Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
This was written in 2010 after some conferences on the Metaverse but not published for some reason.
Obama doesn't rule America, or senators or Supreme Court judges or your assemblyman or Dad. No, there are three types of people who rule America, and you would never know it -- if you didn't think about it a little.
One is exemplified by a kid with a name like Matt or Jeff -- I'll find it in a minute -- with an elaborate floral tatoo on his forearm, tall, with a shock of black hair and a friendly demeanor, who appears as a dinosaur-type creature, working as a mod in Webosaurus from the company Metaverse Mod Squad. Another is a cheerful, heavyset woman in glasses with intelligent brown eyes who is from Sony Online Entertainment, her name is Laralyn McWilliams, the Creative Director of Free Realms. And of course there's the lanky geek guy in the glasses with the boyish cowlick, owlish eyes, slightly receding chin, and and deadpan grin -- Will Wright, inventor of the Sims.
These are the types of people who really rule America, because they shape the hours an hours and HOURS of time online that your sons and daughters -- and YOU -- spend in their games or worlds. They are the game inventor or dev, the game manager or creative director, and the mod -- the person moderating the behaviour of the users. These three kinds of people have a powerful influence over the education of your offspring -- and your mindset, too! -- and they have way, way, WAY more influence over your thinking and your children's thinking and patterns of behaviour than family, school, or certainly church or club. It is their practices of governance -- best or worse, as we'll see - that determine how people see themselves as individuals and in groups, and see themselves as part of larger systems or civilizations, such as they are.
These three types of people -- and you've seen them all and known them all by various names -- really shape our real and our simulated lives, no question. They decide whether you can gank newbs with impunity because it will be allowed as "fun" (the practice known as "ganking" means to deliberately kill newbs or harass newbs in large numbers -- just because you can), or whether you will be punished for it. Whether you can swear or not swear. Whether you are processed along this incentivizing channel or that one. Whether you get one time-out or a three day ban for whatever is perceived as bad behaviour. Whether you are encouraged to report on your neighbour surreptitiously about what you think he is doing bad -- or not. Whether you have fun, or are miserable, but addicted. Every facet of your game or world experience is controlled by these people's notions of governance, and yet they have little training, awareness or conceptualization of real-life governance (they aren't politicians or political scientists or business managers). They are rulers online in the virtual worlds, and they rule with an iron hand, usually assisted by code-as-law, but also a playbook of what they feel are "best practices" outlining how game publishers should treat their players, and what kind of beings those players must become to fit into the worlds they make.
Will Wright doesn't think, like your church or your Dad, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing if a mafia forms to bully others, or whether a marriage breaks up online over the Sim capacity for stepping out on your real mate. It's not really his problem. It's emergent gameplay, and while he might personally feel a bit rueful about it, it's not something he *works at* changing *as a game function*. If he did -- he'd be the first to tell you! -- the game wouldn't be fun. Platforms, pixels, code, mechanics, blowing stuff up -- that's all just a lot more interesting to him than morality, which isn't necessarily a reproach, just a report.
Laralyn McWilliams, who gave the most absolute best workshop I have ever heard in my life on governance (and that includes a lot of UN and OSCE workshops lol) -- every single game god should take her hour-long course -- likely doesn't think terribly deeply whether her system is sufficiently liberal and democratic. She can't; she has a world to run -- it has horrible exigencies that few of us mortals truly appreciate. And the Webosaurus guy, as he interacts with kids 10 years his junior, trying to round them up to pursue more positive activities than just huddling and gossiping and possibly sexting, which obviously isn't allowed, doesn't ponder heavily whether he is part of a collectivizing experiment that might have a down side. Moderating is just what you *do* in worlds. You *need* mods. Everyone *expects* mods. Mods are inherent. You could have a world without mods. Mods need to mod. Otherwise, you'd get Lord of the Flies. Right?
I haven't gone on Free Realms, but I've read enough to get the general gist, and appreciate that it has paths that involve socializing and pet-raising and such and that you don't *have* to fight. It has 8 million registered users. The TOS has the usual draconian terms -- you give up all your IP rights, you agree to a heavily restricted speech regime; you agree never to bring action against Sony for any reason; Sony can terminate you for any reason or no reason, etc. Yes, you are in thrall, my lord.
