– When the game gods’ “assets” are in fact rented and paid for by the population, and a very large portion of expenses and profit come from the customers themselves paying for the servers, yet, they should get to have a say over the control over these assets, as partners. The concept of “voting them off their own servers,” is extreme, since they lease them and own the code for the server software. But far more democracy, participation, and control can be yielded to residents in many ways precisely because they pay the freight and make the content.

– I guess you don’t get into Second Life very much? What did Linden Lab make? They made some software that accesses servers and also they give you a client to download to access those servers. That’s the basic tabula resa. But you, as residents, particularly the content-creation class and land-owning class, *invest your own money, and sometimes LOTS of money* into what overlays those servers and that basic software. There are millions of pieces of resident-designed content and scripts and textures. LL concedes copyright over these items (it’s of limited nature due to their TOS caveats, but generally you can make, buy, sell, and cash out without interference). Given that residents make the world, it’s *their property” we’re talking about — and THEY are the hippie egalitarians if they think we are all supposed to throw everything in the pot and THEY get to take it like socialist thiefs in the night, and we don’t get to benefit from it or contribute to decisions about it.

I hope that will put paid to your cynical little attempt to play gotcha on me.

- Should people be able to vote “game-god” creators (Linden Labs) out of control of their own assets, as he has virulently proposed in the past, or

- Should people who create things (like Linden Labs) have some sort of natural authority over it that hippie egalitarian-types can’t touch?

I can’t tell yet whether they are still standing by their bias. I still see some of them clinging to this notion that all these people are going to be painting happy little trees in the corner, and each one will deed to the Group their 512 on command, “as one,” and each one is only looking for tools to help them all hold hands and jump in the pool together. So I keep pushing back on this. We’ll see how they turn out.

I’m fully aware that it might turn out down the line that some of the features of the old hippie tool set will turn out to have been terribly important, and that once we’ve lost them and gone to this new granulated tool set, we’ll realize it.

I don’t know enough about how to project and predict all the paths that the programming and its results will lead to.

One thing I see right away that’s a bummer is that “open groups” no longer means anything.

That is, I’ve always maintained, in an idealistic way unlike any other rentals agent or mall owner, an open group that anyone can join by pressing JOIN. That means that I have to put up with a certain percentage of deliberate griefers who join in order to invade group-set objects and strew malicious scripts into them. In fact, groups have gotten a lot less groupy by having to undo this “group set” option lately to prevent the wave of griefing based on this feature (it’s not an exploit, but misuse of a feature originally intended for collaboration).

So now…sure, people can join and come in as what you might call Everyman. or “basic member”. Everyman is the default rung with the perms that all will have. So Everyman perms might involve, say, the right to put out your objects on group land.

But I can’t have Everyman have ALL the perms, like the next rung up that one might call “tenant” or “officer” because if I open up a group with perms intended for the next granulated level, like ‘able to deed group objects” or “able to set ban lists,” where any griefer can come in and deed prims and undeed prims to the group, they might go around not only destroying everybody’s TV but also banning them from their own property. It’s hard to figure out how to give the perm to everybody without having to risk some of them will use it to grief each other.

Nevertheless, I do hope to issue all those perms and keep the groups all open, possibly after a 24 hour or 3 day wait or something.

It seems that in a game like SL, where content and social network/community, and accompanying commerce are for lack of a better term “the game” rather than go about designing utopia, and attempting to hard code it socially (therein lies the problem, pesky human behavior seems resistant to coding, rulesets, laws etc) with some some “group-think” ideology, they would apply loose rulesets and allow for a more organic growth, in other words allow (I hope I understood you right)to choose from (eg. socialistic, cumministic, democratic, liberal, conservative, facist, oligarchy, capitalistic) kind of like a buffet of socio-political frameworks.

But heres the rub, and where I could see an “elitist artisan caste” (I think that was the term from the interview) system comming (and possibly egoism) comming into play

If I design a system from the perspective of communal ownership, and the system naturally progresses organically weather I like it or not (as any human system is wont to do), and I am forced at some point to formally offer “options” for organizing groups socially, as it were. I have a vested interest in maintaining that the orgional (as the patron of the system) ideals will be more successful than those which subsequently follow. This for control, and for egoism purposes. For how could the origionator, or creator be wrong???

