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Why Online Games Are Dictatorships according to Cory Doctorow

April 16th, 2007 (Visited 4184 times) Tags:

Cory’s article for InformationWeek on why and/or whether online games can be democratic is really interesting. Note that he’s lumping Second Life into the same bucket, by the way, on the grounds that your wealth in SL can vanish at any time at Linden’s whim.

The core of his argument is that while democracy can be really fun, actually governing sure isn’t, and interactions with governments tend not to be either. And that this poses challenges for any world (just as it does for the real world!):

This is where the plausibility of my democratic, co-operative, open source virtual world starts to break down. Elected governments can field armies, run schools, provide health care (I’m a Canadian), and bring acid lakes back to health. But I’ve never done anything run by a government agency that was a lot of fun. It’s my sneaking suspicion that the only people who’d enjoy playing World of Democracycraft would be the people running for office there. The players would soon find themselves playing IRSQuest, Second Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Life, and Caves of 27 Stroke B.

It may be a bit much of a tall order to ask virtual worlds to solve the problem of government being fun. But if people care enough about the outcomes of government, there will be plenty of people who participate even if it isn’t fun. Particularly if they can be compensated in some way for the thankless bureaucratic jobs that would likely ensue.

Past experiments in full democratic governance, like LambdaMOO, ran afoul of the core issues of government itself: impatience, special interests, dirty politics, and so on. No doubt Cory’s hypothetical system would run across the same, because politics are politics regardless of whether they are virtual.

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Dearest Copernicus: Joost Schuur's blog wrote on April 17th, 2007 at 8:01 am:

major Korean online game companies outside of their home country (updated) for FY2006. Surprisingly, most of them aren’t making any net profits overseas, with NHN Corporation and leading the pack through their foothold in Japan. MMO veteran Raph Koster points to a recent piece by author Cory Doctorow about why online games are dictatorships. Cory believes that self-governing a community simply isn’t fun. The third iteration of Guitar Hero is due to support

Second Thoughts: Blog Log: No Mention in Lansing! wrote on April 19th, 2007 at 4:30 am:

[...] o I would have liked to do more with Cory Doctorow’s article about games being online dictatorships because I felt he resigned himself too much to them (even in a way celebrating them as gamesters do) but I didn’t have time, so I responded on Raph Koster’s blog. [...]

CDS Discussion :: View topic - Cory Doctorow on Virtual world Democracy, Citizenship wrote on April 19th, 2007 at 7:59 am:

[...] Some commentary here: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/04/16/why-online-games-are-dictatorships-according-to-cory-doctorow/ …and of course, my commentary, below. I’m not sure I agree with Cory’s assessment, bleak as [...]

Tess said on April 16th, 2007 at 9:51 pm:

Cory makes many good points, but I think where his article falls down is in his failure to distinguish the possibilities of democracy that exists within the scope and constraints of the virtual world, and democracy that exists on the meta level.

By necessity, virtual worlds which are games must eschew the latter, as players are almost guaranteed to vote all the fun clear out of their games. Imagine how quickly all life on the planet Earth would become extinct if all the citizens of the planet could vote on things like how long a day was, or how much oxygen should be in the air. This is not to say that democracy is bad — but rather that it is a political system that works very well for some sorts of things, and not others.

In contrast, in-game Democracy is a perfectly viable game mechanic, depending on the sort of game you’re making. Model UN simulations are, after all, just LARPs for future diplomats, aren’t they?

“A Tale in the Desert” does some very interesting things with democracy. Democracy in ATITD is mostly in-game, with enough meta in there for enforcement. That is, if, for example, players voted that only Sages of Art are allowed to wear a certain hairstyle, there might be a small code change to enforce this rule. This prevents players from having to deal with running the executive and judicial branches of government — which is good in many ways, and also bad in a few. The player democracy has one of the most dangerous meta powers: the ability to ban a player. However, it does not have the power to adjust the natural laws or scarcity of resources in any way.

There’s a great deal of info, including a list of player-written laws, here: http://wiki.atitd.net/tale3/Laws

Wolfe said on April 17th, 2007 at 12:14 am:

Politics is one of the things that make guilds fun to run for a long time. The context is not about democracy but as Tess said it is about the game systems and peoples opinions.

(Pretending at democracy can do a lot for the opinion part of the politics but little for the practical sige of the politics game.)

Rich Bryant said on April 17th, 2007 at 3:08 pm:

Best article by Cory that i’ve ever seen. Excellent, and clearly explained too.

