original sin", saying that we ar civilized only because society keeps us in check. Bullshit. Society is an expression of our human nature, and civilization is a natural consequence of our innate desire for an easy life and our built-in mechanisms for conflict avoidance.

Re:Bollocks

LOTF is just well-dressed propaganda, teaching youngsters that without the guiding adult hand they inevitably descend into primitive violence. No coincidence it's such a favorite of teachers.

I didn't see it that way. You see the adults who arrive on the island and make everything ok were involved in WW2. And no next-level authority figure was going to arrive and save them from the horrors of their own creation. LOTF was trying to make a statement about adult societies and human nature by creating a microcosm to show just how ridiculous some of our behavior is. The fact that it was children was just incidental -- probably a literary choice designed to emphasise how horrible that behavior is.

Heck even if this interpretation is wrong, the fact that my english teacher spent most of our class time analysing interpretations which go in this direction discredits your statement that english teachers choose to teach this book as propaganda. And that goes for both english teachers who taught this book to me. (I moved after my second year in high school, so had to endure this hideous book twice.)

I hated LOTF not because it was saying that children embody the naked evil, but because it was saying that human beings are fundamentally evil. That is a sentiment I whole-heartedly disagree with.

Re:it only makes sense....

I'd also like to note the fact that Second Life is an extremely unique type of game since the developers have little real control over what the players must do. In MMO games like Ultima Online you're playing a RPG-like game with fairly set restrictions. However in Second Life, the goal is whatever a group of players agree to do/try. In Second Life, the idea is make a world where players can "build" whatever they want and play with it the way they want. In a world like that, reality or fiction, people will test the limitations of their freedom.

To compare the real world with games is a far cry until more (mainstream) games adopt a "free world" system. Last time I checked, Everquest players weren't having virtual wars over spawn points and players weren't forming political parties based on which class or race should be beefed/nerfed.

I love online politics

Dating back to MUD days [durismud.com], could always have fun killing each other, forming groups, getting purged (ostracized) from a group, etc.

The best online game party has to be when an RPG converts to a chaos-like free-for-all deathmatch/capture the flag. OH YEAH!

Raph Koster

Still hard to believe that Raph Koster has come so far since LegendMUD. I started with that mud in 95 and played on and off for 5 years wasting thousands of hours. Although the mud peaked at only about 80 players, it was still very enjoyable. The man use to take part in his own MUD, building a tight and interesting community.

He's definitely a talented designer also knowing the importance of a good mix of playerbase is essential to sustaining a in-game society. I can't vouch for any of the graphical MUDs he's been part of but I will always remember LegendMUD and late late nights doing quests, rescue parties, and infamous clan wars. (Knights and Grendels baby!)

I tried an MMORPG...

I tried the star wars MMPORPG because friend insisted it was "the greatest thing ever".

Its so freaking boring...the tutorial fine, but the game, you get to a world, and it consists of guys looking for raw materials so they can level up characters, so they can then look for different raw materials so they can level up characters...

I'm only saying this because I think the mentality of people who play these games is not part of what most people consider "normal", and therefore, the current MMPORPG population is just a collection of weird geeks.

So if you try to draw a conclusion from that population, its a bad idea.

Re:I tried an MMORPG...

> I tried the star wars MMPORPG because friend insisted it was "the greatest thing ever".
>
> Its so freaking boring...the tutorial fine, but the game, you get to a world, and it consists of guys looking for raw materials so they can level up characters, so they can then look for different raw materials so they can level up characters...

...and then, because they can't do anything without giving up their skills, they surrender all their skills and start over. And this is supposed to be something different than just quitting and reloading?

> I'm only saying this because I think the mentality of people who play these games is not part of what most people consider "normal", and therefore, the current MMPORPG population is just a collection of weird geeks.

At least the premise of Second Life sounds half-interesting. ("There is no content. Here are tools. Build it yourself. Play it yourself.")

