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Constructive Politics in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game
Power Possibly one of the most difficult aspects of constructing a political system is deciding how much potential power the government can have over the citizens. The government has to have some, or the system will have little meaning to anyone. But, if the government has too much, you risk either the government abusing it and irritating the citizens to the point where they may permanently leave your world, or having to emasculate the government by frequent admin interference. Interfere too much, and the system loses meaning, because the players begin to perceive their actions as being necessitated by admin demands rather than as being the result of their relatively free choice. Some things to consider when measuring the impact of power are: How intrusive is the power? One thing that players particularly hate is the feeling that their private, out-of-character conversations are being spied upon. Giving a player government the equivalent of unlimited wiretapping is a bad idea. How difficult/punishing is it for a player to escape the authority of a repressive regime? If it's impossible to escape in-game, you force players to escape by leaving the game. If it's too easy to avoid the authority of a government, particularly within its geographical jurisdiction, then you may as well not have one. Oftentimes, if the political organizations are sufficiently discrete (meaning that there is limited social crossover between them), the cost of leaving the organization is kept sufficiently high simply because players do not like to leave their peer group. What kind of power might a government have over its citizens, or, more generally, those living, working, or merely being, in their jurisdiction? You might consider taxation and the regulation of commerce, some sort of judicial system, and police power to enforce both the dictates of the lawmakers and the decisions of the judicial system. Here one must be careful however. It's been my experience that players are less willing to accept taxation of their income than people are in real life. Much trickier to pull off are judicial and enforcement systems that players will view as fair. The construction of judicial systems has been the subject of extensive debate, to no satisfying conclusion, within the MMORPG design world. Three of the focal points of the disagreements are 1) How to bring and hold those suspected of criminal activity to trial (whether that trial be by player-magistrates or player-citizen jurists), 2) How to conduct the trial itself, and 3) What punishments can be acceptably imposed upon the player found guilty? The problems are largely those not faced in a large degree by real-life systems, and they all involve deciding how much power to allow players to have over each other. I'm not going to go into the various proposals for solutions to this problem, but I will say that in my opinion, the most difficult judicial issue to deal with is the issue of repeat offenders. This is because it's my opinion that players should _never_ be given the power to permanently and irreversibly harm another player. In real life, we deal with criminals who have repeatedly committed certain acts considered particularly heinous by, usually, permanent (or at least extremely lengthy) imprisonment, or execution. Neither of these are truly options in an MMORPG's political system. Permanent imprisonment would just cause the player to lose interest fairly quickly, and execution (which, unless the game in question has a permadeath system, is not the same as 'killing' someone in the game), or, in the case of a game, deletion. Some would not doubt disagree with me, but I believe that limiting punishments of this magnitude to the administrators is wise. Civic Participation So let's say that by now, you've designed a system that takes all the aforementioned elements into consideration. You've planned out a hierarchy, you've given it some, but not too much, power over the citizenry. You've created external threats or rivals to help bind the citizens together, and you've given the government the power to provide valuable public services, to further create a sense that the government has worth. The citizens are able to regularly voice their approval of disapproval of their leaders, and the leaders stand to lose their jobs if enough citizens disapprove. Perhaps you've created a bureaucracy that is either elected or appointed, and divided up the responsibilities of the government by department (Department of Defence, Department of Interior Security, Department of Newbie Assistance, Department of the Treasury, and so on, for example). What's missing? Civic participation. So far, the only way we've given the citizens themselves a way to take part in politics is by voting, or some other method of expressing favour or disfavour of a leader (for an interesting system in which players announce approval or disapproval of a leader on a daily basis, rather than in a one-time vote, see the MMORPG Dark Ages (http://www.darkages.com). This, however, is not enough. You need to give the citizens opportunities to get involved on a more day to day basis. Perhaps they could work as aides to the officeholders, with some, but not all, of the powers that the officeholders have. Better still, create tasks that any citizen can perform that will help the city. Make it as arbitrary as you need. Maybe your governments need widgets. These widgets are in limited supply around the land, but all governments need the same widgets. Ensure ways exist to recognize the citizens who bring in the most widgets to help his or her government. Bang! You've created the external rivalry I spoke of earlier, you've provided a challenge for the players to overcome, you've made the citizens feel more a part of their 'nation' (or whatever), and you've given an opportunity for them to be recognized by their leaders for their work. Another example, specific to the city or city-state type of government, would be creating a rodent problem within the city and setting it up so that an excess of rodents within the city has ill effects for the city (perhaps outbreaks of disease among player-citizens, or a lowering of morale of the NPC population, which would lower economic productivity). The city could offer bounties per rodent, which would likely be an excellent way for small players to help the city and be rewarded financially at the same time. Positive reinforcement. This leads us to the final, basic thing to think about when creating a political system: creating incentives to build successful citizens. By successful, I mean successful from your point of view (i.e. they stay customers of your business and enrich the world in such a way as to cause more people to become customers of your business) and successful from their point of view (i.e., they feel enriched and excited by you world). You can significantly reduce your cost of administration, and increase your rate of newbie retention, by setting up a system that inherently rewards organizations that take good care of its newbies. For instance, if your system has an element that depends upon players voluntarily donating money to their government, it's likely that the cities with more active, competent players will benefit. A word is necessary as to why I strongly advocate allowing player-governments to be responsible for some essential services. The obvious objection is that due to the discontinuous nature of most player's in-game lives (players regularly up and leave the game, take extended absences, and so on), it's dangerous to set up a situation where players are potentially deprived of services they need and desire. My response to this is that a political system shouldn't, in any case, require constant effort and attention on the part of the leaders. There may be benefit to the government if the leaders do work constantly and steadily, but in most cases this is expecting too much. In order to prevent a disruption of services that the players need and want (and in turn prevent your customer service lines from lighting up with complaining customers), simply ensure that more than one person in a government is capable of performing the duties that an office requires, and that in case of emergency, the players have the power, through a special election, or whatever means of selection your system uses, to replace the itinerant leader. ________________________________________________________ |
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