Troll at the Bridge: Ted Castronova in Second Life

The complete lecture can be accessed here

What's worse? Ted Castronova never coming into SL and never taking it seriously and sniping at it? Or coming in and trashing it from inside? Neither, really: what's most worse is Ted Castronova disseminating his oppressive ideas drawn from the rules of games into economic policies that should be instilled in virtual worlds.

When the Ludium this year (Ted's confab at University of Illinois of elite game scholars and designers) issued -- as a political game -- a Declaration of Virtual World Policy, I was getting ready to blast a post off denouncing this illegitimate Junta of the Metaverse and calling on people to critique it. It had the usual suspects, like Thomas Mallaby, writing thumb-suckers on it, and providing a wiki -- this wiki now turns up page errors and seems to have been taken down, I watched it for a few months and I swear I was the only person who submitted anything to it beyond the original conference organizers. The Declaration handily grants game-gods "freedom of expression" but never anticipates it for residents -- their freedoms are put off to the bright future when they can draft something some day after the economy is fixed -- kinda of the China perestroika-versus-glasnost approach. The Declaration says "A self-governance group of virtual world stakeholders should be formed" to which one can only say: "oh rilly? what do you mean "we," white man," etc. Who are these people in Illinois that get to do this? Of course Ted said at the time, well anyone could sign up. Of course, anyway who has plane fare and hotel costs and can "fit in" with this august bunch.

As somebody banned from Terra Nova on the whim of Dan Hunter for directly criticizing their stable of authors and challenging their received wisdom, and defending myself against malicious stalkers, and as someone banned from Metaversed Metanomics where Castronova spoke, naturally I'm going to point out those very salient factors as the first critique of this vaunted "self governing group". They will stop at nothing to ban, filter, censor people they don't like whose ideas they find challenging. It's pretty awful stuff. But I do hope that just as on TN this awful Declaration did get some pushback from some posters, so Ted's bad ideas he's about to spread around even further in the Metaverse will get some rollback, rather than everyone sitting around ga-ga merely because he's got the fifth most download paper on SSRN (a hilarious game-like statistic!)

BUT AREN'T YOU A TROLL YOURSELF?

Why all the nasty stuff about Ted, you ask? Isn't this mere "trolling"? Of course, the provincials of Second Life aren't used to anything like a Valleywag or Gawker tone being used on events and people, and that's all I've done -- but there's more to it than that. Nobody is criticizing this stuff. People don't even seem to understand its implications. I feel as if I have to jump up and down and really shout at the top of my lungs over this stuff, it's so bad, and nobody sees it go down. Soon it will affect all our lives.

You would think I feel some affinity to Ted Castronova, given that he has taken virtual economies seriously, and the first time I heard him speak at SOP II, I was impressed merely with the idea that he took these things seriously. See, that's where so many people stop -- at that stage of enthusiasm that some real-world "expert" -- a "real economist" -- is taking seriously this thing that we are all a bit unsure of, to one extent or another. He even took virtual stock exchanges so seriously that he said in the near future, the only thing that would be different is the world "virtual" would be dropped from the discussion.

But we need to get beyond all that now. Virtual worlds are big business, they are nascent big business but big business nonetheless; they are part of the real-world economy for those companies that make them, and those people gaining economic opportunity from them make real livings, too, or somehow monetarize their time on line such as to get their game paid, so to speak. So now you have to see what Ted wants to do with these economies, and the answer is very simple: he wants to control them; he likes them synthetic; rather than have real -life principles evolved over centuries come to apply in virtual worlds, he wants the simplistic game rules of MMORPGs to come to influence real life. Preposterous.

And you would think with Ted openly announcing that he is a "church-going Catholic" I would feel some affinity, although I can't imagine what Catholic teaching or writing or mindset he is drawing from when he comes up with these very troublesome ideas.

CYBERSOCIALISM

Basically, as always, the ideas come down to capitalism versus socialism, and the socialism variant in this case is what is sometimes called "state capitalism," i.e. large entities controlling economies for the good of mankind as they see it. Ted says he's a "Tory" -- that's just a tongue-in-cheek way of somehow signalling something conservative about his personal preferences, but it is a meaningless label when it comes to his prescriptions for games -- it's a rather coy way of signalling what his actual politics are. For example, I am never shy about saying I voted for Gore, but I'm a 9/11 Patacki voter.

