# Politics LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt) --- When players of virtual worlds refer to “politics,” they’re really talking about systems of government. Politics will be involved in any process by which people gain office, whether that office is head of a country or head of the local chapter of Hell’s Angels. It can happen in any virtual world where players have the ability to gain power through the support of others. On the whole, though, players use the term in the context of offices that grant tangible, law-making powers to their holder, enforced by the virtual world itself. There are other forms of politics that are important for virtual worlds, especially so-called “issue” politics such as feminism; these, I cover where the particular issue is discussed. Thus, with one exception that I’ll give at the end, this section examines the research that people have undertaken concerning the government of and in virtual worlds. As with economics, most of the work done with politics in virtual worlds has come from players and designers who happen to have a background in that area. The best explanation [^237] as to how and why political systems as a gameplay mechanic make good sense in virtual worlds is by Matthew Mihaly, who has experience of just such a system in his virtual world Achaea (plus a degree in Political Science from Cornell University). He characterizes political situations in general as lying along a spectrum from static to dynamic. Static systems, such as monarchies, have no competition for power at the top but may have some lower down. Dynamic systems, such as democracies, have competition for even the very highest offices. Clearly, dynamic is more fun, but it does need a static element or it becomes incapable of doing its job. If governments changed daily, they wouldn’t get a lot done. For designers of virtual worlds, implementing a formal political system is good for four [^238] reasons: - It provides a non-violent way for players to gain a sense of achievement and involvement in the world. - It creates a class of opinion leaders. When the live team wants to make a major change, it only has to win over the opinion leaders, not the whole player base. Opinion leaders take much of the flak that would otherwise be directed at the live team. - It provides an incentive for experienced players to help newbies. - It can provide another dimension to gameplay, as there are many interesting social dynamics that arise in situations where characters have formal control over aspects of other characters’ lives. This also increases the possibility that “storyline” content can emerge from player actions. As for why players would want a political system, that’s not so clear. Many of the reasons that people care about who governs them in real life don’t apply in virtual worlds. They don’t, for example, react the same way to despots: In the real world, citizens may fear for their lives, but in virtual worlds they simply leave if someone is taking the fun out of playing. Matt narrows down the reasons that players might genuinely want a system of in-world government to the following (none of which are particularly strong): - Comradeship. Players connect with other players in their community, and care what happens to them. Comradeship is good for a virtual world, but its presence isn’t dependent on the existence of an in-world government. - Public services. Players get access to facilities they wouldn’t get access to if there wasn’t a government. This is only the case because it is forced by the virtual world design, of course, so it’s really an artificial reason. - Glory by association. Your faction does well, so you feel good about it. This all assumes, of course, that some players will actually want to be leaders. Matt concludes that there are four basic motivators involved (yet another set of bullet points—sorry folks!): - The desire for power (over other players) - The desire for glory (that is, recognition by your peers) - The challenge - The desire to help Checkpoint: Let’s see how the player types I described in Chapter 3 fit into this. Power is clearly the domain of politicians and glory is that of griefers. The other player types are more general: Challenge is a motivator for both opportunists and planners (that is, achievers); the desire to help is present in both networkers and friends (that is, socializers). Because of what politicking involves, I’d guess that more opportunists than planners would be interested in the challenge aspect, as it’s quite a long-term activity. I also suspect that fewer friends than networkers will want to get involved, as the former tend to interact mainly with the people they know, rather than the population in general. This means that potential leaders would be in the front, top-left corner of the 3D player interest graph shown in Figure 3.4. Okay, back to Matt’s analysis…. The critical thing about creating a system of offices is that they must have meaning. Power doesn’t itself imply meaning: There should be perceived benefits for letting people have the powers in the first place. This is best done through the provision of public services, but there are other ways that can work well, too. Comradeship comes from the collective fear of, and responses to, threats to the organization concerned; glory by association follows from this (assuming that the organization does occasionally triumph). As for the type of government, Matt advocates a republic or democracy with a hierarchy of offices (rather than standalone “mayor” posts or whatever). Democracy is best, if only because players who live in real-world democracies won’t accept anything else [^239]; hierarchies are desirable so that people can get a taste of power without having to challenge influential players for the top job, and because it’s another ladder to climb. The nature of the hierarchy doesn’t have to be the same as in real life governments, because there is no need to build in “checks and balances”—real-live governments can abolish elections, but virtual ones can’t if the programming enforces them. This means that the system of government can be designed to address directly the reasons for having it, making it more fun for the players. The hardest part of government design is deciding what powers the player holders of offices have. With too little, the offices are little more than sinecures; with too much, life for governed players can