Virtual worlds are ultimately about creating, administering and experiencing a system of governance. Every day millions of players enter virtual worlds and are subject to rules and policies laid down by game designers. Not only do designers have the same power as politicians in the real world, they act as tin-pot gods that can control the color of the sky and even alter natural laws of physics within their virtual worlds.
More importantly MMO designers are virtual social engineers. They dictate how economies will ultimately behave by setting drop rates and prices for goods. They also control mobility via the level system. They create the incentives, conditions and mechanics that influence what content players will experience in the game world. They can control how players will act and react by rewarding certain behaviors and punishing others.
Given that MMOs are a form of participatory entertainment, the game designer has a vested interest in ensuring that players are attracted to their worlds. The more a player interacts with the world and experiences some form of gratification, the more likely that player will continue to inhabit that world and keep paying the monthly subscription fee.
On the other hand, players may have a different goal then the game designer. The player, out of self-interest seeks the pursuit of their own happiness within that virtual world and on their own terms.
Virtual Worlds as Entities
Finally there is the virtual world itself. Like Planet Earth, it could be argued that virtual worlds such as Azeroth, Norrath, Middle-earth take on their own intrinsic characteristics and have a unique identity. We often hear the phrase: the long term health of the MMO. This indicates that the virtual world albeit is akin to an organism that is independent of its creators (the designers) and inhabitants (the players).
What happens when the goals of the designer and the player contradict each other? Isn’t it possible that the health of the virtual world can suffer if designers do things for the wrong reasons? Isn’t it also possible that giving in to the whims and desires of players could result in the health of that MMO suffering?
Similarities Between the Real World and Virtual Worlds
Here’s an interesting exercise: let’s substitute state for virtual world, politicians for developers and citizens for players and see what we get:
What happens when the goals of the politicians and the citizen contradict each other? Isn’t it possible that the health of the state can suffer if politicians do things for the wrong reasons? Isn’t it also possible that giving in to the whims and desires of citizens could result in the health of that state suffering?
Sound familiar? The parallels with the politics of the real world are striking.
MMO developers are just like politicians except that we don’t elect them directly. Instead, we vote with our feet and dollars. Want to “vote out” your MMO developer? Stop subscribing. But that’s not really a satisfactory solution.
MMO devs are more like tyrants. There is no direct way to make them accountable for their actions and in-actions. MMO devs are tied to the popularity of their MMOs: if the MMO is popular they are free to continue their reign; if a MMO is unpopular they are dealt with severely by the marketplace and the MMO soon folds leaving them on the unemployment line or worse working on a new MMO.
Democracy?
It’s interesting that despite the fact that millions of players voluntarily log in to MMOs each day there is no system of representation for players. In the past companies such as SOE have set up player representatives that liaisoned with the devs. Other attempts have been made to set up forums where classes can vent and communicate with the devs. Both of these schemes ended up being public relations contrivances that had limited success.
The reality is that allowing players to vote on features and game design elements would have the effect of turning letting the monkeys run the zoo. It would be a logistical nightmare. It also goes against the control freak design philosophy that has characterized the most successful MMO of all time: World of Warcraft.
As in the real world trying to establish a democracy is very hard. This is why most countries are run by dictatorships. The truth is that totalitarianism is the most efficient form of rule.
Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Even though we may be unhappy and fed up with a MMO and the developers, it’s not that easy to leave as an act of protest. As players we’ve invested hundreds of hours into our characters and we’ve developed friendships with other players that keep us logging on each night.
MMO companies know this full well and are counting on it. This magic dust is called social cohesion.
And this is the predicament of living in a Blizzard dominated MMO universe. Where do you go when there is nowhere else to go? Do you take the devil you know or the devil you don’t know?
Special Interest Groups
As in the real world special interest groups exist in virtual worlds. There are the constituencies of hardcore players, raiders, PVPers, role-players, casuals, achievers, explorers, socializers and more. There are also demographic groups: male gamers, female games, the teen gamers, family gamers et al. The devs walk a tightrope and try to appease all them and offend none of them.
The more vocal and savvy groups play a sort of meta-game on the official forums to lobby the devs for a larger share of the development budget — just like the political lobbyists in the real world.
Then there is the silent majority. The unsung and unheralded player that pays the bills, never complains and dutifully logs on each day. Who speaks for them?
Our Fearless Leaders
If one were to be somewhat cynical, MMO devs could be viewed like self-serving politicians who bribe people with their own tax dollars in order to keep their positions of power. In the case of some MMO devs, they continue to demonstrate that they are capable of doing things that ultimately hurt the long-term integrity of the game but have the short-term effect of attracting more subscribers which increases their revenues.