By comparison, Star Wars Galaxies is "There is no content. There are no tools. Pretend you're inventing content." (Don't level up, you evil powergamer! There's so little content, and there are no tools for players to create add-on missions, but that's why you're paying $15/month, so you can roleplay... you know, imagine the content and roleplay what you'd be doing if the content was there! :-)

I'm a weird geek. SWG fans make me look positively normal. Bah. Gimme NWN. Hell, gimme Bard's Tale and Wizardry. If I wanna roleplay social interaction, I'll roleplay a party of six on my old-school CRPG. And not one of those characters will know the word "pwn".

Pretty sad

protests, politics and parties in MMORPGs.

Meanwhile, US citizens are barely registering a whimper of protest at the draconian laws passed every day in the name of "patriotism" and "protecting the homeland".

It's pretty sad that people organize "protests" in a fucking -game- but won't stand up for their rights in real life. What is the matter with you people?

Re:Pretty sad

Very simply because in real life you can get really arrested, really have your life ruined, really get shot dead.

In a game you can act out in complete security and comfort. All you risk is maybe having to find another game to play.

Conversely, of course, this also means there is no real valor or heroism in games either. You just get to act out heroism. The next day you can back to the cube farm, or mailroom, or whatever, to earn the payments on your nice car.

In short, the game, however closely it may mimic real life, is just a game.

Anyone who loses sight of this simple fact is heading for trouble.

KFG

Re:Pretty sad

It's pretty sad that people organize "protests" in a fucking -game- but won't stand up for their rights in real life. What is the matter with you people?

Please stop grandstanding. I feel confident guessing that many more protests happen every hour in real life than have ever happened in any massively multiplayer game anywhere.

We protest what affects us. We protest what we care about. If I lived in Australia and spent a signifcant part of my life playing Second Life, you'd better believe that I would be far more interested in changes in Second Life than in America's laws.

Further, as the article indicates (did you read it?), online protests are often mostly recreational. If playing a game is fun enough to spend hours doing, and protesting within that game is even more fun, then many players will protest. If you somehow made protesting the PATRIOT act the most enjoyable out of the three, then they'd do that instead.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that being upset or offended is a right, not a responsibility. It follows that protest should be similarly optional. No one is stepping on your toes by being apathetic about the PATRIOT act, so your vitriolic straw man doesn't seem terribly justifiable.

Screw taxation as social engineering

This game tax was supposed to fix runaway inflation by changing behavior by giving 'players an incentive to get rid of things they don't really want any more.' In the real world people are getting sick of taxation as social engineering. Taxation should be about funding the government.

Another revolt

Reminds me of a time in one game I play called Dragonrealms, where they changed how some aspect of experiance in the game worked, so all the healers in the game refused to heal any wounds. Between that and the general chaos it caused, the experiance system was changed back quickly. Sometimes a little in game riot goes quite far.

The best protest

Cancel your subscription. That's what I did with Star Wars Galaxies. The game clearly isn't ready for release.

Re:The best protest

This is not a protest. This is you deciding not to play. If you though the net effect was negative, of course, go ahead and stop playing. But what if you enjoyed the game but was annoyed by bugs or some other things? You want to continue playing, but you want stuff to be fixed. What to do? Protest by doing sit-ins, demonstrations, rallies, distributing pamphlets, etc.

Blurring the lines

So when will things change, and people stop considering such social experiments to be "games"? Surely by now we're starting to see that the society represented electronically in these MMORPGs is no less valid than the physical world...

Personally, I've been caught up in a couple of these MMORPGs and while I've always managed to keep the boundaries between the "game" and "real-life" nice and clear not all players manage to do this. To some of them, their on-line "life" is just as important as what most people consider to be reality.

Also consider that one of the key boundaries between virtual and physical worlds is gradually breaking down - money. It is far easier to purchase items, assistance, support and knowledge for these "games" than it was just a couple of years ago. Now that people are willing to spend real-world money on not-so-real-world commodities, does this make them less of a game?

Onlince Democracy

I would really like to see a MMORPG be designed with a pay controled government in place. Imagine if there are a few hundred variable rules in place that contrain things like taxes, lang usage, skill acquisition, hunting, etc. Now, you have a congress/parliment set up to control these variables through bills. Every 6 months of so, you can have an online election to elect the president and a congress whose size is based on population. Online worlds are already divided into districts, cities, servers, etc. Now you can have direct action in demorcracy.