Or rather the question is then this:
Did the designer make a mistake in the origonal design? If so then the design is flawed? (*insert horrified gasps from the audiance here*)

It takes an enlightened designer to admit they made a mistake…..

This seems to be what your fighting in SL Prokofy, and if it is thats an admirable fight because tekkie geek content creation types of people…well youll be hard pressed to get them to admit to having a flawed design…ever. Thats my experiance anyhow

My advice: take your wins where you can, even incrimental progress is better than none at all

Democracy tends to go together with capitalism. That is, you might have capitalism in a society with less of a liberal democracy like a Russia or a Singapore or a Russia, but then you really begin to question what democracy is, and whether it isn’t socialism or state capitalism, and a variant of socialism, all over again. If you’re going to put in the qualifier of *liberal* democracy, it’s hard to find a country that doesn’t also have capitalism, at least of the shopkeepers’ type, even if they have nationalized industries and transportation.

The social networks that people value — they always gush that they hate games or are tired of games and worlds “except for the people, they’re great” — aren’t so valuable as to keep people paying $500 or $100 a month.
In fact, you’ll find they may not pay $50. Usually what happens is they discover when their world or game is REALLY played out, their social network, once converted to Yahoo Messenger, where they have to hear more about people’s mundane RL day-to-day problems and less about their heroic exploits on quests, etc., begins to pale. So I’m not sure that you can so easily separate the land/builds/game of the worlds from the social networks, though people think you can.

Plato’s Republic is an ideal, with few if any RL counterparts. The Soviet Union or the Ottoman Empire are real things that we can study, however. And what’s dismaying is that the SL world replicates all the problems of those empires, and adds on to them a few new horrors (like the ability to instantly scrape all the personal information and sales data and communications off every single citizen inworld).

I spend a lot of time on my blog not only complaining, as so many do, but making very detailed and specific proposals, like proposals on how to fix the auction system or the group tools. And the interesting thing is, if you follow group tools reform, the Lindens actually came around on this, making an interesting trajectory over a year. Some day, scholars will study this — they don’t find it interesting now, but they will. Here’s my very short and very subjective summary:

In the beginning, as tekkies in a wiki with all the wiktopian and wiktatorship sensibilities that go with it, the Lindens fashioned what I like to call “the hippie dope smoking tools” which distributed all income of any sort equally to every single member of a group, regardless of whether he had put in more tier or labour or products to the group, and also enabled any officer of the group to steal the land out from under the other officers. The members could also trigger “officer recall,” so that if I, as officer, bought land with my hard-earned RL dollar, and put tenants on it, they could rebel, and push me off my land and take it over, even though they had never paid a dime on it.

Come in and get a snapshot of this now; it’s a marvel. It’s as close as anyone has ever done to coding and actually programming the deep flaws of the Soviet Union into a simulated format; to coding the crime that is at the heart of socialism. When income distributes equally, nobody can do anything coherent with it and they cease to value and respect it; then inevitably someone will steal it for their own good — they will commit crime. When land is held in common, when it is nobody’s and “group land” it leads to this sort of crime, very commonly.

In fact, the deeded objects became the smartest thing in this system, an inanimate object housed the greatest truth: when any officer pressed “return all objects from parcel” the deeded object didn’t know what to do. It didn’t know where to go. It couldn’t go back into the lost and found folder of any one officer; it was “the group’s”. So it did the only sensible thing in such an awful system; it self-destructed, deleted, never to be retrievable from anything ever again. Gah, lost a lot of L$1500 group-deeded TVS that way.

I began pushing reform of this circle-jerk about 18 months ago, in long posts, in short posts, in group meetings in world, in meeting with Lindens. I just banged away on this like you cannot imagine. In utter exasperation with these Lindens, I finally wrote a satirical post, What if the Pizza Guy Stole LL? which I think they finally read at the lunch table at the lab there, in between fatty breaks, so to speak. I invited them to try to imagine if they had to run Linden Lab the way they were forcing us to run our groups inworld — I think that concentrated the mind more wonderfully, but in fairness, many of them were already trying to figure out how to fix these group tools even for such mundane things as communications among their own volunteers’ groups.

Of course there were other people pushing along with me — most of the land dealers had a hellish time trying to get land groups to work right and had to devise all these workarounds. The Lindens confessed that in fact groups had never been conceived to hold land and work as businesses — they just imagined themselves endlessly doing those tekkie wikis.

