In any case, we must get in the habit of thinking about the multiple sources of control (law, the market, social convention, code) which, as Tim rightly says, accumulate through history, and the multiple sources of contingency (Tim also points to contingency) in order to see governance as emergent from the ongoing dance between these forces, and avoid the trap of trying futilely to rescue a notion of absolute control that never existed anyway. I recommend Jens Bartelson's A Genealogy of Sovereignty on this issue. I think it's true, James, that the concept of sovereignty can easily cloud the issue of online governance, if it is taken in the typical sense of marking supreme authority. But it's not going to happen very often.Īnd a game that implements all player-made changes, or democratically approved changes isn't going to stay fun for very long. Is it possible for players to design content for a game that would make the game more fun or better balanced? Yes. In a democracy, a fair amount of this challenge/fun-destroying-content would be implemented because players will approve anything that improves their characters. Without even picking on particular classes, I could design boatloads of content that would destroy the balance of a game by buffing some items or making areas easier. The people willing to devote the most time to the "design" of the world are the people who have a vested interest in some aspect of it. User generated content may exist in abundance, but content that would be useful, or actually improve the quality of the game as a whole seems hard to come by. And yet no open source MMOGs.ĭan Hunter > "The degree of user-generated content on the fora-ideas, suggestions, gripes-demonstrate the huge amounts of time and effort that individuals will donate to the design of the world." But that's not the weird thing: the weird thing is that these people care deeply about the community of the virtual world, which is quite similar to part of the motivation in producing open source content (ie, the sense of producing something with is collectively-owned, and for a public good). Which I have no problem with, in general though in reading these postings I often have moments of Marxian-dissonance, a little like the moments I have watching working class people root for NFL franchises owned by billionaires. In doing this for games produced by commercial developers they are effectively donating their labor-value to the shareholders of that firm. The degree of user-generated content on the fora-ideas, suggestions, gripes-demonstrate the huge amounts of time and effort that individuals will donate to the design of the world. It also makes me wonder why it is that open source projects in this space have been such a notable failure. Here is another example of the effect of that shared sovereignty. It's been clear for a while that devs don't have total autonomy (and indeed if they thought about it, wouldn't really want that anyway) and that sovereignty is shared among the community and the devs. This sort of democracy is a pretty thin version of a public sphere, and can be easily be dismissed as a typical response to consumer demand by a firm.īut it does provide a useful datapoint for Tim's conception of sovereignty within virtual worlds. Devs regularly check the forums in order to see where the problems are in their games, and regularly change the game (nerf classes/objects/etc) based on information they receive there.
On one view this is nothing new, of course.
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