Like devious Roman emperors of antiquity, some MMO devs routinely appease the masses with the distraction of bread and circuses while eroding the fundamentals of the MMO that attracted them there in the first place. Skill, status and accomplishments are transient, disposable and mean nothing to these people. As long as the MMO is “popular” and the shareholders are happy who really cares if it is good?
Conclusion
It has been said that politics is the art and science of government. The MMO developer that understands and transposes this realization to the virtual genre is light years ahead of their competition.
Creating and running a massively multi-player online game is no easy task. Virtual worlds and MMOs are far more advanced then single-player games because they involve the management of long-term relationships with people. Combine that with the social dynamics inherent with dealing with thousands of players that are interacting with each other and you have a complexity that only a politician could appreciate. Yet for those MMO companies that take the time to get it right, the rewards are phenomenal.
But this begs a question: given the history of this genre, why do so many MMOs fail? The life expectancy of a MMO is a direct result of the quality of the mind-set of the developers that run them. The same can be said for successes and failures of their non-virtual counterparts in the real world. Those that fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them.
-Wolfshead
You missed the biggest player representation system in any MMO: EVE’s player-elected council. The representatives get flown up to Iceland every year to meet with the devs and have detailed discussions regarding the future path of the game, as well as the current state of the game.
I found your post a bit disappointing, Wolfshead. I don’t think that developing and maintaining an MMO is much like running a government at all. There is no sense of legitimacy necessary for a studio–and their legitimacy as rulers of the game world has nothing to do with how they are perceived by players (assuming the game isn’t a broken pile of garbage). There’s a huge difference between being able to play a game and being able to live in a country. I think the differences are too much for the metaphor to have much validity.
I thought, at first, that you were going to write about political and social entities as they emerge in MMOs, a topic that I made a post about today.
Thanks for the reminder about Eve. I recall hearing about the player-elected council at one point and I forgot to mention it.
As Blizzard has always noted, he population of WoW players exceeds many smaller nations. It only follows that there might be many facets of running a MMO and players perceptions in a MMO that might have common elements.
I think there are plenty of similarities between real world governance and virtual world governance, enough so that I wanted to write about it and share my ideas.
Any mention of “politics” is deadly in our currently polarized and partisan world. Anytime I even slightly reference politics on this blog, the attack dogs seem to come out and bare their teeth. For many, politics has taken the place of religion hence the reason that I may have touched a nerve.
However, I can understand why some people don’t want to be reminded by the real world and politics in the realm of discussion of virtual worlds.
To be honest, I’m disappointed that you are disappointed. Since you have no problems being brutally frank, I will repay the favor: I find your reply is nothing more then a sophisticated version of “it’s just a game” fallacy that has plagued MMO discussion for years now and I expected better from you.
I’ve often thought about how similar running a government and running a game seem to be. I’ve never run a government, so I can’t give a definitive answer.
However, I don’t think the comparison is exact. At some level, no matter how fascist (or socialist) the Republicans (or Democrats) seem to be (to use U.S. politics), you hope that at some level they are still interested in the nation continuing to exist. Hopefully the politicans aren’t doing things they know would hurt the nation beyond repair.
Franky, I don’t have the same confidence in the more vocal agitators for online games. Several players have told me that they would like nothing more than to see Meridian 59 fail, and that they are going to harass and chase other players off knowing it’ll hurt the game. This is the same as someone bombing a federal building, and politicans of all stripes would condemn that type of behavior.
Perhaps sports teams might be a better metaphor for describing how players approach the game. A lot of people pick one team (game) and root for it. A team with a winning season has fair-weather fans coming out of the woodwork to support it. People generally root for the same team that their friends do. They wouldn’t mind of opposing teams were wiped off the league. True fanatics stick with their team even during a losing season, hoping it’ll make a big comeback. Some psycho fans wish their favorite team harm if the team isn’t doing exactly what they want so that things “go back to the good old days.”
Seems to match pretty well with my experiences.
A very apt comparison that is funny because it really works. I wonder where daily quests would fit into this system, it sometimes reminds me of a mindless TV program to keep the masses quiet and busy.
EVE’s player council has already been mentioned. I still wonder how much power it really has, but there were already two cases I can recall where members used their insider knowledge to the financial advantage of their ingame chars.
Brian mentioned the sports team -> in Byzantium politicial parties picked the colors of their horse racing team, and politics and sports where not so much different. There were not really neutrals, social pressure demanded you belong to one of the three major factions, with the blues and the reds being the most important ones. Reminds me so much of Alliance and Horde that I cannot help but smile.
