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The State of Play: Life, Death, and Democracy Online
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Sunday, September 28 @ 22:48:09 EDT Governance
This week in LawMeme's series for the State of Play conference: the link between death and democracy in games.

If you want to know about democracy in multiplayer games, ask Guybrush Threepwood about the time he died.

About two-thirds of the way through 1990's The Secret of Monkey Island, Guybrush scales a mountain on Monkey Island and admires the view. But then an innocuous-looking piece of ground gives way, and Guybrush falls to his death. A dialog box informs the player of Guybrush’s sad fate, and offers the choice of restoring a saved game, restarting, or quitting:

“Oh no! You’ve really screwed up this time! Guess you’ll have to start over! Hope you saved the game!”
And then, a moment later, Guybrush springs back into view, obscuring the dialog box, and lands on his feet. He turns to face the player and helpfully deadpans, "Rubber tree!"

At the time, Sierra OnLine was the number-one maker of adventure games. The death dialog box with a snide message and a list of options was a standard Sierra technique. Guybrush's "death" was a sly joke at Sierra's expense. And, I would like to argue, it was funny because it was true. "Death" in most single-player computer games is near-meaningless, not because game designers aren't morbid, but because the gaming experience itself inherently confines dangers.

The Holy Trinity: Quit, Restart, or Restore?

Back in the heyday of single-player adventure games, most games gave the player upon the same three options on the death of her alter ego: "Quit," "Restart," and "Restore."

The necessity of a "Quit" option is obvious; no adventure game yet invented can force an unwilling player to continue playing. She can always give the game the three-finger salute, flip the power switch, or throw her computer in the junk heap.

"Restart" is almost as necessary: there have been only a tiny handful of games that refuse to let losing players try again. (I can remember a few, but not their names. There was a submarine game that deleted hostages if you failed in your mission; anyone remember that one? William Gibson's poem "Agrippa" was originally released in a read-once format that erased each page as the reader went along. Notwithstanding the artistic statement involved, transcriptions are readily available. DRM hawkers take note.)

From a narrative point of view, this fact is also obvious: why, as a player, would I want to play a game that self-destructs, when I can play a game that guarantees I will eventually be able to beat it? There may be some pride of uniqueness in beating the game that can only be played twice, but the risk of failure involved purchasing a game known to self-destruct looms large.

"Restore" takes some actual programming work to implement; there are other genres of games in which it is unknown. But some kind of "backing up" less severe than a full restart is a narrative near-necessity for adventure games simply because they take so long to play. At the very least, a game designed to take twenty or fifty hours of playing time cannot be played in a single sitting; some facility must be made to allow players to take a break. From here, it is a small step to allowing players to "restore" back to a saved game even if they have bollixed up matters utterly.

And it is at this point that "death" itself doesn’t really seem very deadly. You can always, after all, hit "restore." The structure of the adventure game is a series of puzzles; the player encounters each mystery in turn, and then solves it with a mixture of deductive and abductive reasoning. Death is another obstacle, a kind of constraint: if you stay too long in the dark, you will be eaten by a grue.

LucasArts made a decision to downplay death (and other narrative dead-ends) in its games as much as possible: rather than force players to restore, just skip the annoyance and don’t script player death into the game at all. Once you’ve got "Restore," the only thing "* * * YOU HAVE DIED * * *" is good for is giving a player a bit of a jolt; it’s not otherwise going to alter the shape of their interaction with the game.

Put again in narrative terms, the single-player adventure game requires a story arc that promises some level of forward progress. A game that doesn't deliver such an arc isn’t fun. The technical features required to deliver on that promise have the effect of allowing players, within the game world itself, to sidestep any "permanent" negative events that the game might throw at them. Once a player has attained a certain level of achievement, the game cannot take that achievement away.

Into the Multiplayer World

Such is the single-player background against which all multi-player games must be understood. Any game, to the extent that it has the narrative structure and richness of world associated with an adventure game, is to that extent a competitor with adventure games. If it fails to deliver the satisfying storyline and perpetual progress a gamer can get by going back to SCUMM, the gamer will go back to SCUMM.