Credit Required for Reg.

Hmm.. ok I was gonna check out Second Life cause I was bored tonite. When are they gonna learn that a free 7 days trial should NOT include a requirement to provide a credit card number?

Skip that game trial.....

Re:Credit Required for Reg.

I tried out "A Tale In The Desert" [atitd.com] and it has a free 24 hours of playing trial with no credit card required.

I highly recommend the game.

smeat

My thesis

When I tried to persuade a waring faction of savages to lay down their weapons and join me in peace, I quickly found myself splattered against a nearby wall by a stray rocket. Awakening in a nearby chamber (Damn cloning, I protested against that, too!) and proceeded to shout my pleas to pacify the barbarians shooting at each other. After several hours of this and quit, there's no use playing a roleplaying game with so little character interaction and virtually no economy.

Quake had to be the worst MUD I'd ever played!

why tax? break shit.

If they are taxing just because things are so easy to get that they aren't fun any more then why not make them harder to get? Or make them wear out with use or time. Seriously, that is why consumer goods break so often.. because otherwise people wouldn't need to buy them very often.. so huge corporations wouldn't exist to supply people with new can openers on a regular basis. We could make these things last longer but we choose not to. So do the same with your game.

Solution?

Perhaps the solution to the tax is to incorporate some form of manufacture, sales and profit. One would have to limit or provide cost to the manufacturing/labor to make this work. The primary problem with the inflation, it seems, in all these games is that the money supply is virtually limitless once you know how to get it. Instead, stop the money supply (for the most part) and rely on commerce to take over.

In a game like Ultima or other combat based games, this might have to be revised but it seems like Second Life is more about life. So anyways, your stadium is taxed more but people come and visit it and you charge for it. This makes you a net profit.

Okay, I realize I may be missing some of the boat since I don't play MMORPGs but I think it would be vastly interesting to model these RPGs in a manner similar to real life. This would make it even more interesting if/when "twists" are thrown in as they might reflect interesting revelations about what might happen in real life. Or even "playing" with economics a little. :)

By the way, in the Ultima or combat style MMORPGs, you could still limit the money supply but one would need to realistically have the villages sacked every once in a while by a band of orcs, dragons or whatever. Then the good warriors have to go and get it back.

Finally, I've always had an interesting theory about economics. The old line is that nothing happens until something gets sold. Yet in many ways, government focuses on "taxing" things which of course reduces the amount of items sold. I propose an interesting experiment to be to reduce taxes for spending a certain portion of your income within a month. For example, let's say 50% of your income within a month. This means that the poor would likely be spending this amount anyways (and be subject to those savings) and the rich would be encouraged to spend more to help vitalize the economy. I'm sure I haven't thought this entirely through yet but I'd be interested in hearing some responses to this. I get this feeling, however, that the criticisms can be worked through.

By the way, this would have to be matched through some accounting system that matches bills to taxes and of course would require automation to make it viable. This may involve privacy concerns but, of course, you could opt out if you wanted to keep something private or come to some other solution.

At any rate, ideas like this could be interesting to test in a real economically based, paper-money limited, MMORPG.

Re:Solution?

Finally, I've always had an interesting theory about economics. The old line is that nothing happens until something gets sold. Yet in many ways, government focuses on "taxing" things which of course reduces the amount of items sold. I propose an interesting experiment to be to reduce taxes for spending a certain portion of your income within a month. For example, let's say 50% of your income within a month. This means that the poor would likely be spending this amount anyways (and be subject to those savings) and the rich would be encouraged to spend more to help vitalize the economy. I'm sure I haven't thought this entirely through yet but I'd be interested in hearing some responses to this. I get this feeling, however, that the criticisms can be worked through.

There are important reasons to actually save money though, especially on a month to month type basis. Things like retirement accounts, risk aversion, financial security in an unexpected crisis, etc. I currently have about 20% of my annual income just sitting in my bank account in case a rainy day comes along. For instance, in 1998, my dad had a brain aneurysm and stroke and was in the hospital for 5 months. After he got out, he still needed constant rehab and someone to be with him all the time so I ended up taking nearly 18 months off from work. My savings, along with some supplimental income (his pension plan kicking in and all his vacation/sick time he saved at work), is how I made it that long.