LOTRO’s “Skirmish”-system gets a hilarious “bread and games” character. All the supposed innovation behind it can be seen as some kind of bloody gladiatoral “games” to keep the ever unhappy population, like Longasc & co., happy … for a while.
I know you have recently stated frustration that not much has changed in the way MMOs are made or how they are set up over the last years. In a way bloggers and their commenters are like philosophers and their students, dreaming of Utopia, the perfect MMO, while all the power is still in the hands of Demiurges who rule above the world, but need to make sure that people pay for it. Not that all professionell, semi-professionell and armchair designers writing and commenting here have the guarantee to do it better, but at least we have dreams, ranging from simple ones to revolutionary ideas. There are for sure Hitlers and Che Guevaras among us, in a way. 😉
There is no (half-) god is nobody is preaching to him, i.e. visiting his temple, his MMO. And making money sacrifices. We are civilized, after all.
The recent trend of offering alternative payment schemes instead of a subscription often strikes me as some kind of “we are lowering income tax – but now you will pay more for gas, food and all that” approach. Please note, I am not totally opposed to the approach. But besides DDO I have not yet seen a game where it really works and is anything else but a “pay extra to the sub” idea to make some extra profits. OK, I do not know Puzzle Pirates and Wizards 101 that much. They are apparently doing well, and I do not want to incite the Wrath of Tesh.
By the way… LOTRO is altering the laws of physics of Middle Earth, weapon speeds and damage ranges get normalized and combat changed. The changes apparently are in general for the better, but they also scare players. It is like changing gravity from 9,81 m/s to 7,8 m/s. Still, it is no SWG style “NGE” – a radical change that is like an overnight switch from communism to capitalism or vice versa. Regardless if the new system might even be better, you will cause turmoil.
P.S.: Keep on dreaming of the MMO Utopia. You are not alone, many people are doing that despite things that make me despair. Hearing how STO devs basically explain players that their engaging space combat system is the stone old holy trinity of TANK / DPS /HEALING-UTILITY (cruisers are tank ships, escorts are DPS, science vessels heal shields and scramble enemy shields…) made me despair somewhat yesterday. This feels about as wrong as the mech game Tesh once mentioned where there were “healing” and “tank” mechs! 🙁
Rrrrrawr, Wrath! 🙂
W101 is actually pretty similar to DDO in that there is a sub option or “content packs”, in general terms. What DDO is doing right is what W101 is doing right, more or less.
Puzzle Pirates is a different animal, but if we’re going with political allusions, the dual currency system they employ is more democratic than most games, and lets players self-regulate by bouncing off of other players, determining their own money-time balance. Curiously, item decay is a significant component of their economy, but it doesn’t raise the hackles that it would in something like WoW… probably because items that *do* decay are generally unnecessary to play the game, just icing on the cake. Player skill is also much more important than it ever will be in a DIKU game with a wide level/loot power band.
Hmm… was that Wrathy enough? More like “Longasc nailed it, and I’ll chime in with more depth ’cause I’m a dork that way”…
There definitely are those who are doing it wrong, though, offering the worst of the Socialist Subscription model and slathering it with Crowbar Capitalism. *coughChampionsOnlineItemStorecough*
Oh, holy trinity ships in STO? Mark me as sad, too.
As for the article proper, the lack of accountability cuts both ways. The anonymity of the internet aids and abets jerky behavior from customers. Devs *must* take feedback with a large grain of salt, and wield their powers ultimately as they see fit.
They aren’t our representatives, they are our gods. We are free to worship or ignore, but we don’t really have a significant lever to wiggle them with. We are mere statistics, especially in bigger communities.
Curiously, out of any entertainment genre, games have the greatest potential for democracy (and anarchy). Games are based on interaction and player choice. With great power comes great responsibility, though, and as we’ve seen time and again, anonymous internet players just can’t be trusted with great power over these virtual worlds.
It saddens me, and I still firmly believe that there is a place for virtual worlds where the players *can* be trusted… it’s just not the mainstream. The natural dev reaction to an unruly population is indeed tyranny of one flavor or another… but we really only have ourselves and each other to blame.
Just saw this funny comic that I thought was appropriate 🙂
Hi Wolfshead,
You raise interesting questions. I am not too sure you consider Second Life as a MMO, but I often thought about the Lindens is a kind of Governance (that is how they call themselves), and how the residents are the citizens. For more than a year now, Linden Lab seems to have enter more into politics to rule in another way, which very often create kinds of revolts or rebellion among residents. When you read the Second Life blog, you can see how when the anger is too high , a lot of people threaten to leave the “game”, and it would be interesting to know how many do it actually…