What Ted loves about games is the level playing field and the level starting gate -- uravnilovka, dumbing down everyone to one level, not making them equal before the law, but actually artificially equal. Anyone coming in can therefore shine not with the stake of money and class and power from the real world (the stake Philip Linden also told us in September 2005 couldn't be recognized in SL when we lobbied him as an interest group), but can win through skill, and amass game gold from playing the game.

Castronova's notion of Second Life is therefore skewed -- he imagines everyone starts with the same Lindens, apparently not fully appreciating that of course if you are richer, you simply buy bigger islands or buy more Lindens - if you are CBS, you buy the Lindens themselves and their favourite metaversal agency, the Electric Sheep. So there's no level playing field there, though some of us have worked very hard at making one, i.e. with our call at that same meeting with the Lindens in September 2005 to create a code of conduct for Lindens and reveal their identities and conflicts of interest in major businesses inworld, and making the developers' director as an open directory anyone can join by meeting a set of criteria. (BTW, all that hard work is undone with Michael and Zara Linden now warbling about how their isn't a conflict of interest between residents-turned-Lindens and Lindens, and if you make an analogy to the government, they plead that the government doesn't make its employees reveal their hobbies -- *rolls eyes* -- as if some of the big businesses or influential projects Lindens have run as residents are "hobbies").

Ted actually talks about people in SL merely applying time to building and accruing wealth that way, not by RL wealth. Of course, there's something to it, or maybe that was the way it was s'pozed to be...but if there's anything the last year has taught us, it's that the best builders are the best people in RL art and skilled on PSP and skilled at getting gigs -- not very many have been able to ride the magic of SL itself to the biggest contracts with major companies.

GET A QUEST, GET A JOB

Astoundingly, Ted also talks about how people will acquire expectations from games that they will then wish for in real life, like, say, millions of young people getting used to seeing a guy with a yellow question mark over his head who gives them new quests as they skill up. Huh? He would actually want to overlay such a ridiculous sense of entitlement on to real life and coddle people that way?! It's as if Ted has no awareness that the quest meme is merely the fairy-tale meme or the agent legend meme, where young men received the quests of parents or village elders or wise people along the road in the forest, and fulfilled them to reach some level of self-knowledge or find some truth of life. The quest is telling people to do a job, or find a job -- not *giving them a job with no effort on their part except mindless skill grinding*.

If he were to design a game (and he's a self-admitted failed game designer as he is a self-admitted failed economist), Ted would put in various Ministries -- Ministry of Justice, which he'd name after Gordon "Tyrant" Walton who was designer of Ultima Online and many other games including our Sims Online; Ministry of Interior, with Raph Koster in charge, etc. There would be "fungineers" -- engineers of fun (puke) who would work at the science of helping people have fun. Why? because it would be such a big business, and there would be so many millions of them.

MISAPPLIED OUTDATED ECONOMIC THEORIES

Ted cites an economist from the 1930s and another from the 1960s, neither of which make a bit of sense -- he's just showing off. As Caleb Booker dutifully recounts in uncritical and trudging style on Metaversed.com
""Hick's Theory Of Wages" (1931) states that people move from one place to another when it's better for them, especially if it's economically better. The "Becker Theory of the Allocation Of Time" (1965) states that people put their eyeballs and their minutes where it's best for them - explaining how people divide up their day."

Of course, neither of these decades are what many would consider such fabulous decades for economic theories -- the next decades brought many world-changing events that undid the theories. Frankly, both of them are completely irrelevant to Second Life! Shouldn't that be obvious?! Nobody could say that virtual worlds are economically better. The overwhelming majority of people logging on to them lose money -- well, spend it -- they don't make it -- profit-making is only for a tiny majority, and even a relatively small group can only be said to offset their costs. What is "better" about virtual worlds if they take people away from actual real-life wage-paying pursuits, and healthy pursuits in leisure time that would involve walking or sports or socializing with real life people -- generally people concede that some of those real-life activities -- especially that bit about "a job" that "pays for a roof over your head" is "better". There's no theory at all here devolving from this guy; it's merely a place marker to let us know that Ted has a degree in economics -- a totemic symbol.