become unbearable to the extent that they leave for some other virtual world [^240]. There’s also the problem of law enforcement: Should the government only make laws that the virtual world itself can enforce (for example, to ban stealing it throws a switch that stops the “steal” command from working) or can it add other laws (“spying,” “treason”) that would need police and a judicial system to enforce? Even then, what could the punishments be? Imprisonment in a virtual world isn’t quite as big a deal as in the real one. What alternative justice systems are there [^241]? Matthew Mihaly aside, most of the other articles about politics in virtual worlds concern how particular virtual worlds implement the concept. This is one field where large-scale graphical worlds are breaking new ground, because their textual predecessors didn’t often have the kind of player numbers that made such a system viable. There are exceptions, of course: Achaea itself, and (as mentioned in the Mr. Bungle case) LambdaMOO. The fact that LambdaMOO had politics might suggest that there would be dozens of academic papers describing the goings-on. That there isn’t is something of a surprise; A Rape in Cyberspace pretty much says all that has been said. There is a good paper [^242] about the legal system that emerged from LambdaMOO, but nothing [^243] about its politics. Freed from any legacy of the past, designers have come up with some very interesting approaches to politics. Nexon’s Dark Ages [^244], for example, uses a notion of “political clout,” Clout is a tangible measure of political ability attached to a character and granted by the formal support of other characters; it must be spent to attain office and to execute the political control that comes with it. Roy Wilson, Jr. gives a good explanation [^245] of how this works, at the same time illustrating the refreshing absence of serious grief play that it engenders. The theory that underpins it is described in a rather more difficult article [^246] by Dark Ages’s designer Dave Kennerly, which is hard to follow without knowing what the virtual world is all about beforehand. Another virtual world planned to have a strong political element is Star Wars Galaxies. Here, drawing on ideas from Lineage, politics is regarded as a profession; it has a skill tree associated with it, and characters must have the right skill before they can take political office. SWG’s design incorporates a very flexible “player associations” system that allows players to form large groups to focus on some aspect of the virtual world; politics is one such aspect. There is some concern [^247] as to how griefer-resistant this all is, however, especially as some of the powers that players can obtain could make virtual life quite unpleasant for other players. Atriarch follows the general trend by allowing players to build their own cities, install their own governments for those cities, set taxes and laws, instigate trade routes, and so on. Shadowbane, on the other hand, goes for a purely guild-based system, allowing guilds to swear fealty to other guilds like Asheron’s Call players do to other individuals. Guilds can build cities, choose which government type to have (monarchy, oligarchy, republic, democracy), and set tax rates for shops. So, the ideas are there, if it’s not yet clear what kind of consensus solution will emerge. It’s important to note that with the exception of LambdaMOO, all the examples I’ve described so far have concerned in-context government of virtual worlds. Overall control of virtual worlds does not, in general, use the same systems. You may be able to elect a town mayor, but that mayor can’t change patch release dates, subscription rates, or the extinctness of a virtual volcano. That said, not all virtual worlds are run by individual megalomaniacs, and some do involve players in real-world policy decisions (A Tale in the Desert, for example). I’ve found two reasonably good studies that (as part of wider investigations into the subject) look at how virtual worlds are governed. Both were written by groups of students in 1998/99. The report [^248] from Stanford University compares the approaches of virtual worlds, chat systems, email mailing lists, and newsgroups. Different types of government are described, along with their strengths and weaknesses concerning the online services under discussion. Virtual worlds [^249] are usually feudal by nature, with a monarch having overlord powers over an oligarchy that has powers over the rest of the player base. Some virtual worlds are anarchies, which allow only for ostracism and flaming to influence deviant behavior. LambdaMOO was highly unusual in that not only was it a democracy, but it was a direct-participation democracy rather than a representative democracy. The joint report [^250] from MIT and Harvard Law School mentions the same monarchy-like hierarchical power structure that is typical of most virtual world administrations, but notes that there is a form of democracy at work because players can choose which world to play. If they don’t like what the government is doing, they are at liberty to leave and find somewhere more appealing. In other words, they can vote with their feet. This makes virtual world developers accountable in a way that real-life autocrats are not. The report also looks at LambdaMOO, and concludes that the ultimate failure of its democracy was evidence that this is not a viable form of government for virtual communities. The LambdaMOO developers had power but didn’t want the responsibility that went with it, so they passed power to the players. Unfortunately, the one power they couldn’t pass—control of the physical hardware—overrode all the other powers. Attempting to separate social from technical issues does not work when the social is rooted in the technical. The control of virtual worlds only involves player politics if it involves players. So far, the experiments in that direction have had mixed results [^251], and the paradigm is for a developer hegemony to rule. It’s conceivable that players could set up co-operatives to develop and run virtual worlds on democratic or shared-ownership principles, but it’s not going to happen until the cost of creating and operating commercial virtual worlds has dropped substantially. Something that is rarely mentioned is the possibility of using virtual worlds to make political statements about the real world. The reason, of