Moses said on April 18th, 2007 at 4:13 am:

Cory’s article is certainly thought-provoking; the analogies with citizenship in a nation are useful. I’m surprised by how he overlooked how appropriate :

– Linden Labs can delete your shop, wipe your L$ balance, even lock your password to your avatar… but (usually not democracy, but America’s been doing this lately, and laws to allow this can be voted in) a meatspace government can go to your bank and withdraw money for back taxes, seize your property for “imminent domain,” and hold you in detention, sometimes pressing charges, sometimes on nebulous suspicious of anti-government activity.

– Evercraft is no fun, your friends are playing Warquest, this has ruined the value of the Evercraft golding and you can’t bring it with you to Warquest. There’s a lot of people who think Mexiquest is no fun, the pesold coin isn’t worth it, and they risk life and limb to try to play the Americraft game even if it means starting as a level 1 labourer again with no guild of friends. Thank the maker I’m not risking my ability to play games ever again when I want to switch from playing Second Sims to mEVEtrix Online.

Sure, it would be *nice* to move avatars and wealth freely between virtual worlds/nations, but don’t mistake that we’ve failed to include things that we have in the real world.

jbrandt said on April 18th, 2007 at 1:09 pm:

The problem with the ban power in ATITD is that nobody who will use the ban has been elected to the position that gives them that power. It’s kind of frustrating, actually, because the Demi-Pharaohs (the ones who _can_ ban somebody) pretty much won’t, ever. And if you try to run on a platform of being willing to use the ban, a significant portion of the populace will not vote for you ever.

There are arguments going on at http://www.atitd.net/forum right now. Look under “Laws” and “Ban Richter”.

Prokofy Neva said on April 18th, 2007 at 3:09 pm:

Cory’s argumentation is like the tekkie argumentation we see coming from Edward Castronova in his book “Synthetic Worlds”. In it, he says that government requires “customer service” and that the endless demand for this “customer service” isn’t realistic for a company and therefore can’t be implemented. In fact, he even sort of gloats that you never see any CS agents in WoW, and describes this positively as an indication of a kind of user-driven or user-prefererd anarchy.

Of course, in SL, these CS agents are constantly present and constantly intervening in the world. But they are showing many signs of fatigue. In fact, they just closed Live Help because it was too draining. With the new feature of hiding one’s online status, the accessibility of Lindens completely dried up, and only those lucky enough to have snagged their friendship cards before the change can see if they log on and approach them for service.

Sure, governance is work. And we pay taxes to hire government employees to do that work.

But both Castronova and Doctorow WAY overstate the work involved. Castronova wants to have bots or AIs that are like the instance bosses or whatever that clear you on the basis of factions. That will work for games, but my God, don’t put that in a real-life type of situation with business and universities and non-profits like SL, please.

Doctorow is right that our property is only like a dacha under Stalin (or Putin for that matter) where only services to the state get you the use of that perk during your lifetime, and it can be lost for disloyalty. I like that analogy — it’s perfect.

But I do think that with all the tier fees we pay, we really have the right to expect more! And that means a) a seat on the board of Linden Lab to represent residents who pay tier collectively b) some policies like banning ad farms and club FPS thieves in order to cease the devaluation of land purchases c) enabling of cooperation tools at the meta level, or creative use of the group tools by Governor Linden herself to make the problems of repair, prim clean-up, griefing, etc. more manageable.

Right now, the only direction LL seems to be going in is making more capacity for more ban-happy !@#$tards. I’m finding it fascinating that the ATITD people aren’t electing the ban-happy kids. In SL, with no elections, and only happy Soviet yes-style voting on the features voting system, the ban-happy are in power, and ban the hell out of everybody they possibly can, creating networks of fiefdoms and warring principalities.

I’m sorry, but this really facile and stupid moral equivalency of game gods with “America” has just GOT to stop. In 99.99 percent of the cases, the government does NOT wrongfully seize your property. Get a grip. Your life functions and the life of hundreds of others function in America precisely because we do not have a government like a Russian government that can arbitrarily search and seize in this fashion, and its to the credit of legions of lawyers, politicans, human rights activists, citizens that it isn’t a country where that really does happen, come on, don’t be *silly*. Sure, there are cases of wrongful seize. And — remedies for that situation which you don’t have with a game company!