(Someone should contact the Guinness Book of Records and explain that the first concert held both in real life and a virtual world was likely in Second Life some years before it was held in Free Realms, but I'll let someone else take that issue up.)
So, understood about the TOS, but what about the regime of governance inside the world, governing your relations with the company?
Here at ENGAGE! Expo, in a panel discussion titled "Best Practices for How to Keep Your Online World Running," McWilliams takes you all the challenges and pitfalls of game god ethics, such as they are -- and she actually has developed them to a fine working system.
Sony uses the "Scrum" method which I guess is a programmers' tool for doing collaborative work that has all the charm of wikis and Love Machines and such -- see here for more, but the Wikipedia explanation predictably describes the opensourcerers' tyranny -- a claim to be open and emergent and responsive, but with rigid ideas of not changing the backlog list, not letting certain people speak, not having meetings over 15 minutes, ritual this, role that, blah blah blah. Doesn't this weekend California seminar stuff just make you tired sometimes?~!
And the worst thing about these collectivist cultic work ideologies isn't that they are used -- for good or bad -- to make software, but that their cult-followers then want to apply them to all aspects of human life. I swear, sometimes it seems to me that on the day the Soviet Union collapsed, it splintered into about 27 California tekkie seminar ideas and migrated into the "world of work" to infect us all...at least some are criticizing it, and using the fine analytical tool of comparison to communist dictatorships to do so -- thank you very much, because that's where these ideas come from in the first place -- it's a cult, and a disease of the mind.
So -- back to the Sony presentation -- with that sort of brisk categorical imperative, the scrumming game god looks at the world, and sees four World Tasks, as it were:
1. Meeting player requirements (interesting that this is acknowledged and fronted -- and not surprisingly, because a company like Sony, unlike Linden, has to work toward a higher degree of customer satisfaction or they don't stay in business.)
2. Fix a bug.
3. Adjust world imbalances (i.e. in the economy)
4. Meet business needs (of the game publisher).
Obviously, not all these things go together. Players want impossible things that would put publishers out of business. Bugs have to be fixed even if exploited to make players rich. World imbalances need watching and sometimes even the company bottom line has to wait, but never too long or there's no world, full stop. As I said, the great thing about seeing the merging of Toy Fair and Engage! Expo this year was seeing the "real" companies and how they do things, which is so unlike the lackadaisical, indulgent, spendthrift ways of the VC-backed virtual worlds.).
As you response to these things I call World Tasks or World Challenges, you have to look everywhere at once, holistically. How does this affect that? You decide to grant everyone the right to tint their characters. Great, meet a player request! But that makes some stuff people got already a curious mustard yellow, and they bitch. Or it means the rare red pants that people slaved and skilled to buy are now devalued. So you have to figure out how to compensate.
Constantly, you are faced with the need to disappoint customers and tell them hard truths in these paternalistic worlds, and McWilliams appeared to be a big believer in analyzing what kind of challenge you had, and devising a solid communications policy to back it up. God, I wish Pink Linden had been in the room soaking this up.
"Change Management," as McWilliams called it, is key to making the world run well. These worlds are in CONSTANT change because -- I might add -- we're stuck with the software culture of the constant reiteration and the chronic bugs. It's never "finished". There is always "fixing". And there is always "burning through of content" and the need to add more (the original real-world God apparently solved that challenge by creating "evolution" and "procreation" to get out of the loop.)
When you have "change management", you have to:
1. Protect your business (see, this is why it's not a liberal democracy).
2. Protect the team (see above).
3. Protect the players (see what I mean).
Players come last in the Change Management triage because they don't bake the donuts. They only eat them, and the team makes them. So priorities are Darwinist simply because they are. You don't get to ask whether such a world where we all spend hours -- days -- is *good* because it just *is*. If you forget this, there will be plenty of net nannies on the forums to remind you that this is a company, not a country.
