Cory Doctorow’s got an
interesting Infoweek column once again, talking about how many, if not all, online worlds are effectively dictatorships due to the totality of administrative control. Even those with a bent towards creating realtime interaction communities like
Second Life are little better than “hack-n-slash” MMORPGs as the focus becomes less on interacting with one’s digital neighbors and more on making money and other boring First Life activities.
But there’s a difference between “game” and “community”, just as there's a difference between, as Doctorow puts it, "being a citizen and a customer," and it’s the difference between laws and rules. Law is a body of statements designed to secure and protect rights; rules are a similar structure that define a situation and accepted ways to alter it. Break the law and you are punished, but for the most part society continues along. Break the
rules, and the game ceases to exist – thus games have to be infinitely more authoritarian than any legal framework.
There’s another difference to consider, and here it’s the difference between finite and infinite games. James Carse tells us that a “finite game is played for the purpose of winning; an infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing play.”
The former ends when a particular condition is reached, usually called “victory”, and very rarely is there more than one victor. This includes boardgames, wargames,
abstract strategy games, sports, the lot. The latter keeps going and as long as it does, every player can be said to be winning to some degree directly proportional to their level of participation and enjoyment. This category gives us tabletop roleplaying games,
nomics, sigwars and other storytelling games. As you may have noticed, finite games tend to be zero-sum and infinite games usually have a strong social component. Even
Conway games foster community-style action between those studying them.
Here’s where it gets interesting, so don’t go anywhere. Communities, both online and off, can be seen as a set of large-scale infinite games where people play (to a large degree) themselves. Even a meme-link framework like the Wikipedia, which some propose is a prototype for Hermann Hesse’s
Glass Bead Game has both rules and a fairly solid (if Castalian) social structure. A game that is also a community of sorts, but again, trends towards authoritarianism from time to time. For any game to drop that behavior completely, it must make the switch from rules to laws: to say only what is forbidden, not just what is allowed, and to induce all participants – including administrators – to abide equally. In other words, a
Virtua Carta, an End
Citizen License Agreement.
But as Doctorow says in his article, “
the only people who'd enjoy playing World of Democracycraft would be the people running for office there.” For the masses, games are more fun than government, and such a game would no longer be a pastime. So how to strike a balance? How to keep an online game/community from breaking down, not just into moneymaking and
similiarly munchkin behaviors, but also from being a playpen for selfish dieties? Again, finite and infinite games. The quickest way to break a game is to play it as if it were the other type. Exploit what I like to call its Kingmaker Flaw.
Kingmaker was a fantastic Avalon Hill strategy game, one of my favorites. But it did have a serious problem in that a player who wasn’t playing to win – that is, was playing it as an infinite game – could make the game last
ad nauseum. The reason game worlds like
World of Warcraft and Second Life quickly become No Longer Fun is because so many are playing them as finite games. Kill monsters and take their gold. Take people’s stuff and sell for gold. Set up sweatshops full of players making gold. A wonderful cooperative playground that brings distant people together for enjoyment ruined by points-mongers.
Two adjustments need to be made. One is in the administrators, the creators of the game. The mark of a well-designed game is one that continues to challenge the one who designed it. To do this the ruleset must be robust enough to allow sufficiently novel strategy and must be fair enough that the creator has no unique advantage. Andy Looney and John Cooper don’t win every game of
Icehouse they play, and Steve Jackson can still be given a run for his money at
Ogre. Similarly, the rules of an online game must both allow new ways of playing the game while at the same time not grant ingame advantages for outgame activity on the part of the sysadmins.
All the blame is not on those in charge, however. The second, and possibly more important adjustment must be from the players themselves. They must stop playing a game designed to be infinite through new adventures and new concepts as if it were a finite game based on simple point scores. Infinite games have no stopping point if they are played well, but the corollary to this is that they stop very quickly when they are not. If that's all players want, and that's all that's successful, then the admins have no reason to change.
It’s a balance that must be found soon. The money munchkins will quickly move on when the cash dries up; that’s what speculators do when any market is no longer profitable. Just look at the bubbles created around trading card games and comic books by speculation and how things that were so much fun were completely ruined by it for many. But long before that the dedicated players, the ones that are online to have fun, to socialize, to create new and glorious things, will have gone. Those are the players you want to keep. That’s the community, the solid base that keeps the bills paid and brings new ideas to make the game better. After they leave the game will bog down into a hackfest and no one plays a hackfest for long. New shiny will come along, a new online world with a better way of doing things, and people looking for social recreation will migrate to it just for the novelty.
Communities require people just as games require players, but both require active participation within the framework, whether law or rule, to thrive and grow and ultimately become truly infinite. Allow for change, especially from player-up, not always designer-down; and allow the game to grow in ways that weren’t anticipated by original design. The longer online worldgames can be played for enjoyment by all concerned, the longer they will last.
annoyed
accomplished