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cory doctorow
have a thriving virtual penis-business in game, one that returns
a healthy sum of cash every month. You can even protect your
profits by regularly converting them to real money. But if you lose
an argument with Second Life’s parent company, your business
vanishes. In other worlds, the only stable in-game wealth is the
wealth you take out of the game. Your virtual capital investments
are totally contingent. Piss off the wrong exec at Linden Labs,
Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, or Sulake and your little
in-world business could disappear for good.
Well, what of it? Why not just create a “democratic” game that
has a constitution, full citizenship for players, and all the prereq-
uisites for stable wealth? Such a game would be open source (so
that other, interoperable “nations” could be established for you
to emigrate to if you don’t like the will of the majority in one
game-world), and run by elected representatives who would in-
struct the administrators and programmers as to how to run the
virtual world. In the real world, the TSA sets the rules for aviation
— in a virtual world, the equivalent agency would determine the
physics of flight.
The question is, would this game be any
fun?
Well, democracy
itself is pretty fun — where “fun” means “engrossing and engag-
ing.” Lots of people like to play the democracy game, whether by
voting every four years or by moving to K Street and setting up a
lobbying operation.
But video games aren’t quite the same thing. Gameplay con-
ventions like “grinding” (repeating a task), “leveling up” (attain-
ing a higher level of accomplishment), “questing,” and so on are
functions of artificial scarcity. The difference between a character
with 10,000,000 gold pieces and a giant, rare, terrifying crossbow
and a newbie player is which pointers are associated with each
character’s database entry. If the elected representatives direct
that every player should have the shiniest armor, best spaceships,
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