[...] Should virtual worlds change the real? March 19th, 2008 (Visited 3305 times) Tags: gdc, jane mcgonigal, prokofy neva, serious games, speaking, ted castronova, WoW [...]

@Taemojitsu: given the part of this thread on religion, the answer to the question asked of Jane is the classic “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Dissembling doesn’t change involvement. That she chooses to take the money is capitalism. But if we are talking about virtual games having a positive change, and in this context, making extraordinary claims about the powers of the game gods, then I have to agree with Prok, and Jane has to accept that she is collaborating with the Tibetan oppressors. Even G.W. Bush gets that. The Beijing Olympics will have a cloud over it both real and virtual.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=iraq+body+count&btnG=Google+Search

The question for the audience then becomes, WHAT can you do, not IF you should do. You do not try to fix ‘capitalism’ in the Real world, as Prokofy Neva is so afraid of, because it’s just not relevant to your tools and domain of action.

Amaranthar, could you please at least skim what I write? Nowhere have I called for forcing RMT on games; for deliberately messing up ingame economies; for ruining your sense of fairness. Nowhere.

I didn’t say you did, I was just asking to get a clearer definition of your view point. The rest of your comment answered that very nicely.

I couldn’t find it (and I’m not going to spend an hour looking for it), but it seems to me Richard has said somewhere that he does not mean to enforce his ideals for a good game on everyone either. So, if that’s correct, I think you are both coming from two directions and meeting in the middle. But (and again, if that’s correct about Richard) neither of you is actually accepting that you’re both in that middle ground.

I do wonder on if Prokofy Neva thinks virtual worlds are good ideas, and if so, how and why.

When Richard talks about virtual worlds and their power, he means games. He doesn’t mean open-ended virtual worlds with an economy like Second Life. He loathes the idea of an arbitrage-based land market, for example, and would remove it completely.

I don’t give some blank check to virtual worlds declaring “they are a good thing”. They are very destructive. They can also be used positively for good. I think most people don’t think about the difference and don’t want to contemplate the consequences. If the anonymity of avatars, especially griefing avatars, was rendered visibly as a white-robed figure with a pointy hat, they would understand it better, perhaps.

I used to be a lot more enthusiastic about virtual worlds 8 years ago than I am now. Now I’m very, very sobered and concerned about what I see. I do think it’s vital to participate in and shape them. The toxicity of doing this could get to anyone, though.

I’m simply not going to sit here and warble on like a Linden about those wonderful opportunities for the disabled and the socially inept to connect. To do so merely invites more snarky comments about how SL is for geeks, losers, and shut-ins. I don’t think you mount a defense of virtual worlds on the strength of how you can use them for psychiatric therapy or occupational therapy.

I think they are a powerful tool and largely unexamined and unknown by the general public, and jealously and even viciously kept from much-needed analysis by their creators.

If you mean more narrowly speaking the social utility or public good of games as games, i.e. WoW, I would have to raise many questions about MMORPG culture which I find insidious and generally destructive and authoritarian. If you mean the “games for change” stuff, I’m really unimpressed and unpersuaded. I’m no more persuaded by lefty that makes a game about evil American oil corporations because he made his religious tract into a game than if he pressed that tract into my hand on the street — if anything, it’s more of a turn-off precisely because of the sense that he is trying very hard to smuggle a message in under cover of the gameplay sweetener.

Like any other tool or artifact, it remains to be seen whether virtual worlds can be used for good by imperfect human beings, whether the tools themselves in fact inexorably lead them to *not* do good because of features built into them. Henrik Bennetsen’s questions matter. I reply instantly about what concerns me: things like the inability to vote “no”.

I do wonder on if Prokofy Neva thinks virtual worlds are good ideas, and if so, how and why.

But Prok, what about those of us who want a game and don’t want the outside influence of RMT messing up the in-game economy? What if we don’t want the inflationary results? What if we want a certain sense of fairness in that a player earns what he has in the game, and doesn’t just buy it on an outside RMT market?

Amaranthar, could you please at least skim what I write? Nowhere have I called for forcing RMT on games; for deliberately messing up ingame economies; for ruining your sense of fairness. Nowhere. No how. And the persistence with which you and others keep saying this is itself a little side study in the amazing inability of any of you gamers to tolerate the slightest bit of criticism of the overall socialist game ethic without flying into hysteria that your very games themselves are in danger (I guess they are *that* brittle!).

Seriously, there’s something really very wrong and insidious about persistently ascribing to me a fake and totally tendentious position of wanting to invade games and re-do them.

Try to see if you can understand this critique in the more subtle sense it is intended, and reason by analogy.

1. This persistent socialism (feudalism isn’t the name for it, no, unless you want to say that Soviet-style socialism is feudal, and perhaps it is) shouldn’t be allowed just to remain as unexamined backdrop — it should be discussed and analyzed for its own sake, but especially when it begins to have pretentions on reality.