But, there is a higher perception here as McWilliams explains. If you lose as a business, hey, your players lose too. You can't have a mess-up that harms you that ultimately doesn't harm them, too. So they have to understand that. And ultimately, you can't be too rigid with this "Change Management" Darwinism, as I call it, because you are trying to make a world. As quickly as she put up her Darwinist code, McWilliams added this:
1. Players lose if you lose, the players can't be hurt
2. The team can't be hurt
In identifying the PainPoint of players, a template I've sussed out from the Linden management, McWilliams simply applies a more studied and experienced methodology -- again, I wish the Lindens would learn from this (in fact, frankly, some old community Lindens went over to work for Sony and maybe they are happier there).
You have to see what is worse for people -- time or money, for example, in a given change. Let's say you skilled up to earn the red pants -- that was time. So you will feel screwed by your loss of time when everybody can tint the pants red. So now, is there a time credit the company can give? Some other compensation?
There are other things to look at. Does the change affect how people play or move or how they feel? Does it affect their success? Does it change their experience?
See, these are all *game* questions emerging out of the exigency of gameplay that people might think don't apply to the open world of SL, and yet, they are very similar. Why? As McWilliams explains (and Will Wright had explained in exactly the same words in the previous hour:
"Human being are pattern-finding machines."
"Does it change the play pattern?" is a question that the Creative Director of Sony Free Realms asks each time the devs change the game for whatever reason (bug fix, business need, player request, etc.) And we, even in our sophisticated world of SL, have "play patterns" too, like "hunt for freebies on Xstreet". Or "make freebies for the general public on Xstreet because I think people want and need freebies". etc.
There are thousands of elements in a game mechanics that follows a fare more rigid pattern than the open SL, of course. But even so, lessons can be drawn. In the Sony ecology of this particular game, there is a pyramid of layers to the game world through which all the changes have to be rung:
Main, Dev, Q&A, Life Test, Stage, Live
Constantly, in this process, you are getting what McWilliams called "confirmation data". Data that confirms that what you are doing is going to have X effect on Y categories of players. So, for example, let's say you have a game item that is called Speedy Kicks that make you run fast. But the devs discover that the function of running really fast is something that they have to throttle down for other reasons or it will keep growing incrementally in each patch and become outrageous. So they have to retire the Speedy Kicks super-fast feature. How to do that without howling?
In this lesson learned, Mcwilliams said Sony learned the hard way from lots of howling that they shouldn't have broken something that affects what the players already have and earned. I noticed WoW players have to steal themselves for fairly frequent nerfing and devaluing and "balancing" of various items that various times people try to stockpile or sell at inflated prices or something, but in this world, Sony was attentive to the players' howling.
They had to think of how to do damage control. It turned out that they found that the very people who were the most power players with the most hours and posted on the forums the most were the Speedy Kicks customers (figures). Casual gamers didn't have the Speedy Kicks and didn't care. But the most vocal patrons did.
Change is hard for people. They don't see the whole picture, says McWilliams, and kvetch because they can't see all the devs' problems of the incremental speedy outrage problem brewing. They only care about their own experience and don't care about the devs' problems. They want to "get more, and pay less" like any player.
So, when to announce that the Speedy Kicks are not going to be so speedy?
Here, Sony will follow one tried-and-true course which is "Never Talk".
"Never Talk" is a great method because...80 percent of the players are not on the forums, and will not bitch. Especially with exploits, you have to follow "Never Talk," but painful changes sometimes have to be done this way, too.
Sometimes, you can tell them but "Do Nothing". Why? *Because they will talk themselves out on the forums," says McWilliams (and perhaps Pink Linden *has* been to her workshops...)
