[MUD-Dev] Guilds & Politics [was Affecting the World]

[Koster]

On Thursday, December 04, 1997 3:53 AM, 
Ling[SMTP:K.L.Lo-94 at student.lboro.ac.uk] wrote:
> Here are some of my insights into society.  They're very crude, 
cynical,
> impassionate and probably misled.  But I've only lived a couple of
> decades.

Actually, everything you said sounded right on the money to me...

> - A higher proportion of people in muds can and will be jerks 
publically
>   infront of strangers.
> - Why does the same not apply to life?
> - Because of comeback, because they're receive pain either 
physically o
>   mentally.  I do not go around clubbing someone I don't like for 
fear of
>   arrest.

There are lots of papers on "psychological disinhibition" in a virtual 
setting that offer great insight here.

> - But mudders get 'arrested' too!
> - Yes but it is a persona being arrested.  Anyway, there are plenty 
of
>   other muds to go piss on.

Not even another mud; just make a new character in the existing one.

> - So get muds to form an informal mud alliance where someone 
blacklisted
>   on one mud will find life difficult on other muds.

This raises some of the issues I was getting at with scale and 
communication. Let us assume as premises a lack of a global namespace, 
and that large scale makes for increased difficulty of communication. 
In the case of the "other muds" scenario that you describe, a lack of 
a global namespace is of course implied.

As far as increased difficulty of communication... If you have a large 
enough world, the effective distances become large enough that 
traveling to a different city to act out your jerkhood is almost 
equivalent to traveling to another mud. Yes, act out long enough, and 
with the same identity, and eventually word spreads. But It's very 
EASY for the jerk to go from place to place, and comparatively hard 
for WORD of the jerk to go from place to place. (I don't know exactly 
why this is so, since word is carried by travelers with the same 
mobility as the jerk, but nonetheless it is so).

So the jerk keeps moving, and word never catches up. And by the time 
he cycles back around, well, everyone has forgotten the first 
incident, if they noticed it at all...

> - This might work, difficulty in implementing due to the way people 
can
>   change their id so easily.

And of course, there's this. :( The death knell of normal societal 
enforcement. Mike Sellers said:

> I don't see how the difficulty of long range communications fits 
into this;
> most policing and governance can and should be handled on a 
geographically
> local level

The problem is that "locality" may as well not exist. You don't have a 
local setting because travel to other areas is easy (for the PLAYER 
though perhaps not for the character). You don't have effective 
policing because you may not have the criminal to police.

In the real world, we have fingerprints, descriptions, birth records, 
dental records, family histories, school records, etc. It's been 
well-explored in jillions of dimestore thrillers how thoroughly 
someone can vanish if they do not have the above elements present. Yet 
in the virtual environment everyone lacks those elements. They are 
ALWAYS a persona.

Now, do outraged citizens eventually catch up with The Jerk? Yes. But 
whereas in the real world a criminal who escapes from the scene of 
more than say 20 murders is literally one in a million, a virtual 
criminal can easily rack up hundreds of times the kill count.

There's an oddball factor complicating this. The consequences for the 
aggressor are light, "virtual", easily shrugged off. The consequences 
for the VICTIM are often traumatic, deeply troubling, not easily 
recovered from, and quite real. Not every virtual citizen is going to 
see their murder in the virtual setting as a crime; but many will. My 
experience is that far more than half of them will. Doing simple math, 
that shows us that the societal impact of a jerk like this (on the 
virtual society) is much worse than it is in the real world (on the 
real society).

Tossing in other things that factor into this: there's a general lack 
of major support structures for victims, in the virtual setting 
(family, friends, Salvation Army, what have you); and it's very easy 
for a traumatized victim to just "check out" of your virtual 
environment and thus not deal with the trauma.

This means that you hemorrhage players. Yes, the ones that "couldn't 
stand the heat" and therefore get out of the kitchen... but still. 
Particularly if you are a commercial endeavor, but even if you aren't, 
this is a real serious problem.

To put it crudely:

In the real world, a serial killer kills 5 people before he is caught. 
He never kills again. You end up with 5 dead people, and maybe another 
few who give up on life because of it.

In the virtual world, a "virtual sociopath" (my term for those who 
take actions against others in the virtual context because they do not 
see virtual social mores as real) kills 50 characters before he is 
caught and killed. You end up with 50 dead characters, out of which 5 
quit the mud, eg are actually "dead" to the context. You also end up 
with another 5 who quit because they saw their friend killed--also 
"dead". And our killer returns to kill again the next day under a 
different name, effectively anonymous.

Mike also said:
> (and re: long range communication -- you *do* know that many UO
> players use ICQ or Ichat while playing to talk to others at long 
distance,
> don't you?).

Sure; these are generally peer-to-peer or narrow-band communication at 
best however. What's more, they are dreadfully *inconstant*. You have 
communication to limited recipients who are probably not local, and 
who may or may not be logged on. The "historicity" of communication 
breaks down. In the real world, if an isolated village got the message 
via telegraph that Black Bart was on his way to butcher them, it'd be 
everywhere--including on the local TV and radio stations. In the 
virtual setting, the recipient organizes a posse, they wait, Black 
Bart doesn't show, then they log off, and Bart comes along and 
butchers a set of people who were not privy to the info.

There's a failure here on multiple levels: the newbies for not being 
aware of a social context (checking the local bulletin boards), the 
oldbies for not contributing to the social context, perhaps because 
they do not perceive it as existing; and the game itself for not 
making the social context more important to the environment. 
Unfortunately, these are all really tough problems to solve. And the 
usual way to solve them is to make players have to invest in the 
environment. Yet few are willing to invest major time and effort into 
a patch of virtual space as small as one virtual village. More likely, 
they may invest in the mud as a whole, which won't solve the problem.

Lastly, Mike said:

> I disagree, at least in terms of the imperfect code crutches.  It's 
going
> to be painful for some folks, no doubt, but that's part of the 
adjustment
> of all of our social mores while these new societies get started. 
 My goal
> is to make that pain as small and short as possible, and to 
eliminate as
> many of the code crutches as we can.  I don't think the solutions 
we've
> seen thus far scale to where the Net and online entertainment spaces 
are
> going to be in, say, three to five years.  IMO, we absolutely must 
stop
> looking at this as a problem with a technical solution, and begin
> addressing it as a predictable and tractable situation with social
> solutions.

Now this, I completely agree with.

[A side note, some of the crutches can be considered tools to supplant 
or simulate the things that are taken for granted in the real 
world--you might add rumors of murders, automatic bulletin board 
postings, etc. Are these crutches or tools? Automate the punishments, 
that's USUALLY a crutch. But should city guards kill criminals? 
Possibly a tool, certainly logical in the environment. Etc. The line 
here is hard to draw.]

However, in putting in place the mechanisms we did, our feeling was 
that the public wasn't ready to shoulder the burden yet, because they 
were not aware of its extent. Right now, when someone says to me, 
"ditch this code crutch stuff, it can't possibly work right!" I ask 
them tough questions:

- Are you willing to devote as much energy to this community as you 
are to the real community?
- Do you regard the virtual lives here as valuable in themselves (not 
"as valuable as the real one" since we'd never get a yes)
- Do you think most other people do too?

Someday, I'll get "yes" for answers, and then I'll GLADLY take away 
the code crutches, because they DON'T fully work and never can, and 
because they are extra implementation as well which I might as well 
skip. But since we need societal mores, better that the code provide 
them than we abdicate responsibility to a playerbase that may claim to 
put them in place but isn't actually willing to do so.

(Especially when we need to make money off of that playerbase!)

-Raph