Originally, LL put a bonus into the groups of 10 percent free tier coverage, or free land credits to buy more land without additional monthly maintenance, i.e. 50,000 m2 would generate 500 m2 tier free. It wasn’t used very much except for some mainland groups like mine. The groups they especially wished would use it, groups with a more utopian concept of group ownership and collaboration, or “collectives,” like Lusk, turned out to be a tiny minority.

A war on the forums ensued and in IRC and everywhere else. It wasn’t a very visible war. You can see the transcripts of some of the group public meetings in the forums section called Group Covenants, etc. It worked like this: land dealers and businesses of the modern type with one CEO and a board, and a few investors who were “officers” but didn’t want to see any one of their number steal the whole thing, lobbied for changes in the group tools — at least to be able to toggle the switches to make “CEO and board” or “hippie commune” or even “slave and subs,” i.e. one officer ruling over the rest of the group who had no privileges.

Yet the communists, fearing that their obsessive equality ideals were going to be undone by even having the *option* of toggling them OFF, began to rally for their kind of changes, which didn’t emphasise ensuring CHOICE.

One Linden told me that it was easier to code the King and his knights model of one strong CEO and members, rather than having the group collective — they *deliberately* made a harder thing to code *to fit their ideology*. Some might deny this now; this was the history told to me by at least one no longer there now.

So these new reviewed group tools that will enable you to opt in or opt out or select whether you want the hippie commune or the modern business with a CEO and board or anything in between, or a dom and subs, are now in preview. And the ideological battle around them is still fierce. The Lindens have their favourites in this battle, of course, because some Lindens are still clinging to the idea that there are all these selfless, utopian tekkie wiki types out there who dream of all putting in exactly the same amount of money and tier into a group, and all happily sharing their proceeds like good socialists. The reality of the grid though, just as in real life, keeps defying their notions. The one socialist experiment inworld that even in true socialist form got a free sim from the Lindens to start (unlike the rest of us capitalists who had to buy our sims at retail prices!) struggled for a few years never growing much beyond itself, had a huge drama and constitutional crisis, and split into warring factions and had huge emergency lock-out type of confrontations where the people who originally created the content were locked out of their own creation.

So to try to challenge me with a statement like, well what do you actually like? And what do think could make it better? and what are YOU doing to make it better — the age-old exhortations of socialist leaders who tell intellectuals they should shut up and help bring in the harvest for the People — is simply inapplicable to me. I work REALLY hard to change things. In fact, I think I had some effect!

[...] Comments [...]

everyone enjoys content on thier own terms…

You may have missed that….

Prokofy-

Perhaps Im unclear in my post, so I’ll attempt to clarify. I frankly dont care if someone replicates the endless suburns of San Jose in a VW, if thats thier flavor let em have it. Especially if they are paying to create it.

You’ll note that I actually support your view of valuing community/social networks, trust me Im about as pro-gamer as anyone. Its just that on a philosophical fundamental level when treating a system that objectivly assigns value to an economic system, (which is what the interview was fndamentally about) you cannot use the same objective criteria for valuation of a social/community network.

Its subjective, this is the realm of sociology, anthropology, not economy. Well some have tried, Marx, Friedman, Keynes and come close, but all models are flawed. We can assign value based on what people are willing to pay, quantifiable value. That you are willing to pay your monthly fee for a game, even if its only to socialize participate is the quantifiable value of your network. But if the fee goes up to 100? 200? 500? a month….see your threshold tolerance is economically based.

Now if you ask me to assign value to your community of freinds and what theyve created. Well I cant economically assign a valuation to your friends or your level of immersion. I can say, yes thats important, because its your community that brings you back, fundamentally keeps you a customer, and its important to foster community, otherwise MMO’s dont exist for you or me….

Now you cant rail against the powers that be in SL on socio-political terms, on the one hand railing against a communist soviet politik and on the other promoting free marketeer principles and on another complaining harshly about the Merchantile Artisan class. Get your politics and economics right, either your pro-market or your in the middle, or your not, theres a full spectrum of political phlosophy to choose from, and everyone has thier preferances. But please at least try and not jump from one political spectrum to the next, by paragraph. And dont confuse a political system with a economic system, democracy does not equate to capitalism. Just as totalitarian states do not always equate to closed markets. (ref. Plato “The Republic” for a clean breakdown) so perhaps what your experiancing in SL is related to this confusion.