There are also parallels to the dot com bust. The faster you blow the money, the sooner you'll find yourself working 3 jobs to try to make ends meet when the unexpected occurs. So, do you start allowing exceptions for savings? If so, how do you define the savings limits? Someone who has a $5000 a month mortgage payment is going to need a substantially larger rainy day fund than someone with my $500 a month payment.

What all of the economic theories of taxation come down to is controlling people via the government urging rather than keeping the government off their back. Under the current scheme, people are punished for working their tail off to earn a good living. Under your plan, people are punished for trying to make sure they have a nut saved in case a storm comes along.

I may not be making any money off the few grand I've got sitting in the bank, but the fact that it's there means the bank can lend it to someone else who can try to make something happen with it. Similarly, the money of the filthy rich isn't sitting in their mattress, its being excersized in creating business through stock ownership, allowing government improvement projects through bonds, sitting in a CD while the bank lets someone else use it, etc. Retail is only a small, though critically important, portion of the vast capitalist economic system.

In Shadowbane...

...we would protest more if when we all get together and tried to do anything the wouldn't game lag...lag some more and finally sbexe out. (For those of you lucky enough to never have to experiance the sb exe error, it's a fatal error resulting in the process being removed from memory, aka a crash)

Anyone know if it's gotten better. Haven't played in a few weeks but have heard from a friend it is a bit better, probably due to the fact enough people have left where the server side has a lighter load it can handle, not that there was ever enough players to have what should be considered a large load under these cirsumstances.

tom clancy?

Wasn't a book published, under Tom Clancy's name (im pretty sure he didn't actually write any of it) in the Net Force series dealing with a creation of a online community? Except that community did create its own goverment, its own everything and tried to make itself a real country or a real state, and not abide by the US laws? How soon will it be before it comes to this? -pix

Protests as the resolution of the Modern Paradox

What are online revolts and revolutions? They are the resolution to a paradox of a society that encourages and rewards individualism, but at the very same time generalizes, stereotypes, and also rewards conformity. In other words, we tell individuals that they are important, but at the same time, thanks to the proliferatino of mass media, Americans now have a greater perception of those around them than anyone else at any time in history. Prior to this, the world was contained to largely a town, or section of a city. Now, however, Americans are individuals, yes, so we are told. But we also feel terribly small when we realize that we play such a small role in the perceived world around us (the world that mass media presents us with). We are made to believe that individuals are of the highest importance. The paradox, though, is why do our actions mean so little? If we, as individuals, are as important as the American idealogy would have us believe, why then are our actions meaningless as individuals? Why is the mass media more concerned with seeminlgy everything around us, except ourselves? The paradox? Individuals are important. But individuals are also ignored. If I am important, why can I not apply this level of importance to the world around me? If the individual is penultimate in American society, why am I completely ignored by society when I want lower taxes? Why can I not change and control the environment, if I am as important as everyone tells me? The people in this online games have realized, either on a conscious level or otherwise, that if they cannot change the immediate environment around them, if their individual actions do not mean anything in the immediate world, all that is required is to switch environments, change worlds. It is in online games that their importance as individuals is recognized alongside the importance of their actions. They are both individual and impacting. It's important to note that American society has always moved in this direction; gangs, cliques, etc, are all manifestations of this. But online games give the illusion of incredible impact. They match the importance of individualism with the importance of impact. The players in Second Life are creating a revolt! A revolt! How is that possible within the confines of the real world? What does a nude sit-in in the real world accomplish? A novelty at best, and nothing at worst. But a nude sit-in in Britannia [newyorker.com]? That accomplish something. I believe that what is now on the absolute fringe of society will gradually make its way into mainstream. They are the perfect solution to the American paradox of individuals and impact, they manage to squeeze by both and integrate these two elements into a world where an individual's personhood and their actions are as important.

Simulation of real life!

What needs to be done is for someone to start a mmorpg that parellels out real life economy and society.....give it out for free, get everyone that has internet access of any sort involved in it, then use it as a model/simulation over the course of several years to fix our damn society/economy!

Re:Simulation of real life!

