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Constructive Politics in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game
Destructive Politics I've mainly talked, thus far, about constructive and beneficial politics, but now I want to discuss some major pitfalls, that can lead to destructive politics. These fall mainly into three categories: Overly dynamic politics, overly static politics, and an inability to resolve disputes. I've touched on most of these earlier in the essay, so I will keep this brief. Overly dynamic politics mean that the system is too fluid and changes too frequently. When political leaders are cast in and out of office too often, it becomes difficult for them to establish themselves as opinion leaders, and provide good leadership for the player-citizens. Further, winning an election (or your equivalent of an election) loses meaning to the victor, because he knows he got swept in on today's whim, and probably will be out again on tomorrow's. It also gets tiring and repetitive to the citizens if a new election is taking place every day (note that the aforementioned system of very regularly expressing your preference that Dark Ages uses avoids this, despite frequent 'voting'. Real-life systems have never used this on a large scale because of logistical details that are mainly nonexistent in a virtual world). Static politics result from a powerless citizenship, or from a system that makes it too difficult to replace the leadership. This is undesirable because it removes the climbing-the-ladder-of-success aspect (if you can't replace the leadership, then no one new has a shot at climbing the ladder). In practice, this can be created by making the requirements for voting too high. The final major pitfall to avoid is the lack of ability to resolve disputes. This is a well-known pitfall in MMORPGs as regards plot resolution, and the issues involved here are basically the same. Example: World X has a political system whereby the in-game governments can define the voting criteria for its citizens. The government of city A has decided that only those of the Tsol'aa race may vote. This greatly upsets members of the Human, Rajamalan, Horkval, and Dwarven races and they would like to do something about it. Clearly they can't vote the government leaders out, so their only options (short of bribing or convincing the Tsol'aa voters to force their leaders to change their policies) are leaving the organization, unless you institute a way by which a government may be forcibly overthrown via force. Leaving the organization is really not something you want to force the citizens to do in a case like this, because they may be leaving their homes, breaking their psychological attachment to the organization, and so on. These can be very stressful things to do for a player, and can damage his interest in your world. Another example of poor plot resolution would be an experience I had in an MMORPG I designed and run. This world has a system of city-states in the Hellenic style. Two city-states were continually at odds, but the military system had not yet been implemented. One city-state, Ashtan, seemed to be winning most conflicts between players, and generally had high morale. It's primary enemy, Shallam, had somewhat lower morale, due to some internal conflicts that prevented it from gelling as a community. The way the military system was set up, it rewarded those city-states who had very active and devoted governments far more than it rewarded any strategic ability on the part of the generals. In any case, quite soon, Ashtan had conquered probably 10x the amount of revenue-producing land as Shallam, and was literally at the gates of Shallam, ready to take it over. I had not anticipated this would happen that quickly, if ever, and I was caught with my pants down, because I had no way to resolve this. There was no way to "take over" a city, and simply letting Ashtan burn Shallam to the ground was not an acceptable solution. In the end, I had to solve it, rather lamely, by simply nullifying the effects of the system and putting the system on hold while it was redone. Clearly this is just about the worst way to handle plot resolution, as it irritated the victors, and made the losers feel as if they didn't need to try next time, because the administration would rescue them. In retrospect, the major problem was that the Shallam citizens did not care enough. They didn't feel like there was enough reason to care whether they won or lost, and once Ashtan got rolling, the attitude that "We can't do anything about it." quickly prevailed. These were largely the results of an improperly constructed political system. There wasn't enough perceived benefit to being a citizen, and the major benefit that players saw was glory by association (which, of course, doesn't do much for those presently losing a conflict). So, the external threat posed to Shallam by Ashtan wasn't effective, because the citizens of Shallam didn't feel attached to Shallam. Major pitfalls:
Conclusion I believe that I've elucidated the fundamental reasons and requirements for having an in-game political system in your MMORPG. It is useful from the administrative point of view because it is something interesting for your players to do, it binds communities together, and it can help reduce the cost of administrative support for newbies. It is viewed as useful to the players because they can achieve glory, because their friends are involved (circular, I know), and because they can gain services they could not otherwise gain through it. On a less practical level, political systems in virtual worlds are fascinating both to the creators and the players. Those in my MMORPG often comment that the intensity of politics are their favourite thing about it. There's something very, well, for lack of a better word, cool, about political interactions. I've watched people who started off as meek, seemingly weak players blossom into lions when the burden of leadership was placed upon them. I've seen problem players become responsible and valued leaders who, through their actions, also improved the experiences of those who followed them. Finally, few conflicts and storylines are more exciting to watch and arouse more passion in the participants than those of nations at odds. Without a political system, all you have is a bunch of informally aligned players clashing. But give these players a formal framework to work within, and suddenly players are making nobler sacrifices and deeper efforts than most of them ever would make if only their own welfare was at stake. This essay has merely scratched the surface I'm sure, particularly as so far, MMORPG political systems have been fairly rudimentary. I have little doubt, however, that as successive generations of MMORPGs are created, politics will become a more integral part of the design process. I expect to see systems with features that have not been tried on any large scale. For instance, systems where the players can, without admin assistance, determine their form of government, be it direct democracy, republicanism, plutocracy (rule by the rich), communism, anarcho-capitalism, or whatever! Social engineering in virtual communities is already a nascent field of study, and as research into it progresses (certainly beyond the meager scope of this essay), I believe we're going to see these political systems become more sophisticated and more dominant (along with other, somewhat related systems, like economics) in game design. We have the technology. We can build them. Matthew Mihaly is the President of Achaea LLC. He currently resides in San Francisco, and has a degree in political science from Cornell, 1994. Previous experience includes being aide to a US Representative and a licensed stockbroker. He has played text MMORPGs for 10 years, and developed on a number of them before starting his own, Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands. That project began in 1996, and went online (after relatively sporadic development initially) in 1997. He still works as the primary designer and as a programmer, as well as handling all business and legal affairs. He can be reached at diablo@best.com. Geoffrey MacDougall, a social engineer for a MMORPG that is just getting started in development, called Solar Knights, made editorial contributions to this article. ________________________________________________________ |
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