[...] has been building a series on Trust. I find the meandering through all things real and virtual, personal and sociological, to [...]

[...] That’s really the problem; of the three, it’s having a relationship with a community that doesn’t scale very well, as I have written about before in my series “On Trust” (1, 2, side note, 3, 3.5. [...]

And I agree with you on the Player vs Designer game, particularly when players start trying to find reasons to stay in a game they completed to the level they could complete it.

Heh, if LambdaMOO fascinates you, I assume you’ve read “The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat”?

While I got a bit into semantics on the whole power switch thing, I do in general agree that authority and the masses generally work best when there’s a mutually beneficial arrangement to them. There’s of course ways to control the perception of such benefit (protection, insular superiority, etc.). But in general, truly mutual benefits can be self-sustaining. With a lot of work on both ends, including a purposely self-aware society and a purposely self-aware authority that forces itself open to periodic trimming.

MMOGs I think are a bit like this. There’s a core group of purposely self-aware members who think they’re the voice for the masses, a self-aware authority that only sometimes recognizes the breadth of their full powerbase, and the mutually beneficial element that ties both together in the actual game itself. Faith is a huge bond here. Faith in the world being there, faith in the teams that manage it and, importantly, faith in those teams to manage others.

And that’s where I think an authority relationship in one MMOG is very different from another. For the most part, I think it breaks down between PvE and PvP:

PvE- Player vs game, a contrived cooperative experience players play at their own defined pace. Everyone’s a guaranteed hero if they can manage their own expectations. Other people are in the way often though, so GMs are seen as both ombudsman and dispute resolvers.

PvP- Players are their own government after a fashion. The devs are seen as people to make the world work and to continue to chase the paper tiger of pure balance in the face of ongoing game changes and emergent behavior. However, players otherwise expect to make their own rules.

The LambdaMOO story always fascinates me because, a) it is an example of something I’ve long believed in; and, b) happened so long ago. That’s a future blog entry for me actually, how all this new found knowledge isn’t really so new, a wonderful example of human history and how few people actually understand the patterns it pretense, on a smaller scale. And I say this as someone who truly did once think I was learning stuff at the pace it was happening

I can’t see any fiscally-responsible decision being made to shut down a successful game (as in, one that generates more money than it costs).

Don’t forget opportunity costs in your calculations. Even tiny tiny MMOs are sustainable businesses, but the worst thing from a business perspective is to be just barely breaking even, unable to grow.

You’re right, though, that the business considerations add more layers of complexity. One glaring example is that transparency and business often do not mix, particularly as regards notions of brand image (though the comments on brands from a while back do touch on this).

Everyone has someone to report to, whether it’s a parent company or stockholders. As such, the true power to me isn’t the ability to shut things down. I don’t really see a “true power” here, but more, an abstract/complex relationship

For the purposes of the discussion, however, the power to turn the system off isn’t a proactive power, really; it’s merely the ultimate threat. It’s the symbolic summary of “the forces that keep the virtual world operating.” It’s what is used as the justification for the authority held by the game operator.

We’ve seen in various other forms of Internet communities that as long as there is a centralized server where data is stored, even grants to the common weal often flounder because of the basic necessity of keeping the trains running on time. Someone starts up a website, announces that everyone gets a say, and keeps it running. After some amount of time, insufficient donations come in, or there’s a technical problem, or something interferes with the operator’s life, and bam! He starts having to exercise authority.

It might be his hosting company that actually has their finger on the power switch, but it doesn’t really matter from the community’s point of view, unless they can appeal to that company somehow.

This is part of what I am getting at with these discussions; there is a common ground here between the authority and the community. If bth are ultimately answerable to a higher-up authority such as the bandwidth and hosting bill, then they have common ground for considering themselves parts of the same community. Similarly, in both cases their inalienable rights (departure for players, and turning things off for admins) are both destructive of the community. That’s why these are a poor basis for discussing trust.

Let me draw the analogy. A captain and a bunch of passengers are all on a lifeboat in the ocean. The passengers are unhappy with where the boat’s going, but their only recourse is to jump overboard. The captain ultimately has the ability to scuttle the boat, and he uses this power to mandate a bunch of rules the passengers must obey.

The thing is, if anyone exercises these powers, then nobody gets where they are going, captain included. Yes, in the end the captain may well be answerable to someone else, but as long as he can keep radioing in, they’ll probably leave him alone.

Given that nobody has yet trumped the power of the power switch, and if we take all the above as a given

I can’t personally take that as a given. The larger these games get, the greater their need to generate revenue. With all the rules surrounding that, I can’t see any fiscally-responsible decision being made to shut down a successful game (as in, one that generates more money than it costs). As stupid as the analogy may sound, I gotta go with the lines in Matrix: Revolutions, where the President/Ruler of Zion talks about how while they could shut off the machines that give Zion life (air, potable water, etc.), doing so would kill them all.

Everyone has someone to report to, whether it’s a parent company or stockholders. As such, the true power to me isn’t the ability to shut things down. I don’t really see a “true power” here, but more, an abstract/complex relationship between players and developers and publishers and venture capitalists and stock holders. Some of that is being covered in these Trust discussions, but I think we may be at a point where the business end of things should be added.

Raph wrote: I seem to recall getting yelled at by a lot of players for saying “Cultures define and refine themselves through conflict.”

Because they don’t know their history. People need to take responsibility for their own temporal ignorance. History is defined by winners and losers in individuals and groups. This doesn’t always mean “war” though. It just means that, for the most part, cultures are not created nor managed in perpetuity solely because of some collective love fest

In MMOs, the conflict is the common enemy, first of ignorance as everyone in your group learns the game, then the game itself as everyone looks to maximize it. When that maximization is done, or has been deemed unachievable, things start to break down at a rate proportionate to group size.

This is why the Internet hasn’t magically unified humanity any more than TV or print was going to, regardless of what people thought would happen at those times. Being able to communicate to a larger audience first means learning just how diverse that audience is. Unifying them is a longer goal, achieved through a bunch of steps based on profitability (whether profitability in power or money or resources or all of them).

In my opinion, of course

[...] Earlier I mentioned the ways in which countries are chopping the Internet apart, creating national walled gardens where the perceptions of reality are literally different, thanks to the filtering of information. [...]

Conflict usually mean winners and losers, victims and aggressors…

I’m still in lurk mode, but I noted that people didn’t notice (or at least didn’t comment on) the significance of “usually” in that statement. Ideally, conflict would never result in winners and losers; it would merely result in what Stephen R. Covey describes as a Win/Win scenario. But that’s notably atypical: the expectable outcome is usually a loser (and a winner).

Just pointing that out. Conflict is simply too broad a term to conflate with most positive or negative notions. Re-lurk.

Whenever there’s a quantity, people want to stake a claim to their share, in many ways. So it’s little wonder people stake claims to space in MMOs. And if there’s one thing that makes people fighting mad, it’s not having their space intruded on, rather it’s having it done so when they have no recourse. It’s all part of the social animal we are.

UO defined that. You got PKed, and while it was claimed you had recourse (you can kill them) it didn’t really work that way. But it’s true, you could kill them. Why didn’t it work in a socially acceptable way? Because they didn’t stay dead. It became a contest of attrition, and it was weighted heavily in the PKers favor. They could or would do things that other players wouldn’t, and that gave them the advantage. They used tactics to make sure they had the advantage, almost always. There was no justice (reminded of the movie “The Golden Child”). And UO never gave players a way to achieve justice, instead always protecting the game play of the PKers. OK, we saw how that turned out. Instead, they took away more and more liberties. Just like the games since. But that still left problems, because we as social animals have lost some of our space along with that.