course, is that designers are wary of making overtly political points for fear of putting off prospective players. Nevertheless, as we shall see in Chapter 7, “Toward a Critical Aesthetic,” it’s quite possible to use virtual worlds to make artistic statements; politics drives some people’s art. Another point that is not made very often [^252] is that if virtual worlds are places with populations and governments and a currency with a real-world exchange rate, at what point should they be considered to be countries in their own right? EverQuest’s population is bigger than that of Iceland, Qatar, Luxembourg, Equatorial Guinea, and so on. If Malta can send a representative to the United Nations and accept ambassadors from other countries, why can’t Norrath? And now we reach the final piece I’d like to mention about politics in virtual worlds. This one really is about politics—genuine, polemical, oh-my-gawd-get-me-out-of-here ideological theory applied to virtual worlds. Brace yourself…. Using a Marxism versus capitalism line of reasoning, Annalee Newitz argues [^253] that the freedom to be a different person online is only illusory. The Marxist perspective is that people work to get beyond their material needs, thereby acquiring an intellectual freedom; work is therefore the fundamental that gives life meaning. In a capitalist system, this is not the case: You sell your labor to other people and must therefore behave as they require. This means adopting a work persona different from your real self (smiling at customers when you’re not happy, working on despite being tired, and so on). Newitz’s argument is that people in capitalist societies are so used to believing that different social environments require them to manifest different personalities that they create one automatically when they enter a virtual world. This virtual personality has no direct link to the material world, and therefore it is surplus, worn only for pleasure. Surplus is capitalism’s promise, and people are seduced by it. Individuals in a capitalist society don’t consider that they work to survive; instead, they feel that they work so as to produce a surplus of free time. They believe that free time liberates them from their material needs, whereas really it strips their lives of meaning (because meaning comes from labor). From this perspective, adding an extra, unnecessary self merely increases the number of partial selves that an individual has but that can never (except by adopting the Marxist approach) be reconciled. People would be better off if they stayed with the real instead of flirting with the virtual. In other words, your virtual self is meaningless because you can’t do what makes your life meaningful in virtual worlds. This is a very powerful point, whether or not you accept the Marxist reasoning by which it was derived. Personally, I don’t know enough about the ideology to be able to comment on it [^254]; I do know about virtual worlds, though, and (as I’ve argued in this book) I believe strongly that they bring multiple selves together rather than keep them apart. You may not be able to change your work self, but you can blend your virtual self and your real self together into one. Thus, although it may from a Marxist standpoint be possible to level all manner of charges against virtual worlds, I don’t think that the installation of contradictory identities is one that necessarily holds. [^237]: Matthew Mihaly, Constructive Politics in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. Gamasutra, March 2000. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000309/mihaly_01.htm. [^238]: Matt’s paper only gives the first three, but because he’s a reviewer of this book he gets to add another one that he missed. [^239]: This isn’t to say that there can’t be some organizations within the virtual world that work to a different system—for example, a religious hierarchy that works like a monarchy. [^240]: Or, less problematically, for another country/guild/whatever in the same virtual world that has a more palatable government. [^241]: For some suggestions, see Derek Sanderson, Online Justice Systems. Gamasutra, 2000. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000321/sanderson_pfv.htm. [^242]: Jennifer L. Mnookin, Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication Vol. 2 (1). 1996. http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue1/lambda.html. [^243]: Nothing I have found, this is. As usual, it’s quite possible that there is an entire series of books on LambdaMOO politics that I have blithely failed to notice. [^244]: http://www.darkages.com [^245]: http://www.darkages.com/2002/community/lore/Paladine_Politica/toc.html [^246]: Dave Kennerly, Dark Ages Politics in Theory and Practice. Imaginary Realities Vol. 3 (9), September 2000. [^247]: Py Rathedan, Py’s Politics. http://swg-de.emr.net/e3.php. [^248]: Jed Burgess, Michael Jahr, Jonathan Keljo, Josh Schroeder and Wilson Sweitzer, Controlling the Virtual World: Governance of On-Line Communities. Stanford University, 1999. http://www-cse.stanford.edu/classes/cs201/ projects-98-99/controlling-the-virtual-world/index.html. [^249]: The report only considers textual ones, which isn’t entirely surprising given the date. [^250]: Jennifer Chung, Jason Linder, Ian Liu, Wendy Seltzer and May Tse, Democratic Structures in Cyberspace. MIT, 1998. http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6095/student-papers/fall98-papers/ democracy/whitepaper.html. There were some other interesting papers that year, too. http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6095/student-papers/fall98-papers/ student- papers.html. [^251]: For a review, see Charles J. Stivale, “Help Manners”: Cyber-Democracy and its Vicissitudes. Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Wayne State University, 1995. http://www.utdallas.edu/~cynthiah/lingua_archive/help_manners.html. [^252]: The first place I saw it mentioned was in a 2002 series of three speculative articles by a player who used the handle Moron (it must have seemed a good idea at the time). http://www.joystick101.org/story/2002/2/12/14207/1757 http://www.joystick101.org/story/2002/2/13/124943/302 http://www.joystick101.org/story/2002/7/11/142124/517 [^253]: Annalee Newitz, Surplus Identity On-Line. Bad Subjects. 18, January 1995. http://eserver.org/bs/18/newitz.html. [^254]: This is rarely a barrier for more politicized people, of course.