[MUD-Dev] Korea and online world responsibility

[shren]

On Sun, 1 Dec 2002, Koster, Raph wrote:
> From: apollyon
>> From: "Sean Kelly" <sean at ffwd.cx>
 
>>> So it appears the fear is spreading.  But is this any different
>>> from the attribution of games like DOOM to events like the
>>> Columbine shootings? Are the producers of potentially addictive
>>> products responsible for aiding in the control of that
>>> addiction?  And could all these problems just be solved by
>>> better parenting?
  
>> From what I understand, the connection is a little less tenuous
>> than the connection to the Columbine shootings.  When Character A
>> kills Character B, prompting Player B to stand up from his chair
>> in a Korean internet cafe, walk across the room pulling out a
>> knife, and stab Player A, it's much easier for the media to lay
>> blame clearly upon the game itself, whether or not that blame
>> truly belongs.

> I have heard from two different sources now that the real reason
> that the Korean government is cracking down isn't so much the 700
> incidents of game-related violence that have allegedly been
> documented, as it is the apparently equally numerous cases of
> young women selling real-world sexual favors in exchange for
> in-game items.

Yow.  That woke me up more than my coffee, to be sure.

> To be frank, it somewhat depresses me that given the supposedly
> egalitarian environment that virtual spaces can provide, that the
> mechanics that we provide serve to reinforce some of the crudest
> expressions of humanity.  Design a feudal world, get oppressive
> behavior? Design a caste-based world, get prostitution. Not
> surprising, I guess. But to me it does hearken back to the fact
> that *players do what we reward them to do.* To abdicate
> responsibility for that seems foolish--no, actually, it seems
> amoral.

It does sound really, really bad - yet, is there any better art form
than an MMORPG for exposing the underlying flaws of various
societies?

I've always wanted to see a game with a flexible-enough guilding
engine that you could experiment with different forms of groups.  It
harkens back to my thought that a good way to lower pking would be
to give players other ways to be nasty to each other.

Let people arrange automatic gold transfer based on thier membership
in certain groups.  You could do this pretty well with a really
simple scripting engine.

So, if I want to have a feudalish system, I can have a guild that
gets money every cycle from other guilds that have sworn allegiance
to us.  Fond of Marx?  At the beginning of each cycle, pool all gold
and redistribute all gold equally.  You could set up everything from
an elected republic to a virtual commune or an Athens-style
democracy - or, on the negative side, everything from feudal systems
to outright protection rackets.


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