By the same token -- and it *is* a token -- the next theorist cited, saying that people put their time where it is "best" also fail to explain why an activity that spends out your money, causes eyestrain, makes your back and butt hurt eventually, and disengages you from real life is "better". I'm quite prepared to outline some things that *are* better. But let's have that conversation then, and not pretend that Second Life fits Hicks, Beck, or even Maslow, the hierarchy of needs, which facile writers like Hamlet nee Linden Au will keep recycling as a concept, as if a need is truly met for self-actualization in Second Life, where most of the time, most people are consuming, not self-actualizing. That is, again, we can posit a theory about consumption as a kind of content creation when it comes to virtuality -- but then let's do that, and not invoke these outdated theorists.

DEEP IN THE BRAIN STEM

Without explaining any of these "internal contradictions" in these inappropriate theories he has invoked, Ted lurches off to explain precisely what is "fun" about games -- which is basically they appeal to the reptile brain of human beings. They tap into the "fight or flight" instinct, causing adrenaline rushes when something big and toothy is coming after you, and they tap into the sense of reward, finding something like food or something of value. So a pot of gold guarded by a dragon becomes the merger of two of those automatic instinctive systems, and that equals fun.

That tapping into the lower nature of man perhaps isn't the most noble of pursuits is something Ted doesn't at all seem to reflect on; I wonder if he's read St. Augustine on the theater, as I've often discussed. St. Augustine chastised himself for becoming attracted -- addicted -- to the theater, where fake emotions of grief and sorrow and joy were excited in him by the play on the stage, and he could indulge in these excitations precisely because they weren't really his, but the play's. Nonetheless, he concluded that this constant scratching of an itch that wasn't real led to a kind of infected state.

In the same way, one does have to ask, not in a facile way, but in a genuine exploration, whether constant murder and mayhem and duplicity and griefing and ganking on online games doesn't take its toll on the soul, doesn't affect the make-up of people, so that they become cynical, callous, etc. It's not about them going out and shooting their schoolmates, although that needs more research; it's more about not taking murder seriously anymore at some reptile-brain level where game-gods have reached them. Ted revels reaching down into the automatic nervous system and thinks the deeper it goes, and the more the stimulation of primitive reflexes coupled with the awareness that you are safe in your own house behind your computer, the more fun! Hey, I guess that's why "ageplay" is fun, *cough*. Ted has a write-off for everything in virtual worlds with this theory, a blank check for vast immorality. It's as if the idea is to overcome not only deep primitive instincts, but all conventions put in people, like driving on the left side of the road -- questioning them all. If I can teleport, why do I need to stop at the border of Canada? asks Ted.

Yet coupled with this licentiousness, like with Bonnie Ruberg on TN and others who favour political and economic control while leaving social and cultural anarchy, comes this notion of these Ministries, who will control the economy and make things "better".

NO ECONOMIC GROWTH

One of the things that Ted hopes fervently that will carry over from games to real life is this idea that you don't need endless economic growth. Somewhere, he took on board this idea that economic growth, consumerism, America, evil Wal-Mart etc. are all to be pared down and pushed back, economic growth for economic growth's sake brings ennui, satiation, boredom, apathy, etc. -- or worse, distracting men's minds with foreign wars. Growth isn't bringing happiness, Ted imagines, because he's now grown, and he doesn't need growth lol.

I love how these jet-setting conference-going grant-recipients are always ready to start the cut-back on economic growth on *you* -- on *everybody else* now that they have gotten theirs. We won't be cutting back economic growth on Ted Castronova's i-Phone or his budget for graduate students. We'll cut it back somewhere *else*. Ultimately, Ted has a kind of fastidiousness to virtual worlds -- he's slumming when he plays WoW, you sense -- and he says forthrightly in this interview that he thinks, based on the growth of the Barbie game and Gaia and pets and such, that the middle and lower middle classes will be playing these games. These are classes obviously he is *not* in. That means he can join the smug and satisfied burghers and dukes of the Metaverse who control the bridge and shape the architecture.

What's wrong with economic growth? Nothing. Everybody wants it. There are more people in the world. They need it. And, if it's bad for the environment, how come somebody in California gets to impose it on others who already have a light footprint, and never bother about, oh, China? or Brazil? Double standards. Who gets to decide this? Framing the debate in this way, we get the implied answer: Ted and his comrades should decide how much is too much.

