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Constructive Politics in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game
Why Should I Lead? So, now I have given reasons why the citizenry of a political organization can be caused to care about the organization, but I have yet to explain why the leaders of such an organization would be motivated to take upon themselves the responsibilities of power. Unlike the motivations for citizenry participation in a political system, which differ in some respects between real life and an MMORPG, the motivations for participation by the leaders are fairly similar in both. Broadly, these are: power, glory, challenge, and a desire to help. Power needs little explanation, and is perhaps the prime motivation for the majority of political leaders, both in an MMORPG and in real life. People value power for a number of reasons, including for its own sake, for the ability to attract members of the opposite sex (particularly in the case of men), for the ability to profit financially from either legal or corrupt exploitation of the power (Roman governors of mineral-rich provinces such as Spain were particularly good at this), for the ability to exact revenge upon ones enemies, and so on. All of these reasons can motivate players in an MMORPG as well as in real life. Glory is the recognition by ones peers (your peers being those whose opinions you care about) of your success, or at least the perception by one that ones peers are honouring your achievements. For an excellent essay on the power of glory in MMORPGs, read Jonathan Baron's article entitled, "Glory and Shame", which may be found at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991110/Baron_01.htm. While I suspect that the desire to overcome challenges plays a smaller role in real life, I believe it can play quite a large role in terms of motivating political leaders in an MMORPG. The reason for this lies in the way that players tend to view success in a game. Conditioned to expect there to be at least some pre-defined goals in a game, some players will treat a political system as another of Raph Koster's 'Ladders of Success' (found in the Laws of Online Gaming document he maintains at http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/index.html ), and will measure their success by their rise in a hierarchical political system. The desire to help is, of course, what we wish all politicians were motivated by. As anyone who pays any attention to real life politics knows, it is generally an unfulfilled wish, often because of the high cost in time and money associated with attaining any office. Still, there are those individuals for whom the simple desire to help is the main reason why they seek office, and it behooves designers to ensure that there are roles for these people. Players lead because:
The Creation of Meaning So, now I have described the reasons why politics can be valuable from a design and administrative point of view, the general reasons why a player-citizen may care about politics, and the reasons why anyone would bother seeking office in an MMORPG. Let's now begin to examine more specific methods for creating a system that can provide solutions to these three general categories of reasons. I'm not going to lay out a specific plan for creating such a system, because the details must largely depend upon the details of the rest of the MMORPG. The first and most important thing that you must consider when creating a political system is that it must have meaning. It's not enough to, for instance, set up an electoral system and create some offices to be run for. If the system has no meaning to the player-citizens, then any power that officeholders have over the citizens will serve no purpose except irritating and angering the citizens. You must create perceived benefit for the player-citizens. I discussed earlier what perceived benefits a player-citizen may find from a political system to which he is subject, namely public services, comradeship, and glory by association. Let's look at ways to create these perceived benefits for your players. The first, public services, is the proverbial carrot. By allowing your political organization to provide benefits that the player cannot get elsewhere, you provide an initial, concrete sense that political organizations are meaningful. The range of benefits that can be provided is large, but, like most details of a political system, will depend to a significant extent upon the details of the world within which the system is set. Broadly though, these services could be things like teachers who will only teach citizens, NPC security forces to protect citizens from their enemies, state-owned banks, state-owned shops, quests that take place within the city, state-run brothels, and so on. Anything that is moderately interesting or useful to the players can be used, and will help to create meaning for political organizations in the minds of the players, as long as whatever you are using can't be easily gotten elsewhere. The second, comradeship, is best realized via one, very important method: collective striving under threat. The players must be given the opportunity to experience fear for the survival of their organization, or at least for survival of their organization's pride. They need to strive together against credible threats, and for credible goals. There are really two emotions that we want to arouse in the players to accomplish the goal of comradeship: fear and the elation that comes from overcoming challenges. It's important to understand that by fear I don't simply mean the fear one feels when one looks out ones window in the morning to see Mongol hordes thundering towards that lovely little picket fence in your front yard that you spent last weekend painting. I also mean the fear of humiliation; the fear that comes when your hated rival bests you at something you both care about. The most obvious way to create this sort of unifying threat, which has numerous real-life parallels, is hostile foreign militaries. Creating a military system for your statist governments is a topic too complicated to go into here, but suffice to say that as long as your military system has potentially real negative effects for the citizenry of the victim political organization, and provided that the victim citizenry doesn't feel totally powerless to combat the threat, and further provided that there are perceived positive benefits to being a citizen (public services, etc), external threats can be a fantastic way to gel a citizen base into a viable sub-community within your MMORPG. Fear is a powerful motivator. This fear can be useful, even when the object of the fear triumphs. Providing that a certain hope of eventual success remains among the citizenry, the siege mentality that can come from being beaten can really bind people together. One can create effects similar to a military system in this respect by establishing and making public certain yardsticks of success for competing political organizations. For