[MUD-Dev] Inside eGenesis: The Simulation of Power and Politics

[J C Lawrence]

http://www.gamegirladvance.com/archives/2003/06/24/inside_egenesis_the_simulation_of_power_and_politics.html

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Inside eGenesis: The Simulation of Power and Politics

A Tale in the Desert
by Jia Ji

I recently began working at eGenesis, the developers of "A Tale in the
Desert" (www.atitd.com), a massively multiplayer online game set in
ancient Egypt that just went live about four months ago. It's a small
company with a unique product, a MMPOG with no combat but an amazingly
complex socioeconomic and legal system. Usually, I describe our game as
a historical simulation, a mixture of the Sims and Civilization with
real people thrown in to make it interesting.

In ATITD, one of the main goals is to overcome complex challenges called
"the tests." We activated one of the tests last week, "The Test of the
Demi-Pharaoh." At its core, the test is simple: the people of Egypt
elect one player to be the Demi-Pharaoh (DP). The DP's sole impressive,
but horrible, power is the ability to permanently exile up to seven
player characters (but not accounts) from Egypt. It's really a test of
the playerbase's ability to identify leaders who can resist the abuse of
power. This is one of the tests in the discipline of leadership - there
are also tests in six other disciplines: art, the human body, conflict,
worship, architecture, and thought.

Our DP election system is quite similar to how leaders get elected in
real life . Everyone who has passed the initiation test of Leadership
(which requires one to get twenty signatures on a petition saying that
one is fit to participate in the governing of Egypt), is entered into a
game-worldwide election. For the first round, one is randomly placed
into a group of seven other players. A new chat channel is created in
game for your group and you have three real life days to decide who will
advance to the next round of voting. Everyone has one vote and can vote
for anyone (including themselves) and switch their vote at any
time. Only one person out of every group can advance. If there is a tie,
no one advances from that group. This process continues until there is
only one group of seven left and the final round of voting starts, which
lasts a week. In this final round, every subscribed player of the game
gets one vote for who will become the true DP. This voting process
occurs about once a month, meaning only around seven people will ever
become DP before this telling of the game ends.

Now just like real world politics, getting elected isn't as easy as it
sounds. In addition to the players' natural tendency to fight amongst
themselves for influence and prestige, we have also given the
Demi-Pharaoh the gameworld equivalent of a nuclear bomb. When a player's
character is exiled, they lose all their possessions, buildings, guild
affiliations, skills, statistics, etc?basically resetting a character
back to zero. Though being exiled does not ban your game account, it is
quite likely that if your character was exiled, you would quit the game
since we only allow one character per game account. You would basically
lose all the progress you've made in the game so far and have to begin
entirely anew, which is very discouraging to say the least. Not
surprisingly, some players are against the whole idea of the DP ever
using the exile power. Some players have theorized that if the DP ever
did use the power to exile an enemy, it would be a pyrrhic victory at
best since doing so would immediately result in not only in revenge from
that enemy's allies but also the general animosity of a playerbase
fearful of exile. Thus, it would seem that brinksmanship would be the
best strategy, to threaten one's enemies with exile but never quite
actually do so.

Now that I've explained the theoretical aspects of the test, we can move
on to the practical, what happened when we tried to implement the test
during this last week. First of all, before the test even began, an
intense debate began over the status of Game Masters (GMs) in the
election process. The developers felt that GMs should not participate in
the test since they would have an unfair advantage. Since the test is
basically about who do you trust with an immense terrible power, GMs
would likely become the default voting choice of the general public
through their association as informal eGenesis game staff. Indeed, we
already give GMs a lot of power, such as the ability to warp anywhere in
the game, move buildings, and summon players. Thus if we, the game
developers, already trust the GMs with so much power already, it seems
logical that players would be quite willing to trust them with the
position of DP. So that's why we asked the GMs to not participate in the
test since they would have an unfair advantage due to their infamy and
association with the administration of the game.

Though the majority of the GMs agreed with us, a few raised
objections. The Test of the Demi-Pharaoh is well-known in the game as
possibly the hardest, most challenging test of the game. Many players
consider passing the test as the ultimate achievement of the
game. Understandably, a few of the GMs were disappointed when we
informed them that they could not participate. Additionally, many of our
GMs were former testers of our game who had participated in DP elections
during previous betas and had expected to once again when the game went
live. Andrew Tepper, our lead developer, quickly made time in his
schedule to have a long talk with the GMs about our reasoning and work
out a compromise. Eventually, using his in game character, Pharaoh, he
called an ingame Egypt-wide poll on whether GMs should be allowed to run
for DP or not. After intense deliberation, a compromise was decided
where GMs would not be allowed to run but they would be immune from the
DP's exile power. However, by this time, the debate had already
generated much discussion in the forums that even after this compromise
was agreed upon, some players brought up the issue again through our
ingame legal system. Within a day, one player had drafted up a new law
called "GMs should be able to run for DP" and submitted it to the voting
booths. Interestingly enough, this law failed by a sizable majority of
votes, showing that players were perhaps annoyed that this issue was
being brought up again after they considered it resolved.

An interesting side consequence of these debates is that players have
started proposing new laws regarding the legal status of GMs
ingame. Since our game attempts to simulate real life social
interactions as accurately as possible, there are no "anti-griefing"
policies. Players are free to interact with other players in whatever
fashion they wish, whether they be a saint or a misanthrope. Thus,
unlike others games, GMs are not obligated to respond to player
complaints about other players who are behaving like "asshats." Instead,
our ingame legal system is supposed to allow players to deal with such
undesirable elements of society. Examples of such laws proposed by
players are "Removal of Zombie's Last Message" which erased a rather
rude word spelled out with chests constructed by a juvenile player and
the "Departed Person Building Reclamation Act" which allows the salvage
of abandoned buildings or those created by people "banished" from
Egypt. Additionally, some clever players have formed a "Mediators Guild"
which provides neutral third-party arbitration services to other players
involved in a dispute.

Currently, we are now almost into the final round of DP elections. In
days since the Test of the Demi-Pharaoh started, several interesting
campaign strategies have emerged. Some players are bribing other players
for their votes with ingame resources or favors. Others are forming
political parties to used their combined voting power to sway the
election process. One player even made an elaborate campaign poster
which he posted on the forums to garner votes. Even real campaign
platforms are starting to emerge. Several candidates favor establishing
an ingame centralized government through the position of DP in order to
coordinate player actions to advance Egypt as a whole. We even have the
equivalent of a "Green Party" which believes that mining, heavy
industrial production, and other activities that have a detrimental
effect on the gameworld's environment should be limited and regulated.

While the political dealings and debates in ATITD are a far cry from the
complexities of real life government, it is remarkable how quickly the
players developed a dynamic system of structured interactions. In fact,
one of the latest development is a player-run betting pool on who will
advance in each round of voting and who will eventually become the true
DP. Though some would argue that gambling cheapens the whole event, we
prefer to let the players themselves decide which direction the game
will take. Rather than step in and preach morals by setting arbitrary
rules, we prefer to let the players police themselves.

Posted by jane at June 24, 2003 10:07 AM
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--
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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