You completely invalidate your arguements and well yeah, Im a geek, I have a penchant for liking things logical, and I dont mind rabid involvement in ones preferred hobby, but at least try to avoid appearing to be an irrational crazed (if somewhat politically confused) SL player, you assume to much when you assume that because someone wants to understand the system you are playing that they actually care about its socio-political issues.

I cant assign value to your network/community because Im not a member of it, if I was then I could, but that dosnt mean I dont want to understand it or care about it. I think its important to understand it, as its a game, and your a player of it, and as I said Im pro player. My concern is not whats wrong with it, but whats right about it and how can it be even better. So your off base if you think Im making value (or asthetic)judgements about a game I admitted to not playing and know nothing about. I dont form opinions out of ignorance. So I’d prefer to stick to some objective criteria rather than the obvious beef you have with either the content creation caste of your particular game or its dominant social class (Lindens), and your need for player rights.

So what do you actually like about SL Prokofy? And how could it be better?

But I wish I had a dollar for every FF armour, Arabian slave silks, and Goth Castle there are in SL — I’d be rich. They are all over, lots of people make them, they are all aesthetic, and they are all talented. And that’s just my point. What is talent? Talent is often defined as making superbly built or textured creations by CAD and PSP jockeys. But is that talent? Is the humble newbie shack where some far more interesting social/artistic/thought/group experiment going on perhaps the better and higher example? Who is to say?

In this discussion on SL architecture here, Jauani Wu tries to announce by fiat a Builder’s Manifesto. And quite a few of us resist this sort of Zhdanovism, or making any kind of Soviet Artists’ Union sort of canon for the arts.

No, Allen, there isn’t any sort of committee that has to regulate content or clear on aesthetics. That is, not yet, if we can help it! but there are many who in fact would love to see one come into being! The Lindens themselves talk out of two sides of their mouths on this one and probably don’t agree among themselves. On the one hand, they want to tout user-created content and freedom. On the other, they’ll privately tell you that they find all the clutter and dreck out there not helping them sell the platform — there’s a tension between touting user freedom and then having to make sure the PR cameras stay fixed on the user-created content that makes the world look its best — by THEIR lights — and don’t stray on to the junk that is off-putting.

I don’t know how to say this gently, so I won’t: Allen, you must be a geek, and you’re the one who is odd in a setting like this, not the others. That is, you assume that what people love doing when they come on to a virtual world is experimenting with mathematical concepts and shapes, or that making data representational, and showing neural networks or whatever is going to be “fun” or “creative”. That’s because you’ve made an assumption that games, virtual worlds, etc. are just for geeks like yourself, and that this geeky world-view on aesthetics — aesthetics are non-suburbia — is the “norm” if you will, or even “the highest standard”.

But it isn’t. Lots of people come into worlds. Millions and millions more. Non-gamers. Non-geeks. They replicate suburbia. In fact, the people who live in crowded urban settings in apartments or who live in poor countries in Europe and Asia without suburban ranch homes are in fact precisely the people who like to kit out their SL parcels with kick-ass split-level surban homes with lawns and sprinklers. You may find this mediocre, tasteless, Babbitt-like, etc. but there it is — people want to be free, and they don’t want your shimmering and whirling data representation cubes cluttering up their waterfront view, thank you very much. They want to simulate and replicate RL versimilitude. They find that gives them a comfort level in virtual worlds. And why can’t they? And why can’t that world have its own aesthetic criteria, too, so that there is excellence even in replicating downtown Denver or suburban Colorado Springs? Of course there can be.

Go do your thing, and find the other 17 and a half people who want to do your thing with you, but don’t spout in indignation that the rest of the world doesn’t want to do this thing and doesn’t find it compelling or original *shrugs*.

Why would the rest of the world have to have your tastes imposed on it? You don’t like THEIR tastes imposed on you, sensitive, original creative innovative type that you are, ever seeking to represent data in new and exciting ways visually. So don’t do it to others.

>If the content is unregulated, and the barrier to entry is ability or money then I dont see an issue, those are objective assignments of value in a system. Assigning value to a social network/community is a subjective exercise. I dont think we’re solved this little problem in the “meatworld” much less a VW.