2. Richard Bartle feels none of the restraint about banging on worlds that *do* have RMT and crankily demand that they remove their free economies (on his visit to SL he complained about the land market, said it shouldn’t be that way, and even bashed land dealers as people not caring about individual freedom and creativity. So I ask you — *he* gets to do that with open-ended virtual worlds, and nobody gets to examine it?! He gets to do *that very thing you’re complaining about and imagining I’m doing” and nobody complaints? Hell, no.

3. Game makers have to think about the larger problem of what it means when these games get larger and larger, and soon, they are entire nations with a severe game-gold problem that they can only solve by heavy prosecution. There’s something unseemly about a business that claims it is in a magic circle, outside of reality, with its own rules that it asks you to obey, then suddenly doubling back and going outside the magic circle to prosecute the hell out of you, not by banning your or taking away your game loot, but by making you go to real-life jail. It’s a profound cheating, and a profound break in the wall of the game. How come nobody is as upset about *that* as they are at Chinese gold-farmers taking the prospect of harvest affluent white-boys’ allowances as a real business?!

4. Given the difficulty of preserving the integrity of games, and the chronic problem of cheating and gold-farming, and also the emergence of open-ended virtual worlds with economies, will some convergence take place? Will open-ended worlds be forced to become more like controlled games because of fraud considerations or banking regulations? Will games have to become more frank and forthright about selling packets of their game gold for those patrons who would like to skip the grind? These are all challenges for the industry which you can’t pretend doesn’t exist and you can’t say they don’t think about — and a game like EVE Online which is more sophisticated with its economy is precisely that direction of becoming more complex in resolving these issues. So this is an analysis of the industry’s responses and developments; noting that those game companies that figure out how to address this problem (EA-land.com has now welcome user-made content and introduced RMT in its re-engineered Sims Online, for example) may simply attract more customers. That doesn’t mean someone is going to get a law passed in Congress to invade your game and force RMT on you. But good luck keeping up the walls when there are a lot of poor people in the world looking for opportunities.

5. And that brings me to the most unsettling prospect of all of Richard’s socialistic prescriptions. They are made in the name of dignity and equality for all. But they wind up prosecuting hordes of poor people merely looking for economic opportunity. There’s something inherently wrong with that picture. For the sake of the integrity of his RP fiction, people can’t make a buck and feed their families? I think it reveals the chronic internal contradiction and bankruptcy of socialist ideology. It’s more about maintaining the populist and egalitarian fictions of a ruling class than it is actually about helping people.

I also don’t believe that Richard means RMT when he talks about changing the real world through games. I haven’t read all his writings, but my impression is he means through moralistic means, as he mentioned racial intollerance which is a very real concern in real life. I don’t agree with him on that, since we aren’t talking human races, but fantasy races. Fantasy races that are depicted quite different. And the idea of turning “evil” into “misunderstood”, if he means that too, well I just don’t see that as a proper goal. There is evil, and it should not be look at as a simple misunderstanding, or even a complicated one for that matter. But we do have to be careful of what we consider “evil”, too.

You can read right in this thread or the Broken Toys thread plenty of quotes that let you know that of course Richard is for changing the world with his games. He thinks they are benign and good forces for change; he thinks he is benign and well-meaning and good, and that’s why he and others become so offended of my practical expose here of his socialist thinking because I’m also able to show the down side of socialism.

For one, no one is ever really made egalitarian to the hilt when made so forcibly; there will always be one person that lets another skill him up or pays another to skill him up. When you force everyone into equality and make their trading of skills and services with each other appear as exploitation every time, no one buys it, and it criminalizes people. The good thing about capitalism is that it turns that around and says you can create equality before the law and people can trade their time for a skilled-up character. Eventually, the game companies will figure out how both to sell access to levels themselves, but also create rewards for players that really spend the time logged on and grinding themselves. Would these, too, be hacked? Well, not if they are changed all the time and possibly even involve mailing to persons who give addresses and credit cards. This could revive the flagging postal system.

There’s plenty in this thread about racism. I can intellectually understand that sure, races of orcs or monsters that you come to “hate” in a game is not the same thing as hating racism of people. We all get that. Yeah, everything in a game is a fiction, and is only a kind of analogy of real life.

But…I do think all of this takes its toll. There is a horrid MMORPG culture that has brewed on the Internet, been reinforced by geeks, and which bleeds into other creations, not games, particularly social media and virtual worlds. The very notion that someone with a different opinion, who persists in maintaining their view, is an “energy creature” with diabolical will, an evil race, which must be shunned and ridiculed and never “fed” — this is all sheer MMORPGery. It’s awful stuff. All of this creates a terrible culture that has already influenced reality, and for the worse.

Prokofy, what irks me about your use of the word “socialism” is that you use it in a way that is plain wrong.

