The Alphaville Herald

Moscow’s Izvestia: TSO is Harming America’s Children

by Alphaville Herald on 25/04/04 at 7:43 pm

A number of news organizations, ranging from the New York Times to CNN have picked up on the story of the Alphaville Herald and EA’s attempts to silence it for shedding light on the inner life of Alphaville. Recently the Moscow daily newspaper Izvestia jumped into the fray, recounting the story of the termination of Urizenus, and enlisting Russian Psychologist Sergei Baklushinsky to opine on the situation. His diagnosis: TSO is a kind of training ground for deviant and anti-social behavior for children. He also concludes that EA considers the “fearless researcher” Urizenus “a threat” to them – or at least to their pocketbooks. Sounds right to me!

Many many thanks to Dyerbrook for the translation from Russian and for adding some helpful footnotes.

“Virtual Sims Are No Better Than Real“

A month ago, Peter Ludllow, a Michigan University professor of philosophy and linguistics, was expelled from the little village of Alphaville, where he lived under the assumed name of Urizenus, and like Miklukho-Maklai*, studied the natives’ customs. The authorities confiscated all of the professor’s property, even the cats that belonged to him, but the fearless researcher did not give up and continues his work.

By Andrei Annenkov
(translation by Dyerbrook)

A Christmas Story

The first news of the incident appeared at salon.com and the BBC in December of last year on Christmas Eve and later in “The New York Times” and Newscientist. It turns out that the professor was ostracised not by the Alphavillians, but outside forces that govern the life of the city. Appropriate for the hero of a Christmas story who has fallen victim to injustice, Ludlow suffered for a time seeking truth and justice, becoming famous along the way. And what more does a scholar need?

The story literally corresponds to reality and at the same time has nothing in common with it. It’s all in your point of view. Yes, Alphaville exists but only the servers of the company Electronic Arts, which owns the rights to a multi-player role-playing Internet game, the Sims Online. For about $15 a month, a player has the right to create his persona and begin life in a virtual country: to start making a living, to build a house, interact and communicate with the community of other personas. The idea is the same as playing “daughter-mother” (i.e. playing house), but the idea is implemented in such a way that an adult would not be embarrassed to play it. The excellent graphics enable you to see yourself, your partners, and the interior of the buildings in detail. If you want to enter into a dialogue with the other personas — go ahead. You can even get married here, let alone chat. It’s just for pretend, of course, but in all seriousness A married woman who was “addicted” told the exiled professor anonymously that that she would never give up her romantic attachment with her virtual husband.

That’s the sort of life-game, from which Electronic Arts erased Ludlow. For the players, the company is like Zeus. Its managers rule over the life and death of every “sim” as the players of The Sims Online are known. The reason for the injustices against the persona of Mr. Ludlow is that the professor went about exposing the vices of Alphaville society. If Ludlow had just walked the streets and preached, or founded a media outlet in the city just for its own residents, that would be one thing. But Ludlow opened up his own site for this purpose (“Alphaville Herald,” alphavilleherald.com). In other words, he arrogated himself to be equal to the gods –after all, The Sims Online is only a site, too.

The Dangers of Exposing Internet Morals

Eighty-thousand people play The Sims Online (judge for yourself the scale of such a business — a million dollars a month), mainly Americans. Trade in virtual property does go on among the players, with items sold on Internet auction sites for real dollars. For example, the cats mentioned above go for $25 a piece — as much as the market values the efforts of the player who has earned the right to own such an animal. Such a form of interpenetration between the real world and the virtual world is not new. This week, a foreign currency market opened at gamingopenmarket.com where the “hard currency” of various virtual games is quoted. It’s very convenient — when you’re sick of one game, you sell your property and buy what you need in another world.