'PINK' GAMES

Asked about gender, Ted responds with a less-than-attractive description of certain games as "pink games," and then launches on a story about how surprised he was when his wife, who suddenly, though she has a Ph.D. in marriage and family, has kids, and is part of a family political position where "nobody pressures anyone on games" (read: Ted has gotten his wife to never bitch about his game-playing by some sort of deal), started playing LOTR with a girlfriend and even *has a character with a higher level than Ted's*. That the reptile brain has been reached *right in his own family* seems pretty scary to Ted; one has to hope Ted's wife will achieve that same arch and meta-attitude toward gaming that he and his Ludium buddies have reached to be able to justify their time wasted on games as "economic and social research".

'NO INTEREST GROUPS IN SECOND LIFE'

And now comes the worst possible thing that Castronova had to say, with Robert Bloomfield stupidly chiming in. And that was there were no interest groups in Second Life. Caliandris Pendragon piped up that there were thousands of such groups in Second Life -- Bloomfield burst in that "thousands was like zero," i.e. too many and too splintered to mean anything. What an annoying and condescending twit. I really find he sets your teeth on edge in these broadcasts, because he clearly only wants to flatter the speakers, style himself as Mr. Metaversal TV Panelist and rush on to each topic that he wants to get covered -- superficially. You can hear the whining impatience and condescension in his tone of voice at every turn, even to the speaker, as he doesn't want to engage in serious and genuine debate with them -- he wants merely to put up little set pieces that "look pretty".

Obviously, he hasn't struggled in Second Life *making* these groups and wrestling with the issues and the Lindens. People like Ted and Rob only understand "big" and "force". Like Hamlet Linden, they are essentially cynical about petitions by 500 or even 5,000 people, of which there haven't been a shortage in SL. It's never enough. If it were 25,000 possibly, or that many simple agreed somehow never to log on -- they might be impressed. In other words, like a lot of reporters covering popular demonstrations, they think that unless there are 100,000 people in the square, there is no revolution -- and with their stranglehold over the media, they are a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Indeed there are interest groups in Second Life, like the land barons that once joined in Metaverse Justice Watch, the content creators who hated them who joined in the Concerned Citizens, and the overall groupings of Platformers versus Worlders. If you look among the important events of SL, you will find groups like even Mainlanders which I mounted to fight the Bush guy's signs; groups like Sellers' Guild that lobbied the Lindens over copyright theft. Hundreds -- more likely thousands -- joined in the groups to protest copybot. Groups steadily pursue agendas sometimes with only a handful of people, i.e. trying to end griefing in infohubs.

That these smug professors could be so dismissing of people's struggle is a statement about them as elites tied very much to the corporations (from whom they get advertising) and game gods, but it's also an indicator of just how oppressive and closed these worlds are, when it comes to any significant challenge outside the Ministry of Fun's agenda. Stay within the Ministry of Fun's agenda -- indulge in sexual and cultural freedom but not political or economic freedom -- and you will never feel the jerk of the chain. Try something like countering the little grouplet of "good citizens" nominated by the Lindens to "clean up" the Jira, and you discover where the whip and the chain are -- the forces that could remove the Feature Voting Tool by stealth in the dark of night, for example.

While some Ultima Online or something could have residents forming "Palladin groups" and even game devs to meet with them and handle their issues, the Lindens are beyond all that. They have SL Views, a highly selective and elitist system whereby a handpicked few people are brought to Linden Lab, all-expense paid, for having their brains picked in a kind of super focus group, and who ostensibly get to express their opinion on forthcoming features.

There is the dev group run by Glen Linden -- and that's exactly the story of SL, much like the Soviet era, whereby ever time any sort of interest group or even innocent group to save nature or collect stamps got going, the Party would co-opt it. No sooner did residents themselves create interest groups in 2005, then Pathfinder and other Lindens swooped down to undermine them and siphon away their people and energies and co-opt them, or subtle destroy them. Or create ersatz professional groups in their stead.

I'll never forget the time Pathfinder came to a meeting of the Society for Virtual Architecture, which I made as a free and informal discussion group, where he lobbied everybody there to come instead to some pet education project he had at the time.

The tools for a variety of tactics ranging from cooptation to destruction are considerable in the Lindens' hands -- they often grant their Lindenhood to a group to completely up its status (Feature Voting) and if they don't take a topic over themselves, they let their little fanboyz take it over and keep others out).