In fact, the barrier has even less friction — you don’t have to have “ability” because you can come in and buy other’s work and reassemble it or deploy it. The money of $1.50 US or $10 US for prefabs means the money is not a significant barrier at least for those in the U.S.

The social networks that people subjectively create mean most to them. If the setting for those networks happens to be an old fishing hole on a dock with scripted fishing rods and various cluttery-signs and old tin cans and tires in the water, that’s what they like. You could say, hey, go move into this new aesthetic modern stone and glass build, and they’ll ignore it and leave it untrafficked.

>I can’t sell TV dinners out of the back of my truck. If I wanted to sell a food product for real and in quantity I would need to get a Supermarket chain to agree to carry my product. A pretty high bar to cross.

This is a curious notion, Rik, I’m not sure where you are picking it up. Do you mean to say that you can’t sell anything effectively without a large parcel of land? But that’s not true. People without any land use the third-party shopping sites that take a small commission out of their sales — no world friction at all. People buy stuff for their avatars on their lunch hours, and use credit cards and don’t even log in.

Or people use vendors, that packs many products into one or two prims that have flippable pages, and for $25 a week they rent a stall somewhere, or they take a free 512 land and put out a store on it that people p2p to.

Of course, to have the greatest sales, the greatest name recognition, they’ll probably need to spend $4 per prim in a high-end mall; spend $50 US on the classifieds list per week; have tier per month of at least $25, etc. Still, given the huge amounts of sales that come in for content, the friction isn’t that great, the bar not that high. If you can have a $40,000 income US for a year by paying even $300 US per month, many would find that a more than acceptible cost. If you only get $500 income a month and pay $30 for that, it may also not all be characterized as any kind of “friction”.

What I find skewed about the capitalistic model of SL is that it is capitalist when it wants to be, and socialist when it wants to be, i.e. state capitalism. The land-creators, the Lindens, land-glut when they want to, periodically, to break the backs of the land baron class. They do this by their own admission willingly and readily to keep land priced at an average of $5/m so that ordinary people coming in don’t find land prices so high that they start screaming on the forums. So the only class allowed to thrive is the content-creation class — and among these, only those creators who advance the platform as a whole. So that somebody inventing, say, new HUD or search functions is going to enjoy more beaming Linden attention, approval, and mentions in media interviews, that people who just make some popular dress or piece of furniture.

The free market is not determining the value; there is another, internal, if you will, market of reputational enhancement and Linden approval when you are in sync with their own company’s goals, that constitutes the “real” market.

People spent all these years in MUDs and video games fantasizing that they were back in the Middle Ages wearing tights and clashing with swords to fight monsters and save damsels in distress in castles. With SL, they now have the opportunity to actually live in a real guild-like medieval economy, too, and be at the mercy of the artisan class and their mercantile backers.

[...] Today, Raph published a link and a quick quote from an interview event in Second Life with Julian Dibbell. For a man with so much history and commentary on the genre, and a new book, I found his interview very readable and entertaining. [...]

Talent has always been scarce.

True

Talent is not scarce in SL.

Um, so this is false.

There are a million talented kids logging on.

And this is the false premise that it’s based on. Not all of those kids are talented. Some are. What sorts the talented ones from the not-so? Or more importantly to the person logging into Second Life for the first time, how can he find the good content?

Some places, I’ll point to youtube.com as a random example of someone online using this model, let you search by “most watched” and “Highest rated”, and lets people vote on the content there. Is that the best way? Well, to be sure some ballot boxes get stuffed sometimes, but it’s a good way.

At Second Life, it’s capitalism in action. A good salesman with an OK product will do better than a bad salesman with a better product. But unlike in real capitalism there is no filter between the consumer and the creator. I can’t sell TV dinners out of the back of my truck. If I wanted to sell a food product for real and in quantity I would need to get a Supermarket chain to agree to carry my product. A pretty high bar to cross. That doesn’t mean that supermarkets never carry bad things, but it does mean that as a consumer I can walk up and down the freezer section and feel confident that it wasn’t just the creator that thought it was a good idea but a team of professionals, many of whom have sold frozen good for years, also thought there was a good reason to carry that product. Thus I’m faced with just a few brands to pick from.

And in Second Life every day more kids log on, and create more content. Only some of it is good. And really the Second Life game appears to only fun if you like digging thru content looking for gold nuggets or if you want to play the “Buy my content” game. The second is logically going to be more popular.