Heh, that'll never happen. Utopia will never exist.

HOWEVER, you're close to the mark. What could happen is economic think tanks should start sponsoring MMORPGs. Set them up with an established social\economic structure, then let the characters run loose in the world to see how it fares "in reality." (I realize it's not REALLY reality, but it is far, far closer than has ever been remotely possible in economics before.)

Publicize the game, make sure people know before hand what sort of world is being set up. This should, in theory, attract those people who have an interest in that style of economics. There will always be choads, but the majority of people gaming should stick to the worlds with rules that best suit their idea of what a society should be.

Or, now that I think about it, even better - run several games using the same basic "world" simultaneously, but with the different structures. You're allowed to "immigrate" from one world to another (you realize Objectivism isn't for you after all and decide to give Communism a shot), but absolutely *not* to run multiple characters. This would be a permanent banning offense, since it would completely skew the study. (this would allow them to test not only which countries are most profitable, but which attract the most citizens)

It wouldn't be a perfect test, to be sure. The fact that it requires a fairly high level of computer knowledge would skew the results considerably from a strict statistical point of view. However, this is the first time in history that economists can actually *experiment*. We might actually be able to rip a lot of the dogmatic ideology away from economics, put the theories to *practical* test (without risking millions of real lives) and then have a huge slew of data to draw from in application to the real world.

And then, of course, if God had a sense of humor we'd discover that Marx was right all along. ;-)

open source gamming

greetings,
on the vein of opensource, have someone else try something like this:
1)A team of developers create, design and code the game, which is opensource. Lets call them The Founding Fathers
2)People who want to play, must pay a fee. This fee is to maintain the server, and pay the developers -as usual
3)After a period, comes election times. other developers step in, make their new propossal to the game and gammers vote.
4)So, this guys take the administration and improvement of the game on his hands, they rule the game and get paid for it trough the gammers fees.
5)GOTO 3... and you have a ever evolving game with democracy.

Oh if only..

I wish people would apply this kind of energy to the real world instead of frittering it away on mindgames. It could have been real useful, say for example, in Florida around November 2000.

not your normal MMO

Taxes are levied in Second life because of finite server resources(ALL content is server-side, the client download is a mere 11mb). A server can handle x amount of objects, and tax levels are calculated based on things like total available land, and other factors.

For example, i have an empty "sim" (one game world unit, in an interconnected grid of sims), and i first want to buy some land in that sim. I buy a 32x32m plot of land for x amount of money. Now, you get taxed for that land, since its a limited server resource. Now i want to build say a house. I "rez" in 4 cube primitives, shape them to form walls. Each item costs y money to bring in to the world, then has a tax for stying in the work for an extended period of time, based on a variety of factors. Basically anything that costs server ram and CPU cycles, you get taxed for. You would have to play the game to fully understand the results this actually has, but as the base of it.. is theres a finite amount of resources, and the rules keep them form being exploited.

Second life is a game where the players make their own content. Theres a scripting language and primitives based modeller. You can import textures and sounds, and create what you like. Dont want to create? no problem. Its a game you play as you like. Its a paradigm shift, and worth your time to take a look at if you want a truly new gaming experience.

It has to be said...

Second Life?
Are the creators sure these people had a 'first' life?

[Chief Wiggum] Mod it down, boys! [/Chief Wiggum]

Nationalism in a borderless world

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. 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.

Re:Nationalism in a borderless world

You do not work for Nintendo. Please stop trying to pass yourself off as a Nintendo employee, troll.

Everyone else: Read this joker's comment history [slashdot.org] to see what I mean.

Every Game Has Them

I remember back about 6 to 7 months ago a protest by the players occurred in DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot).

The complaints were regarding a particular faction (hibernia to those who know the game). Players encouraged other players in the same faction to join a particular server for a protest regarding the issues.

The problem being, the Hibernia realm was the last developed realm and this does show rather well when compared against others.

Class balance issues, some monster/mobile issues and general complaints were all held. Interestingly enough it did get some attention, but I believe most of the answers weren't exactly concrete.

None the less, a protest is a protest, and it is worth mention.

