Exploring Online Conflict Resolution

by Alphaville Herald on 06/11/04 at 3:19 pm

In an historic meeting at the State of Play, a group of game developers, lawyers, and conflict mediators met to discuss strategies for conflict resolution online. The headline idea emerging from the meeting was the thought that rather than impose uniform conflict resolution strategies in a top down manner, it might be more useful for open ended social platforms like Second Life to allow users to organically develop their own conflict resolution strategies in a bottom up fashion ? perhaps leading to multiple strategies. Games like SL could then become laboratories or incubators from new kinds of conflict resolution tools and structures. The question then becomes what kinds of tools can SL make available to the users to assist in this?

Some of the attendees. From the left, Daniel Terdiman (Wired Online), Philip Rosedale (Linden), Jack Balkin (Yale Law), Robin Harper (Linden), Colin Rule (eBay director of conflict resolution), and Randy Farmer (Yahoo!).