Even Robert Bloomfield conceded that interest groups take time to get started - but frankly, that's not the issue. What they require is effective ways of conveying those interests, and with the idiocy and obstacles of the JIRA deliberately foisted on the public, the forums closed except to a very corralled Resident Answers section, and the Blog taking a ridiculous 100 replies then cutting them off, all paths of dissent are deliberately cut off. That causes people to resort to techniques like spelling out in giant letters on their sims PLEASE FIX SL, or coming to Office Hours to wave signs, or making petitions even with 5,000 Internet signers. My God, people would hire a blimp if that would work. We try everything. I've even showed up carrying a pitchfork, and others have showed up carrying torches.

They just laugh. It's fun, in the Ministry of Fun.

Comments

[Cocoanut Koala]

1. "Hobbies," is it?

Are those Lindens implying that no Linden makes enough in his/her inworld business to declare that income on their taxes?

If that is so, I think maybe the IRS might be interested in checking out exactly how much they do make.

2. Castronova is stupid if he thinks there are no special interest groups in SL.

He is also kind of out of touch, I think. When half the shop owners closed down over Copybot, the Lindens were finally forced to post something other than the love letter to the Copybot creators they had already posted, and state that using it to copy other people's items without permission was against TOS.

Now that wasn't doing much, agreed. But the incicent is not only an example of a special interest group (shopowners) having an effect; more importantly, it showed that at least one such special interest group (and a large one) exists.

(If, that is, your common sense weren't enough to tell you that special interest groups couldn't NOT be in SL. You might as well look at the whole U.S. and say there are so many special interest groups that none actually exists at all.)

The truth is, people who love to put down regular residents like this do so because they have already chosen sides, and it is NOT with the regular residents (they are above them, almost to a person), but with the game gods themselves.

And there they WILL find like minds, who also feel they know what is best for the peons.

coco

[Cale Vinson]

Thanks for the heads-up on another interesting topic Prok. :-)

My initial response to this particular declaration:

"-Virtual world designers should have freedom of expression "

was very negative: why is there no mention of freedom of expression for players?

I wonder though whether there might be a freedom-from / freedom-to distinction to be made here.

If tomorrow I chose to build Jane Austen World (JAW), would I also not have an obligation to protect the integrity of that world by imposing some sort of sanction on players who intentionally work to disrupt the internal consistency of that world? And if I do, aren't I reducing their freedom of expression?

Of course, taken to an extreme, such an argument would have to allow for the creation of truly awful VWs where players had no in-world freedom of expression at all. But perhaps market forces would come to the fore here: with the number of VWs seeming only to increase, how many players would chose to enter a particular VW which granted them no freedom of expression whatsoever?

[Prokofy Neva]

Cale, this very issue is what was debated at the Ludium conference, then I placed the edit on the wiki saying that residents deserved freedom of expression, too.

Could you point to some actual cases where groups of players in themed games with RP rules and a very set closed game set rebelled and turned Jane Austin World into Scarlett O'Hara World?

It's a red herring. Such things don't happen. The *most* that happens is that somebody tries to make a GLBT guild in WoW and the game makers squish them and tell them they can't do that.

They don't rebel in WoW and try to make the Sims Online.

The fear is entirely misplaced. Everybody gets it about the integrity of a closed world. But there is no reason on earth to restrain freedom of expression in open worlds in the name of this putative, really fake notion that game designers face threats.

What they may also fear is the dumbing down of design involving violence by these religious and parental groups that want to get Congress to remove it from games. But it's not a battle that I think they have to fight by draconian suppression of freedom of expression of others; after all, even parental groups of the right wing have a right to express their concerns, too.

They should just affirm freedom of expression and be done with it.

And what does it mean to disrupt the integrity of the world? My God, I can disrupt the integrity of the Lindens' little fanboy world on their forums merely by asking why a select group of residents and companies are getting favoured treatment and steerage of opportunities. If that's disruption, we need more, not less of it.

The very people like Ted Castronova who are for us making a "level playing field" in this ridiculous constrained game starting gate are themselves opting out of that harness by putting themselves in the "upper class" for whom VWs are clearly not designed, playing them only from a privileged meta place where they get exceptions.