A Very Appropriate Department

If you're wondering what William Shatner said best, click here [stilldesigning.com]. Because timothy sure hit the nail on the head this time.

Tributes and Memorials

I played DAOC excessively for a little more than a year. In that time, several players on my server died for one reason or another. It hurt to discover that someone you encountered in virtual battle, possibly many times, had cast his last spell or ganked his last noob and assumed room temperature.

If the dead has any virtual friends a memorial will get organized. These get announced on various forums and in-game. In the case of DAOC, at almost no other time will you stand among the enemy without being in battle. At these times, however, possibly hundreds of players gather and have good thoughts about the departed. Honor prevails and people behave.

So lets not get too worked up about a little virtual disobedience. There is a lot more than that going on inside MMORPGs. Ironically, one can imagine that the virtual turnout for the dearly departed will nearly always outstrip the real life version by an order of magnitude. Figure that out and you might have something interesting to get worked up about.

The paradox of the MMORPG

This certainly demonstrates one of the paradoxes of the MMORPG. On one hand, it has to be fun, and everybody has to be able to do everything in it. On the other hand, you somehow have to create the illusion of a living, working world.

And it is an illusion. To satisfy the first condition, the moment you have a built-in quest, the players are rendered powerless to change the world around that quest - a town in danger from a Dragon is always in danger from a Dragon, no matter how many times the Dragon is slain.

But, there are certain concerns that make running an MMORPG a very tricky balancing act:

1. The company must retain control over the game. This essentially renders democracy in an MMORPG impossible. The moment the players actually have a controlling interest in the game itself, the creator of the game is placed in the impossible situation of being responsible for what happens inside the game, but being to control it.

(This is the reason, for example, that when you create a character in any MMORPG, the company running the MMORPG owns the character. If you own the character, you can make demands on the company that are unreasonable in the greater scheme of things, the company HAS to give in [as the character is your property], and since the company owns the game, they are liable for anything you do.)

2. For the game to survive, the players must form a viable community. This means that the game must be fun, but also encourage people to contribute to the world in ways other than slaughtering monsters (such as creating items in UO and EverQuest). In the end, it is the people that the regular players come back for, not the game itself.

3. The game must be balanced, both in design and community. And that is the hardest of the lot, considering the first two factors. Too much inflation and the majority of the players are driven away. Have a closed system, such as the real world, and all of the resources get eaten up by the first players in the game, leaving everybody else in a state of poverty (which happened in the early days of UO). The tax system in Second Life is an interesting solution, and possibly the best I've heard so far (as just pushing new and better stuff into the economy creates inflation).

The big issue is whether democracy can end up existing in an MMORPG. Quite frankly, I don't think it can. It is one thing to petition a developer for a change, which is what the protest basically amounts to, but quite another for the players to dictate to the developers what can and can't be done in the game. The moment you have the gamers in full control of the game, the game will start to die - there will just be too many voices fighting for control at once.

The Interworld Wide Web

Second Life, in its way, is more remote than Iraq. I can't just point you to newspapers with daily coverage of events. I can't send you to the web site of the Second Life Public Library. These things don't exist in a form that can easily cross the border back to reality.

And why not? These "worlds" exist as their own independent "nation" of sorts. Why can't game makers create a direct link between their virtual worlds and the World Wide Web?

For example, I think it would be great if we could read our in-game mail, browse the stores/bazaars, or chat with our Guild/PA through a web browser interface.

I think this may be coming in the future, but I wonder why it hasn't taken off already?

Unhappy in their own skin.

I read the article, and read up on some of the complaints and the stories. It appears that they could have solved this problem by offering tax credits/rebates for philanthropic "projects".
The next complaint by the user community will be based on what is considered philanthropic and what is not. Judgement will come into play. People will be angry for different reasons.
I can almost guarantee that if someone built a monument, got their tax break, someone else will scream bloody murder because they didn't get their tax credit for building blankety-blank.

Face it, some people are unhappy in their own skin. There are people who object to everything. These are people who will never be happy. They might best be served by creating their own game and playing it the way they want to play instead of forcing change on 98% of the rest of the world.

Lastly, it's a game. Get a life! Read a book. People who spend that much time "escaping" from reality need help.