Socialism: people get what they need and provide help to others by their best effort. Do what you can, get what you need.

If SL was to be turned into a communist state then the players would have to buy Linden from SL, then set up a foundation and ask for donations from the players to run it. Then they would make decitions by voting using true democracy. That would be real communism in SL. Alternatively they could run away with the client and code their own server.

Stalinist-Marxism would be to take over the virtual world by whatever means of power you have. Blogs… Hacking… Then seize the means of production (code), start your own server then set up a hard idealistic regime which is to brainwash the population into having the right ideas under strict control to prevent a set-back, then you gradually introduce communism. Which, of course, is a rather hopeless proposition… Please note that very few marxist-communistic states disposed of capitalism. They had cash.

Get this:
COMMUNISM == THE PLAYERS SHOULD OWN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION (THE CODE AND SERVERS). If players then choose to charge for the work they do for others for a low fee (say $10 per hour) then it could still be consider a communist state given that you can’t make yourself rich that way: you get what you need (money to buy food) and do what you can to help others.

Now, I don’t know if Bartle has suggested anything like this. But really.
Why does that concept bother you? How many in SL actually makes more than $10 per hour from their in-world activities? How much would it hurt SL if it was in fact turned into a communist state run by a foundation???

From your speech it sounds more like it bothers you

Well, from this description it sounds more like he is for some kind of feudalism… That’s rather British. What do you expect???

I also don’t believe that Richard means RMT when he talks about changing the real world through games. I haven’t read all his writings, but my impression is he means through moralistic means, as he mentioned racial intollerance which is a very real concern in real life. I don’t agree with him on that, since we aren’t talking human races, but fantasy races. Fantasy races that are depicted quite different. And the idea of turning “evil” into “misunderstood”, if he means that too, well I just don’t see that as a proper goal. There is evil, and it should not be look at as a simple misunderstanding, or even a complicated one for that matter. But we do have to be careful of what we consider “evil”, too.

I know no one is interested in this thread of conversation anymore, but this is an example of how the game itself will NOT change people; only people will change people, a well-designed game simply allows that to happen.

That’s what Richard said. No artistic expression: game, movie, novel, sculpture, poetry, dance: causes change. It simply points out a perspective, and when considered, that perspective is a potential catalyst for change in the viewer.

Not so. Socialists hide behind that argument, first using “material changes consciousness” to change all the rules of the game. The changing of the rules includes forced egalitarianism, the utopianist “level playing field” that is an actual stripping to forced equality, not an actual fair game with fair rules (which is the meaning of the term, which has become perverted in these discussion). The changing of the rules includes a jihadist raid on capitalism (you’ll find stuff like Danah Boyd positing that there is “capitalism” and there there is “cultural sustainability” as if the former could never have a hand in the latter, and is only destructive. From Richard, we also get advocacy of removal of the free land market in Second Life; we get a blast on rabid capitalists who, merely because they engage in commerce, are not for the freedom of the individual and creativity (!).

In other words, we get such a bald-faced misrepresentation of this social system, such a starkly unfair and unjust fake level playing field, that you discover you are no longer dealing with a honest broker, someone capable of nuanced perception of basic foundational truths, i.e. that each kind of social system can be pressed to its extremes, sure, but that there is nothing inherent in either capitalism or socialism in a general working definition of the term that automatically involves inhumanity to the individual, suppression of the individual, and suppression of creativity. Yet that’s what Richard Bartle and his cronies do believe and do espouse, against all evidence (including…the evidence of the embodiment of their ideas in commercial for-profit games made by proprietary game companies lol).

When Richard sets up a stark distopian game world where individual enterpreneurial activity is to be punished and even decried as evil (against freedom of creativity and the freedom of the individual); when Richard sets up a stark paradigm that says “capitalism” is ok only when it is sufficient to generate capital for games and make profits for game-gods, but all vestiges of it must be removed from games — and even open-ended virtual worlds (like his advocacy of removal of the land market from SL) — what he is doing is creating a powerful and very amplified megaphone and even a club to beat people into submission to accept a set of ideas about ideal social systems.

To pretend that these machines for influencing human consciousness called games and worlds never affect them, and are merely a voluntary choice, is one of the ruses contained in the “material affects consciousness” agenda that pretends to abandon its beliefs when it comes to a comment

Richard does want games to change reality. He told you so! Read what he wrote!!! And that means…he doesn’t think they are optional thought-provoking little idylls that spur people to possibly make changes. He thinks they *do* make change. That the answer to the OP’s question is YES, and THEY DO and to actively take part in the project.

One of the obvious ways in which MMORPG culture has bled into social media in truly horrid ways is the concept of “forums etiquette” and “trolls” and “flaming” and “the need to close this thread” and “off-topic” and all the other little questing and boss and monster artifacts that come out of gaming. Ugh.