So now, you have a "Change Management Challenge" and you need a strategic plan.
o coordinate with the marketing team
o spread out the bitter change over stages
o if you can give data, give it
o include a positive to offset the negative, i.e. you're losing Speedy Kicks but gaining but chances to find, oh, the speedy rare steed Timelost Protodrake.
o damage control -- give back the old Speedy Kicks to those customers who won them rather than deprecate them -- let them be grandfathered as the most speedy, and the new players will get the slower kicks
o watch the Margaret Mead Maxim: "What people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things." Marget Mead, the anthropologist, discovered long before us in Second Life that people may say they are too cool for Valentine hunts or Linden homes and then they sign up for them in droves, or they say they are boycotting XStreet but they keep selling stuff on it. That kind of thing.
o Remember you are reading the "Minority Report" as McWilliams has *brilliantly* dubbed the game forums. They are a minority. Only 10 percent post on the adult forums in Free Realms; one percent on the kids' forums, and those who do post are a few specific personality types
o Traditional forms of communication don't work for children under 13 -- they just leave
o Have a player's advocate -- they can mitigate changes by interfacing with the residents (this is the figure these companies wheel out like Tigger or Wallace Linden, who is the Tigger of Second Life right now)
o Don't say anything before a change that will give people a lot of time to complain
o But do give them accessories free if you are changing something that was expensive for them
Got all that?
What I mean by governance templates being fashioned in young minds all across America is then the product of this efficient and really brilliant change management. The young soul learns the following about the world:
o Complain really loudly, maybe they will let you keep the Speedy Kicks even if the new kids will get the Slow Kicks
o If you don't read or post on the forums, you don't count -- except maybe you do, as a silent majority not making the "Minority Report"
o You are a mushroom, better to keep you in the dark and feed you bullshit, you grow better then.
o You cannot participate in decisions about change, because it's not your business, you can only protest bitterly or stoically accept change
o But sometimes you will be allowed to take a whim and demand something unnecessary and DEELIGHTFUL like being able to tint stuff
o No one ever has to explain why they do things because either it's a business secret or you are too stupid to understand why change is made
o Change might or might not benefit the sustainer of your world, but you will not get to have a part in deciding that
o A company will be accountable to its own notion of success, but even if you pay that company lots of money and game time, you won't have a say in what that success means
And so on. Making the building blocks not of civil society, but of some kind of medieval civilization with guilds, warlords, principalities, brutal customs, rituals, rules, and competition and harsh changes constantly to be faced. Have you ever heard of a game or world that was *finished*? That was at *peace*? Where the 30 Years' War of fighting bugs and fixing exploits was *done*? Where people were finally free to just play and develop themselves without the upheavals of wars and pestilence? Well, have you? Ever? Does software ever *finish*?
Now let's come to Webosaurus. It actually has a bit of a different philosophy as a small new company. Early on, the game gods grappled with the problem of the "empty bar syndrome". Remember the Virtual Worlds Expo of May 2007? There.com's CEO said the dirty little secret of virtual worlds is that there's nothing to do in them -- these rich variegated gardens of delight had whole stretches of boring, empty landscape with no people. Why?
Well, the Webosaurus folks found that people just huddle when you leave them alone, and you need to direct them. So they developed the "mods" concept not merely as people who helped only with orientation or broken games, or who only banned or kicked, but people who facilitated the game play. You wonder how long they will be able to throw the manpower at this and scale it, but it's helped them make the world a better place. They also decided simply to close off some of the areas of the world that weren't getting traffic, and turn them into destinations to unlock with game play to give it incentive.
The Mod Squad guy who works in Webosaurus who also happened to work in Second Life on the Gossip Girls said that the kids love having him arrive. He is identified inworld with a special nametag, and he isn't associated with only disciplining like ejecting and banning, but talks to the kids and gets them organized to explore other parts of the game and take on the challenges of mini-games, etc. By setting the tone in the conversation, he can reinforce positive behaviour, so that the bullying that inevitably strikes up doesn't get a chance to happen -- if you want to get a feel for what happens when you *don't* have the nice Webosaurus guy, just think of Evangeline and Granny and the rest in the newbie lot in the Sims Online who piledrove newbs mercilessly after luring them in with promises of help and cash.
Now I come to Will Wright, who told us he identifies with the character "Sid" in Toy Story who would blow stuff up, and didn't see him as a negative character as he was just "exploring" what the toy did when it was broken. But...in the next post.
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