MMPOG's Politics, and when people need to...

get involved in the real world. One semester, myself and about half the floor on my dorm started to play a browser-based MMOG. We played kinda as a group calling themselves "The Borg Collective" and when one was attacked, about 15 of us world attack almost at the same time as we were doing homework someone would yell down the hall, "Hey Dude x in 2:17 attacked me, kill him!" and for the next day or so they would be attacked several hundred times and usually died. By the halfway point in the game we had formed an alliance that controlled about a 3rd of the top 100 list and 3 of the game's "official" alliance.

Well then after the take down of a couple of the game's premiere players, everyone in the game tried to hunt us down and got about 50% of our players, but by that time it was the towards the end of the semester and we were too busy with the real world to rejoin.

I came back about a year later to a game filled with "unofficial" rules of how the game was played. You know, crap like, "If someone twice your size attacks you, they get two retals for the land grab not 1. If you left your self open, no retals, and the entire game had turned into one bad genevea convention. Plus with hourly ticks, if you were not online like 18 hours a day, you had no real chance to win and most of the orginial players had left.

I quit and since have never come back to the game and started some work developing a fork to the Promisance Game Engine and have run various BNT games on websites to a small scale, never more than about 100 players, but even in those small games, politics take a life of their own and as I go back to school to prosue a masters in International Relations, I can't help but think that one of these games would be an excellent study of possible political models.

And if anyone still play's SK, I was known as Unimatrix. If your ever around their forums, some of the old timers (if any are still there) may still remember me....

Re:Taxation is theft

I do believe your logical chain above is rendered entirely worthless by this bad link: "As a result, being wealthy is less desirable" The rich do not got rich just so they can save society. They get rich so that they can ignore most of it.

Re:Taxation is theft

People who contribute more to society through judicious use of their increased wealth are punished for having that wealth in the first place. As a result, being wealthy is less desirable, and there will be fewer wealthy people able to finance large projects that benefit society as a whole.

The counterargument is that wealthy people receive a disproportionate proportion of the benefits of a society, and generally have a disproportionate influence over that society's policies, so that they ought to pay a greater proportion of the costs of maintaining that society.

Re:Taxation is theft

You utilize a classic socialist argument, the economy as zero-sum game. The resources collected by the wealthy can be used to generate even greater benefits for society, such as easier access to things like information and a wider variety of products. I doubt a poor person living off the public teat could fund the businesses that build your home, deliver your food to the grocery store you visit, and finance the research that led to your computer.

No the argument that the wealthy should pay more taxes because they reap a disproportionate fraction of the benefits is an ethcial argument, not an economic one. The economic argument you make is itself a zero-sum argument, because it frames it as an either-or choice between expenditure of wealth by the state for the benefit of the poor and expenditure of wealth by the rich. But remember, the wealthy don't go away because they are taxed. As long as the tax rate is less than 100%, there are benefits to wealth. So the economic question is at what point the reduction in the trickle-down benefits to society from the self-directed expenditures of the wealthy exceeds the benefits to society, both incidental and direct, of the public expenditure of those tax revenues for the public good. Certainly, in the US, there has historically been no apparent correlation between low rates of taxation and high rates of economic growth, suggesting that tax rates have always been below the levels that would significantly curtail the beneficial economic activities of the wealthy.

Re:Taxation is theft

The sad part about this is that it isn't a troll!! Republicans really believe in what they say. "Can you believe that damn government wants 50% of my paycheck? How am I going to buy that new Yacht now!?"
1/7 people doesn't have health care; 1/5 doesn't have auto insurance. Look at the big picture.
I can understand this point of view if you are part of that 1% who benefit from regressive taxation, but otherwise, I'd seriously go meet some inner-city working-poor people and tell them rich people deserve tax breaks. See what they say.
I can see why you posted as AC.

Re:Taxation is theft

People who contribute more to society through judicious use of their increased wealth

I assume you are referring to "the rich". So what are they contributing to society exactly? All the malls and Wal-marts that they open to gouge the consumers even more and make themselves even richer at the expense of the rest of society? Obviously if you have 1 billion dollars in the bank you have been seriously overcharging your customers. After you have that much money you shouldn't be so concerned with raping society to make even more money and whining about how much money is being "stolen" from you.