But The Sims Onlie models not only the economy. Players’ communities emerge here just as in real life, according to the coincidence of interests. Or according to the coincidence of what are commonly called “vices”. Prostitution flourishes in the city, in which it is quite possible minors are involved. After all, nobody knows the age of the players running the personas.There are sadomasochistic hang-outs, whose members fall into serious psychological dependency from the reigning mores there. What happens in these red-light districts of Alphaville quite rightly deserves the term “cybersex”: graphic depictions of the personas may be ambiguous, but judging from the “screenshots” (copies of the screen from the games’ walls), it is realistic enough to stimulate even the least rich imagination. Testimonies to real problems are represented in large number at “Alphaville Herald” for which the fighter for the morality of “sims” then suffered.

In Our Country

Everything is decent in our country. The first domestic Russian multi-player role-playing Internet game, “Sfera” (“The Sphere” http://sphere.yandex.ru/rus/), was released by a companies deciding to conquer this market, Nikita and 1C along with Yandex** in early December, and has not yet reached social phenomenon like The Sims Online (which our fellow Russians practically do not play). And maybe it will not come to that, because Sfera does not model social life.

The purpose of playing Sfera is to conquer land and castles. There are “game masters” (just like Herman Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game”) who ensure the rules are followed, who are present in the virtual world, and staff from the companies from outside it, supervising what goes on it. Violators of the conventions are punished on the spot. If someone here or there sometimes does not want to play fairly, and uses special software to speed up the model (programmed) time in order to play faster than his rivals, the player is removed from the game. The highest measure of punishment (i.e. the death penalty) is not used often, just several times a month. The player is not expelled from the game (after all, he has paid money) but he is simply forced to start all over again.

The tendency toward violence — the only “abuse” possible in the game — is not encouraged. You do not murder monsters, and killing other players is not profitable. The players’ community in Sfera are called “clans”. The behavior of the clans, in the words of a 1C representative, “the most intriguing feature of the game process”. The head of thecommunity can isolate his collective from the external world, and in that case, no one knows what kind of communications go on inside the clan. If it violates the law, then it’s a problem for the intelligence services who have control over access to all server traffic in Russia (through SORM-2***).

A Psychologist’s View

Sergei Baklushinsky, a Ph.D. in psychology and practicing psychoanalys, considers the situation that has emerged in The Sims Online to be problematic because an adolescent can acquire undesirable experience here, which is inaccessible in real life. The danger comes then in the so-called operationalization of the game — the defining of the consequence of actions which lead to goals (such as prostitution). It is like putting on the Internet the blueprints for bombs — with their help, a potential terrorist gains the opportunity to turn into a real one. The same thing happens in prisons, when a person goes in as a light offender but emerges as a member of gangland.

The most intriguing thing, in our expert’s opinion, is the reaction of Electronic Arts to Peter Ludlow’s speaking out: “they sensed a threat”. We note to ourselves — a threat to business, and not to virtual moral freedom.

Notes

*Nikolai Mklukho-Maklai (1846-1888), according to anthrobase.com, is a Russian anthropologist and explorer, acknowleded as the father of Russian ethnography. In 1871-72, Miklukho-Maklai did 15 months of continuous fieldwork on the Northern coast of New Guinea, where he pioneered methods that would only gain wide acceptance 40-50 years later, after Malinowski’s fieldwork. Throughout his life, Miklukho-Maklai identified strongly with the people he studied, and he several times spoke out in their defence against colonialist powers. He laid the groundwork of the rich tradition of 19th century Russian ethnography, which continued well into Soviet times – until it was destroyed in Stalin’s purges in the 1930′s-50′s.

** Yandex has the site yandex.ru which is like a Russian Yahoo, with many free games and mailboxes, etc. and also paid services.

***SORM-2 is a system introduced by the KGB and its successors, fought by many Russian civil libertarians, which enables the government to track Internet connections, traffic etc. and is used to close down all kinds of sites, whether critical of the government or fascist, and is justified to the public to fight crime, corruption, and terrorism. It stands for “System for Conduct of Investigations and Field Operations” and you can read more about it here
http://www.libertarium.ru/eng/sorm/