If a multi-player game is to be more than a chatroom, that is if it is to be a game, it will need to confront the relentless progress-oriented logic that dominates single-player games. Which is to say, online gaming polities are in competition not only with each other, but also with the wholly imaginary polities formed by single-player games.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that the bad things that can happen to you in a multiplayer game aren't all that bad, because if they happen too often to too many players, no one will play. If life in EverQuest is too brutal and you keep losing levels because you keep getting killed, you'll go back to A HREF="http://www.rockstargames.com/grandtheftauto3/">Grand Theft Auto, where you can restore your way out of any botched mission. If the violence in Anarchy Online is too anarchic, you'll play some UT 2003 instead, where the only thing you lose on your death is the weapon you picked up thirty seconds before.

So games can't hurt you so bad. Isn't that one of their virtues? Haven't we all heard about how the safe spaces of simulation help agoraphobics and arachnophobics deal with their fears? What's so wrong with a world where nothing truly terrible can happen?

Well, consider this: one of the main underpinnings of criminal law is deterrence. The idea is that potential criminals will turn to crime when the expected gain from an illegal act is greater than the punishment associated with it, multiplied by the probability of being caught. As that probability decreases, the punishment needs to become correspondingly more and more severe, or a rational criminal will simply treat the occasional sanction as a cost of doing illegal business.

In real life, it's possible to produce punishments significantly more severe than the crimes with which they are associated. A twenty-five-dollar parking ticket is a hundred times larger than the quarter that a double-parker saves. Jail terms are "larger" than the proceeds of the thefts for which they are imposed (an inequality reflected in the old idea of debtors' prison). There is so much depth and richness to life that the ability to take away life and liberty gives the state enormous leverage, even where crimes only of property are considered. Indeed, death itself is by no means the worst that can be done to a person, as the medieval tradition of torture before execution reminds us.

But games are thinner dreams than the solid stuff of everyday reality. People play games voluntarily, for entertainment. Games have visitors, but no citizens. Players can always flip the switch or pull the plug on a game that has ceased being fun. The image of a frustrated player upending the checkerboard contains an important truth: there is nothing in the rules of checkers to keep both players in their chairs. What pressure there is to keep playing comes outside the game, from friend who will be upset if you storm off. Games themselves have carrots, but no sticks.

Banishment is the absolute worst punishment any multi-player online role-playing game can impose on a player. Which is to say that a painless execution is the absolute worst punishment any game society can impose on the characters who are its citizens. Torture is not an option. Imprisonment and fines can be imposed, true, but as soon as the player behind the character finds that these punishments are too onerous, she can simply terminate her account and stop logging in; the rest of the deterrent value of the punishment evaporates. It’s hard to hold characters accountable.

"Accountability" is a much-debated concept, usually described as some form of responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. This is actually a poor description of our usual common-sense notions of accountability, which have much in common with the older sense of "settling accounts." Accountability works when individuals can be forced to be present while others' accounts with them can be set in order. Accountability is the force of authority that makes people hold still while others make claims against them. Accountability is not the pound of Christian flesh; it is the court willing to enforce the contract for the flesh—and not one drop of blood more.

In the gaming context, this free exit option creates an accountability gap. In real life, it's the disproportionate punishments that lurk in the background that keep the system humming as it renders justice over smaller issues. Parties pay their judgments and show up for depositions because the threat of contempt hangs over them. But everyone all along the line in games knows how little any of this threat is worth. It is worth a player’s investment in the game and no more. So the "justice system" in a game, no matter how constituted, suffers both from a lack of substantive punishments and from a lack of procedural leverage.

Evidence of this shortfall is everywhere. Raph Koster has written extensively about the problem of controlling griefers in Ultima Online: his recommendation for game designers is for "incredibly harsh" punishments for players who violate server policies against deliberately spoiling the game for others. Koster sees the issue mainly in terms of the difficulty of catching wrongdoers, but no legal system catches all wrongdoers. Instead, the disproportion is striking when one considers that it shows the threshold at which game designers need to resort to their ultimate penalty. Imagine executing people in real life for the most common griefer crime: looting corpses belonging to others.