Freedom of expression, does mean truly awful worlds with no freedom of expression, like BDSM and Gor in SL. And we have to tolerate this in the name of free speech and assembly, as long as they themselves then do not pose a threat to the public commons and try to destroy freedom for others -- which is of course what they do, on the forums and on the JIRA.

I think it's completely duplicitous for people to invoke the exit clause as a solution to all disagreement problems, rather than the protection of minorities, and then say that the exit clause can't be used to solve the problem of somehow who doesn't want to play Jane Austin. They can leave, under the ideology that these game gods themselves invoke.

[Cale Vinson]

Thanks for your reply Prok. Picking up on some of the points you make ....

"Could you point to some actual cases where groups of players in themed games with RP rules and a very set closed game set rebelled and turned Jane Austin World into Scarlett O'Hara World?"

I guess it depends on the scope of the rebellion. :-) What I can tell you from direct personal experience, is that in DAoC (Dark Ages of Camelot, think WoW if you haven't heard of it) the issue of world-integrity was, initially at least, considered so important that they actually had separate role-playing servers, with rules about appropriate character-naming (ZOMG, freedom of expression repression! :-) ). Over time this was lost, as roleplay has become a minority sport. But a JAW without roleplay would be rather pointless I think.

"The fear is entirely misplaced. Everybody gets it about the integrity of a closed world. But there is no reason on earth to restrain freedom of expression in open worlds in the name of this putative, really fake notion that game designers face threats."

and

"Freedom of expression, does mean truly awful worlds with no freedom of expression, like BDSM and Gor in SL. And we have to tolerate this in the name of free speech and assembly, as long as they themselves then do not pose a threat to the public commons and try to destroy freedom for others -- which is of course what they do, on the forums and on the JIRA."

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but you seem to be making a pretty strong statement differentiating between closed and open worlds here, with the former not allowing freedom of expression. Given that the Declaration of Virtual World Policy was presumably intended to cover *all* VW's, surely it has to cover the worse-case (no freedom) scenario?

"And what does it mean to disrupt the integrity of the world? My God, I can disrupt the integrity of the Lindens' little fanboy world on their forums merely by asking why a select group of residents and companies are getting favoured treatment and steerage of opportunities. If that's disruption, we need more, not less of it."

Well, what is the argument against ad-farms and other blights on the landscape, if not one of maintaining world integrity?

[Prokofy Neva]

In this lecture, Ted himself tries to fend off this very critique of mine that others have made by saying, "oh, I meant just for closed worlds."

But precisely because this "manifesto" has to do for the whole Metaverse of closed and open worlds, I think that you merely ensure freedom of expression for both developer and resident/player and let them duke it out as they may.

RP is a very hard thing to force on people. It's amazing that in SL, there are so many rich and deep RP sims where the people are really enthusiastically upholding the RP without force, without anyone "demanding their freedom of expression against customers". There are all kinds of griefers, but you don't hear of griefers who go to the Vampire sim and decide to play Harry Potter or Hello Kitty instead. I really do think this is a false issue. People negotiate through these things without the strictures of law, and by guaranteeing freedom of expression for all.

World integrity means different things to different people. The argument against ad farms isn't so much about aestheticism as it is about pure financial value -- that sign griefers undermine and even destroy some one else's land value. And they also practice extortionism.

I'm not for making up fake problems to withdraw the freedom of expression that in fact residents in open worlds must have. In addition to freedom of expression, there is freedom of association, and that really is more the place where the right to RP and maintain an RP integrity really belongs.

A club can make up rules and even decide to keep women or gays out, and even lawsuits in higher courts, like the Boy Scouts of America case on behalf of gay rights, cannot force a group to give up its freedom of association to take on board what some other association (gays) would like to have them do.

It's one of the places where rights clash, a case like that, and the kinds of norms and rules that people make on campuses or workplaces in support of gay rights can't be enforced against the will of an association that doesn't wish to support homosexuality.

Of course, that may not last forever if the battle continues, just as one cannot imagine the Boy Scouts being able today to get away with saying that blacks could not apply. But that's the court case now.

I don't think it's a very strong argument, this idea of interruption of RP on servers. For one, the very exigencies of the world as they come out of the designers' free expression -- monsters, battles, castles, quests of World of Warcraft -- mean that you are unlikely to try to set up a pizza job object and play The Sims Online. There's no pizza object, you aren't a sim needing to go to the bathroom or eat, so it simply won't work.