The word you are looking for is “eminent domain” not “imminent” and frankly, it isn’t “imminent” because in most cases you have warning and you have due process hour side. It’s simply hysterical and so typical of the Internet mind-meme that people can sit on their computers on forums and spout nonsense about the government seizing everything. I wish they could spend five minutes in a country where that *really* happens to get a BIG dose of reality.

What I find uber scary is that all these types in the gaming and science fiction world like Doctorow are finding it *permissible* and even *desirable* to have totalitarian systems in place instead of democratic governance and are making the argumentation for it on these nouveau cyber type of grounds of efficiency, or player anarchy, or “the tools enable it”.

Democracy would spoil not only a lot of online medieval games where people want to experience the thrill of having illicity, arbitrary, and cruel powers over other human beings, it would also spoil the fun of a lot of RP on Second Life.

But that is no reason to hardwire that norm into the foundations of the Metaverse. We are people, and we need to have government for, by, and of us.

Rich Bryant said on April 19th, 2007 at 9:56 am:

Loghorroea is not attractive.

Jim Strathmeyer said on April 20th, 2007 at 9:54 am:

No good Democracy in video games? When we vote on what level to play next in Battlefield it seems to work out pretty well.

Gwyneth Llewelyn said on April 21st, 2007 at 6:41 pm:

Cory sadly is right when he points out that, in Second Life, you don’t truly own anything, since Linden Lab, through their Terms of Service, has all the powers to remove whatever you’ve got (even your name!) at a whim, and there is no recourse — ever. Linden Lab’s decisions to remove yourself from their platform are final and not appealable. Even a suit against them would very likely not do much — since you have agreed to the ToS that entitles them to do whatever they please with your account and content there.

I find it almost next to impossible to “have a seat at the LL Board” while Linden Lab continues to be a (now profitable) private company. Instead, what might happen in the future is something slightly different — Linden Lab not being the only provider of a “Second Life Grid”, but a “regulation authority” between several different providers, all hosting server space for their own grids, but having all grids interconnected.

This model is actually being tested — Linden Lab now operates two server farms (one in California, the other in Texas) and they’re still figuring out some interconnection issues. Once those are cleared and fixed, the next logical step would be to start adding more and more server farms, and, obviously, sub-license the technology to other companies (IBM comes to mind) and allow them to run their own grids, but interconnected to Linden Lab’s “main grid” for a fee.

Once that happens, the “dictatorial and tyrannical” powers of Linden Lab need to be reviewed. IBM, obviously, will want to exercise the same level of authority on “their” grid as Linden Lab; on the other hand, they might disagree with Linden Lab’s removal of an IBM user and wishes to appeal Linden Lab’s decision.

So, for a while, it will be clear that under the agreement between Linden Lab and other “grid providers”, the issue of account and content removal will need to get addressed by a third, neutral party. If they do it the easy way, they’ll create a “joint committee” between all “grid providers” and handle abuse reports there; if they do it correctly, they will get elected representatives among the user base to create, effectively, a “judiciary” — an appeals board that might review decisions on improper termination of accounts.

Now, to “elect representatives”, you need some sort of system in place. Hopefully it will be democratic — at least, electorial — using, say, ATIDT as a reference (not perfect, but good enough).

The issue here is one of establishing the timeline for something like that to happen. Right now, Linden Lab’s own priorities seem to be quite different: letting abuse be handled locally, and reserve their own teams for “federal level” issues, like deliberate attempts to hack into the system to break down the grid. What this will mean on a first step is a Balkanisation of Second Life — disconnected communities, each handling issues at the local level, banning griefers and abusers locally, and offering “protection services” from the unruly crowd in SL. This will mostly mean that if you want to “feel safe”, you’ll have to live on your corner of the world — which, in fact, might not be “democratic” at all, and the power to remove all your content (even if you’re actually paying for having it displayed!) will be given to local authorities. Even more than that: a system will be put in place allowing people to subscribe to “ban lists” — not unlike anti-spam systems for email nowadays — and “blacklist” users at whim. Everybody subscribing to the same blacklists might thus effectively prevent a user — again, at whim — to roam the world freely.

So, in my opinion, I think there will be a phase of “less democracy” in Second Life — as tyrannical powers are more and more delegated to local authorities, and less and less remaining at the “federal” level (ie. Linden Lab’s). What will come next will depend mostly on the model of growth that Linden Lab will devise for Second Life.

I might disagree that this is the only way to run the Second Life grid — it’s just one among many possible ones. However, it’s the one chosen by Linden Lab, and enforced through their Terms of Service.

Why Online Games Are Dictatorships according to Cory Doctorow

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