A Dead End?

What this discussion shows, I think, is not that online society is doomed to a barren and anarchic wildness. It shows instead how thin the control of game designers and other central authority figures is. Even when they have the awesome power of code on their side, the gods and wizards who run multiplayer games have startlingly little leverage over players. And as long as the games remain "just games," players will continue to be uncontrollable beasts.

But when players have more "invested" in a game, everything changes. If you have a large circle of friends There or a primo piece of real estate in Ultima Online, you have something of yourself tied up with the game. You can't walk away without giving up that piece of yourself. Cynically, it's the Keyser Soze principle: anything you love becomes a weapon that can be used against you.

And this leverage isn't entirely, or even primarily, a bad thing. Members of close-knit communities know that they have enormous power over each other, know that they can ruin each others' lives with gossip or conniving. But -- and this pattern has been extensively documented by sociologists and anthropologists -- they almost always refrain from such destructive behavior. Instead, they use the closeness cooperatively: to make sure that group chores get done, to develop a cohesive sense of themselves as members of a community.

Yes, your emotional connection to other players becomes something that can be used against you. But remember the first point of this essay: if you didn't value the connection more than you feared the dangers, you wouldn't take part. We're seeing a fascinating development in multiplayer gaming unfolding before our eyes as games pull players into richer and more complicated interactions with each other. Game designers, out of necessity, are devising new forms of cyber-carrots to get leverage over their players.

This new leverage depends upon players having something of themselves tied up with the game community rather than with the game itself. And to that extent, I feel reluctant to call it "leverage" at all. It's something more subtle. There's something going on in multiplayer games that's not just designers and not just players.

It''s something intermediate, a kind of civil society, if you will, which often acts and behaves in ways that neither individual players nor designers can directly control. And it's this complex layer of intermediate institutions -- guilds, buddy lists, informal social circles, neighborhoods, and the rest -- that really has players by the heartstrings.

Sure, the designers can boot you for griefing, but if your buddies didn't object to the language you were using, you can sign up a new account and join up with them again. If you deeply offend your buddies, on the other hand -- poof! -- all those relationships you've built up and treasure, that's what's gone. A great fraction of the "capital" players have built up in games is social, and it's the social groups that are becoming more and more important to games.

Just flip back to last week's piece and think about the Second Life tax revolt. Yeah, it was the idea of a few players, and yeah it was ultimately aimed at the game designers. But it played itself out in the public sphere: players chose up sides and acted out roles, they argued over matters of tax policy, they thought about their own positions and tried to bring others around. Their debates affected actual policy: Second Life changed its tax structure as a result of the revolt. So plenty of Second Life players won something genuine in those deliberations. And the losers?

From what I've heard, most of them stuck around, happy to continue playing in the modified world. They might have been happier had their preferred tax policy been made official, but they expressed their wishes at the social level: dressing up as redcoats and praising the game designers. They had a choice to quit, sure, but they chose to do something more profound: to work within the system.

* * * YOU HAVE LOST, FOR NOW. Would you like to QUIT, RESTART, RESTORE, or CONTINUE CREATING DEMOCRACY ONLINE? * * *

 
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Re: Life, Death, and Democracy Online (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, September 29 @ 00:03:49 EDT
Fascinating article. Just as you cannot prove the completeness of a system using only the axioms in that system, so you cannot enforce order in a game using only the rules of that game. I think what it boils down to is that, in order to get the real work of law enforcement done, online games need to have enforceable norms. Norms, rather than formal laws, do the heavy lifting in any society. And in order for norms to have teeth, there have to be at least some close-knit connections between players, or between players and their environment. Studies of morale in World War II found that when individuals were separated from their units, even if they grouped together with others of the same division or battalion, their willingness to take risks sharply diminished; but if they were among even 2 or 3 members of their original company, they would fight as normal. Of course, it's one thing for norms to develop, and another for those norms to actually enforce the rules the game designers intend.


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