Re:How pathetic.

who are you? Robin Hood? take it easy...

Re:Everquest

The addiction to online gaming is real, and has existed since long before Everquest. MUDs, a text-based role-playing game, were every bit as addictive and dangerous.

It was quite disturbing throughout my time at university seeing fellow students drop out due to these games. Hell, even I had problems with them - I missed plenty of assignment deadlines all in the name of some rare sword.

This isn't going to change, but hopefully society as a whole will learn to acknowledge how strong a role these games can play in some people's life. Perhaps they will even become a tool for creating new communities, merging the physical with the virtual...

Re:Taxation is theft

You missed the point. They're not taxing the rich, they're taxing the productive. The tax is actually agressively anti-progressive, oddly enough.

You tax rich people to keep them from hoarding and just leeching off society. Progressive taxation is supposed to encourage the financing of large projects, as you pay less the more money you dump right back into charities or museums or whatever. If they lack the creative energy to act as a positive force on society, like most rich people, the government takes a portion of their money and does it for them.

This is not what the game was doing. The game was charging people in-game money for building intricate stuff that uses up the company's real-world server resources. The people who this affects most are the in-game philanthropists who spend their money on public-use cool stuff. The protesters are arguing that the company is hurting itself by discouraging the insane art projects that slow down the servers but attract new users needed to pay to upgrade the servers.

There is no point about so-called "progressive" taxation, because there is no economy for anybody to try and progress, or fail to progress, there's just a company that doesn't want to risk scaling up their MMORPG.

Re:Taxation is theft

At some point you are going to realize that there is more to life than productivity and wealth... Unfortunately most people on reach that state after they are in their 50's...

Sivaram Velauthapillai

How about Canada?

How about Canada? I welcome my socialist friends up north...

Is the "War" on Drugs getting you down?
Is the "war" on terrorism depressing you?
Is your Imperial government making you uneasy?
Are you worried about your education systems?
Are you scared of walking in the "wrong" part of town?

Fear not... Canada is the answer to all*...

* Please check in guns at the border. Thank you :)

Sivaram Velauthapillai

Oooh, ooh, where's my "Ayn Rand is a Whore" quote?

"Do you want to have a good time?" said a voice from a doorway.

"As far as I can tell," said Ford, "I'm having one. Thanks."

"Are you rich?" said another.

This made Ford laugh.

He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture. "Do I look rich?" he said.

"Don't know," said the girl. "Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you'll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people ..."

"Oh yes?" said Ford, intrigued but careful. "And what's that?"

"I tell them it's OK to be rich."

Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only a bass player getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.

Ford stopped and peered into the dark doorway.

"You what?" he said.

The girl laughed and stepped forward a little out of the shadow. She was tall, and had that kind of self-possessed shyness which is a great trick if you can do it.

"It's my big number," she said. "I have a Master's degree in Social Economics and can be very convincing. People love it. Especially in this city."

"Goosnargh," said Ford Prefect, which was a special Betelgeusian word he used when he knew he should say something but didn't know what it should be.

-DNA, Duh.

Re:SAD NEWS - MICHAEL MOORE DEAD AT 41!

Woah, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand and boss of the World Trade Organisation?

Or do you mean some other Mike Moore?

mod parent troll

The good news is that his ass is so fat he needed to buy two plane tickets. That means there was one fewer hard-working, non commie-pinko, American on that plane when it crashed.

(OT, I know, but...) Would someone seriously tell me why people post stuff like this? I'm not super offended or anything, I just don't get it, really...
is it like a weird sexual fetish or can't they find alt.troll or are they really grade-schoolers or what? (The trolls at Fark usually stay on topic at least, and sometimes they are even subtle...)
TIA!

A Very Appropriate Department

If you're wondering what William Shatner said best, click here [stilldesigning.com]. Because timothy sure hit the nail on the head this time.

Re:Taxation is theft

I believe they tried this "less taxation on the wealthy than on the poor" thing in France. It was followed by the French Revolution. Sure, try it elsewhere. I always wanted to decapitate rich people. And poor people.