[MUD-Dev] Birthday Cake (or Why Large Scale Sometimes Sucks) (long)

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 6 Jun 2000 15:02:32 -0500 
Raph Koster <rkoster at austin.rr.com> wrote:

> J C Lawrence wrote:

>> Societies are built on agreements.  The members of the society
>> agree to certain tenets which define that society.
...

> Familiar. You sound like you are channeling me. :) 

You had to hear it somewhere.  

> Only saying it better.

You flatter me.

> The CitiBank point is why I posted the Rights and also favor
> player policing. 

In many ways this really is a question of the Barbarians vs
CivilisedMan ($10 PayPerView).  

The Chinese handling of the Mongol invasions (prior to the
construction of the wall) may be a useful parallel.  The Chinese
reaction to the early invasions was simple: assimilation.  The
mongols invaded, killed various people, took over the positions of
power, and within a couple generations were indistinguishable from
native Chinese.  While Chinese culture and society did change during
and after those periods, to the vast extent inertia won over.  The
Mongols were digested and briefly burped.

Civilisation is a process of the consideration of the value of the
other person.  That can be a tough line to draw when the
counterpoint is that its all meaningless anyway.

> And despite the simplistic view many have of player policing, what
> I really mean by that is the ability for many kinds of people of
> different stripes (including those unwashes masses of which you
> speak) to jostle together in the virtual world and get along to
> some extent together, on their own.

Which squarely isolates the core problem: differing consensus on
"reality".  IRL we're all pretty well agreed that life is real and
that remaining living is important.  From the basis of that commonly
held (agreed) precept, and its simple extention from self to
"others" you've got the makings of a society (the value ordering of
other tenets can be argued as being the basic difference among
societies).  IVR (if I may coin the matching acronym) that basic
agreement doesn't exist, and your argument in your Tree document of,
"it really is real, underneath," doesn't instinctively hold water.

Even if you argue that the "life is valuable" tenet is not a
suitable foundation tenet for the construction of RL society (I
accept the argument), the same pattern continues to hold true.
There are very few RL tenets which can be held as constant or
assumable in current VRL.

  IRL the game of taking a Colt .45 about town and decorating the
  street corners with the passer by's brains is not viewed
  favourably.  It is in Quake.  In Quake there's an appreciation by
  both shooter and target for a particularly elegant blood platter,
  a well placed shot.  IRL the cleanup squads have no such
  aesthetics (I've spoken to them).

You see, its not really real, its just bits, slightly off-chaotic
electron patterns, minor pertubations in entropic decay -- or so the
counter argument goes.  Like RL, the ONLY thing that makes it real
is the decision that it is real.  It is real because we say it is.
Nihilism is a tough thing to argue with, most especially when it is
institutionalised.  You have a pretty tough time arguing that "life
is important" once you reduce it to entropic molecular motion.

  I was recently involved in a (small) flame war regarding
  netiquette.  I considered myself insulted.  My opponent's position
  was that "he hadn't peed on my shoes or anything," and that
  therefore as it was only bits, slightly sub-chaotic electron
  motions, none of it really mattered and any peeve I may derive
  from the situation was therefore just a sign of my immaturity and
  general inability to easily dismiss what he said as similarly
  meaningless sub-chaotic electron motions.  

  He was right of course, and pathetically pitifully wrong at the
  asme time.  Bungle too.  He was "right", and pathetically
  pitifully wrong at the asme time.  One could even argue that I was
  "right" -- not that it helps anything.  It wasn't even really a
  question of social tenets, but of axioms, of basic understandings
  on our universe and reality.  A little more fundamental.

But, we're not used to thinking on those terms.  We don't get out of
bed in the morning and remind ourselves that, "Oh yeah, this is
life, staying alive is important, and therefore these are the basic,
well catechised and memorised tenets of my social existance."  IVR
we have, to a certain extent, to do that.

  What would happen if you got up one day and found out that
  everybody else didn't believe in gravity and that therefore, while
  things did "fall down" for you and did behave in the expected
  gravity based manner, they didn't for everybody else?

  What if that weren't just true for gravity, but for all your basic 
  physical phenomena, and everybody did and did not, variously agree 
  on these basic items?

In essence that's what we are dealing with at a social level.  The
axioms don't agree.

  The builders and operators of Kazola's Tavern no doubt are quite
  certain of its value, both to them and to others.  To Bubba, who
  merely sees a conveniently assembled VR bonfire, that's obviously
  ludicrous, delusional even.  Its just bits.

The problem is that we need to build a system that can withstand the
cooperation of multiple mutually contradictory societies and
viewpoints.  A system that continues to operate when composed of
systems that don't even agree on their axioms, let alone any of
their basic tenets.

> Subcommunity formation. Cooperation, etc. It does NOT boil down to
> controlling PvPers. 

PvP, PK in general, are symptomatic not causal.  If you are not real
then it doesn't matter if I eviscerate you.  If you are real, then
there is an obvious problem with playing Vlad the Impaler with your
body.  The problem isn't my decapitatory habits, it is that I don't
consider heads to have value and you do, and those two games don't
cooperate well.

> It boils down to getting disparate worldviews to get along in one
> space.

It all comnes down to manners, to etiquette, to well known and
formalised methods of interaction and discovery.  We are going to go 
Victorian in a Big Way.  We're going to have not care about the Vlad 
the Impalers of the world, just that the impaled were correctly
asked of they wanted to play that game, and their answers were
suitably handled.

Meta society.  Meta-manners.  Meta-civility.

> The basic meme you speak of is something I've been reiterating
> (and prefaced the Rights with) for years now. Cf Story About a
> Tree. Look how many of us here don't believe it! Or have trouble
> accepting its full implications, perhaps because we'd prefer to
> not have the responsibility.

The counterpoint is exemplified by a simple example: An aquaintence
was once invited to buy-in to chartering a helicopter to fly out
over the Brazillian rainforest so they could shoot indians from the
helicopter with machine guns.

Apparently the indians were not real.

> The fact that we need all sorts of people in a VR space, and that
> we have to resolve the issues of subcommunities jostling against
> each other, is something I view as a primary goal for the
> genre. 

Quite.  And that encludes getting along with people who rent
helicopters with machine guns.

> It's why I disagree that the future is in niches. Niches will
> exist, but niches we can make. We're really arguing about the size
> of niche. Someday this won't be niche and if we don't solve it
> someone else will. Personally, I wanna be along for the ride.

Fractals.  Everything is a niche.  The entire process is the
subjugation of niches into increasingly common memes up until the
point that the meme becomes assumable (mass market), a commodity in
its own right, and thus a devalued framework for spawning other
niches.

> I know many consider me a nutty idealistic weirdo for it, but... I
> believe we do have a social responsibility. We're engaged in
> building what is perhaps the greatest teaching--nay, IMPRINTING
> tool ever designed. I think we should use it wisely. 

I don't disagree in the slightest.

> I think to think of it as just a game is braindead
> shortsightedness. 

Tho this I argue.  I see few better compliments, but then that's
exactly how I view life.

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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