The designers freedom of expression on WoW or TSO and their game rules and exigencies basically already ensure against destruction of their world integrity. You can't take the Sim greening round and turn it into a quest in another world or something. You can't make a WoW orc need to go to the bathroom or play pool to green up. They both have other things they do, their own internal dynamic.

It's precisely when games are dull or insufficiently fun or challenging that people start trying to do things with them which were not intended by the makers.

[none]

I wasn't suggesting that players attempt to turn WoW into The Sims, the "attack" on world integrity is not quite that obvious. I'll try one last example. I have played on NWN persistent worlds in which roleplay was not entirely forced, but certainly very strongly encouraged. Not only could you not chose anachronistic character names, but even certain play-styles (such as grinding and power-levelling) could result in banning. Its an enormous burden on the world-admins to have to monitor this sort of stuff, and they wouldn't do it unless they felt it necessary to defend the integrity of the world they were trying to create.

"The argument against ad farms isn't so much about aestheticism as it is about pure financial value -- that sign griefers undermine and even destroy some one else's land value. And they also practice extortionism."

Agreed that sign griefers reduce land value, but isn't this because there *is* in fact a reasonally commonly accepted sense of aesthetics in SL? 99% of players don't like living next to an ad-farm, hence demand for plots next to one have their value reduced. If ad-farms did not offend most people's sense of aesthetics, the demand would not be impacted by them.

Your point about the distinction between freedom of expression (FOE) and freedom of association (FOA) is a very interesting one. But I wonder if I can use the latter to impact on the former. If I ban someone, or don't allow them entry in the first place, from my ultra-serious RPing VW, on the basis that I don't want to associate with people who use leet speak in open chat, has not my exercise of FOA reduced their FOE *in my world*? I would suggest yes, but that that's OK, because my world is just one of many to chose from. The key then is that FOE must be available in some worlds, but not necessarily in all.

We're both in furious agreement that FOE must be allowed in open worlds. You take this starting point, then extend it to closed worlds, because both closed and open worlds are included in the "virtual world" category.

The other option is to have separate declarations for closed and open worlds. I oscillate on this quite a bit, but today at least it seems to me that the things that make SL and WoW the same sort of object (played over the net, with large numbers of people, in a 3D environment, etc) are actually fairly inconsequential compared to the things that make them different. What do you think?

[Prokofy Neva]

Cale,

This is what you're saying, essentially. "Let's not have freedom of expression for residents so that in those instances where the design of a game-god is threatened, i.e. by an anachronistic name in NWN, the game god will be able to insist on his game integrity against the resident."

Well, why do it that way? Why dumb down and restrict freedom of expression to serve the far fewer instances of game-god world integrity, such as this one?

It's much better to affirm player/resident freedom of expression as the norm and the value. Then NWN's game gods can freely say, "We violate freedom of expression." The player decides whether to go along with or not -- if not, he could face sanctions from the game-gods.

It seems to me its really about re-establishing the equilibrium of freedom of expression, so that the more rare instances are seen as the disequilibrium violating the norm, rather than the players who resist this oppression being seen as the disequilibrium.

It's therefore more accurate labelling for the consumer. The purpose of affirming freedom of expression is to affirm it and protect it; it isn't, in the game world and Metaverse at large, to sanction those who violate it.

If we were writing a normal constitution for a state and citizens, we would simply declare "Congress shall make no law..." We would protect the citizen's right from the state. We wouldn't trouble ourselves worrying about "the state's right to freedom of expression". After all, the state is the state with its criminal sanctions for vandalism.

It's only in this Metaverse set-up that game-gods worried about their rights being encroached by the masses begin fretting about game-god rights.

As we've already conceded, freedom of expression means even restrictive expression like Gor, as long as it doesn't kill freedom of expression itself for everyone (people often forget to think of that restraint). So obviously resident freedom of expression as a concept includes accommodating game-gods who make NWN rules, as long as they don't take over the whole Metaverse with those rules.

So again, it's about an equilibrium where game-gods can insist on suppression of freedom of expression in their own little fiefdoms, but they cannot enforce it across the entire Metaverse merely for the sake of keeping their own little world intact.

Yes, your exercise of FOA has reduced their FOE, or however you want to put it -- their FOE has trumped their FOE. It's a clash of rights, resolved by force. The game-god has the statelike control of his borders and an army (the ability to ban). So he ejects you.