instance, perhaps you might make public the total net worth of these organizations, and give some sort of minor reward to the citizenry based on the success of the political organization relative to competing ones. Alternatively, you could hold international competitions between your political organizations like the Olympics. The details aren't really that important. It's simply the element of competition and the fear of humiliation and defeat that matter. The second method of creating comradeship - the experience of collective elation - also requires that there be some sort of external threat or rivalry to the organization over which the members may triumph. What this threat or rivalry is isn't particularly important, but the more the players fear or hate the thing providing the threat, the more effective this will be. If you don't want to set up a situation where one political organization must lose, you could provide rivalries with NPC organizations (or powerful individuals). The upsides to this are that no one loses. The downside is that it is difficult to get players to feel the kind of rivalry with NPCs that they do with actual players. It takes a lot in terms of admin resources to create an ongoing rivalry of this sort. A side benefit to the process of collective victory over an adversary is the final way I've identified to get your players to care about being a citizen, and that is glory by association. I liken this to the bandwagon effect that sports franchises experience when they are having a great season. Suddenly all the fans, even ones who were not fans until the team started winning, are having a great time being involved in the experience, despite having nothing whatsoever to do with overcoming the challenges the team has overcome. Similar effects can be seen in successful organizations in an MMORPG. Create meaning by:
Democracy and Hierarchy The next important thing to consider in constructing a political system is that it needs to be based on some sort of democratic or republican principles. I wrote earlier of the fact that players come to your MMORPG with their fundamental values pre-determined by factors out of your control. Given that the vast majority of internet users come from democratic cultures, it is folly to try to force them into a feudalistic or autocratic system. Now, of course you can call your system feudalistic, autocratic, communistic, or anything similar, but in reality, unless the users feel like they have a say in their government, they _will_ be annoyed. This say doesn't have to be on the principle of one man, one vote, but it does need to give them the feeling that their opinion matters, or at least, if they meet certain, attainable requirements, their opinion will matter. When actually structuring your system, consider the importance of hierarchy. A hierarchy of governmental positions allows participants to climb the ladder of success, and it also makes for more vibrant politics. Now, for this hierarchy to have any use, it must have real, though limited, power over the citizenry, and ideally there should be a division of responsibilities. The reason that I advocate a division of responsibilities is that by doing so, you increase the number of players who are potentially interested in participating in the political system. I've seen games where the only position of power in an organization (in this case a city), was the mayor. So the only people interested in that kind of position were fairly ambitious players who yearned to be at the top of the food chain, with the most control possible. It's my experience, however, that these players are not in the majority. Many players want to participate, but they either don't feel they are ready to be in charge yet, or they simply have no desire to be in charge. Further, in many cases, even an ambitious player does not have what it takes to lead, but could still make excellent and valuable contributions to a political organization. There are really any number of ways to divide up responsibilities, but I would generally suggest using a division by function. You might immediately think of simply imitating the large-scale structure of a government, say, the American. In other words, divide things up into legislative, judicial, and executive branches. However, it is important to keep in mind that this is supposed to be fun. Mimicking a real, modern government is neither really going to be possible or desirable. Who wants to sit through endless budget hearings or worse yet, a US Senate filibuster? Streamline, and simplify. Since one of the explicit goals of a political system in an MMORPG is to glorify the participants, and since you do have an admin staff that can step in to stop extreme cases of citizen-abuse, you do not really need to worry as much as many modern governments do about the idea of checks and balances. Checks and balances exist to regulate the behavior of government in absence of external authority, but this is not a true concern in an MMORPG. Regardless of how much power you cede to the players, the admin staff necessarily can step in, preventing would-be Stalins from driving their own citizens to quit playing through repressive actions. To stop certain designers from going fits of apoplexy this idea, permit me to hastily add that admins stepping in to regulate government in this manner should be a last resort only, and hopefully never at all. In practice, due to the fact that you can permit people in a virtual world to pick up and move far more easily than is possible in real life, and thus can afford to tolerate more repressive government than you could if the barriers to moving were as high as real life, and due to the fact that you can set up your system so that some sort of civic mandate is required to continue to rule, there is almost no need to intervene. If a ruler is too repressive, his citizens will replace him or he will soon find himself ruling an empty and rapidly-failing city. Instead, then, of organizing your governmental systems to accommodate internal checks and balances, you can concentrate on organizing it in such a way that best fulfills the reasons for having a political system at all that I mentioned earlier, namely a sense of player attainment and ownership, plot control, and newbie assistance. A hierarchy that is meaningful can fulfill the sense of player attainment. Giving the officeholders some real power, of which I'll speak more in a bit, gives them a feeling of ownership in the world. Masses of citizens can be motivated to act in ways that contribute positively to the overall atmosphere of your world by making them care about their organization, and then creating goals applicable to the entire organization, such as triumph over a rival organization, etc. Newbie assistance can be provided for by ensuring that an organization benefits from increased numbers of players, and particularly from increased numbers of active, involved players. ________________________________________________________ |
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