But what he can't do, in the name of retaining that ability, is restrict your basic right to freedom of expression, which some other game-god, more enlightened, will offer, to attract customers.

It's not that I "extend it to closed worlds" any more than I say "Gor can't exist because it oppresses women." It's the same logic. Yes, freedom of expression as an absolute includes the tolerance of its opposite *until that threatens FOE itself for all*.

It isn't that I force it upon a closed world; instead, I make it the tabula resa, the forcefield of the entire Metaverse, that some worlds will violate in the name of their own FOE and integrity, and people will tolerate it for the sake of the game.

You're saying that resident FOE can't be affirmed because of that some-time need of a game-god here or there to seal his world.

The whole reason Ted Castronova troubles me is that he is basically taking the ideas of the closed worlds out of games, some of them able to penetrate the reptilian brain and control people very successfully, and wielding them over people to control them. For him, the tabula resa is not open, but closed, and open is merely an interesting experiment that maybe his grad students drag him to watch or see if he can manipulate, but the center of gravity is to take the mechanistic ideas out of stilted synthetic world economies and cultures and apply them more efficiently as "fungineers" to engage/entrap more people.

I suppose "aestheticism" could be said to lie at the bottom of "property value" but it seems more ordinary than that -- simply not to have the view blocked by giant spinning signs. It's pretty basic, and you don't need a degree in art history to get it.

Your argument about ad signs began by saying they "ruin world integrity". Well, it's like real-life argumentation that says freedom of expression a la the First Amendment should ensure the right of tobacco advertisers to offer their product. There are groups that fight for that right (and even funded by the tobacco companies).

But it's like the other examples of what happens when you enable extremes that then threaten the basic principle itself. If advertisers are free to incite people to buy and use a product that causes cancer, they die or remain very sick, and their freedom is considerably damaged. For the long-term health of the society, then, the state comes up with the idea that advertising has to be restricted, or banned from TV, or contain warnings of health damage, etc.

Essentially, that leaves the smokers -- the people who design NWN and the people who want to play NWN "as is" -- free to smoke. But it doesn't leave tobacco companies free to prevail everywhere and add to the cancer victims.

Is a NWN player forced to chose a name that isn't anachronistic like a smoker that the state hopes will eventually be shamed or at least educated out of existence? Yes! In a way. Because his personal desire to forfeit his rights and give the game-god his arbitrary head shouldn't be allowed to spread *as a norm* over the Metaverse because it will kill it.

I think SL and WoW are fundamentally different in essence, it's the difference between open society and closed society, and in fact, to the extent that SL is still closed, its a vestige of its ancient MMORPG roots. And open doesn't have to mean an anarchy of gambling and child pornography, because those are the types of activities that if allowed, soon take over to create closed societies, i.e. where many people are drained of their resources and where children are deprived of their innocence and protection, which is their freedom.

[Cale Vinson]

"I suppose "aestheticism" could be said to lie at the bottom of "property value" but it seems more ordinary than that -- simply not to have the view blocked by giant spinning signs. It's pretty basic, and you don't need a degree in art history to get it."

I would cheekily suggest that even the idea that its better to have a "view" than to only see giant signs is an aesthetic one, if not a particularly profound one as you point out. :-)

"Because his personal desire to forfeit his rights and give the game-god his arbitrary head shouldn't be allowed to spread *as a norm* over the Metaverse because it will kill it."

Agreed.

My point however is that my choice to run (or play in) an ultra-strict RPing NWN-based VW is not a statement that I would want such low-FOE worlds to "spread" as you put it, to become the default. A smoker may make a personal decision to smoke, without advocating that others do so. We have only one first-life (and hence it requires the most vigorous of defences of FOE as you suggest), but can particpate in as many VW's as time allows, so I might spend 90% of my time in high-FOE VWs and only 10% in low-FOE ones.

If I am allowed my low-FOE VW, and if I don't take actions intended to reduce the FOE in other VWs, then any declaration purporting to cover all VWs must include mine, and hence cannot have a statement guaranteeing player FOE.

Because I agree with you that FOE should exist in most, but not all VWs, a declaration to cover all VWs starts to seem a little silly.

[goodyear limos]

These are very important issues that we must face today.