The Alphaville Herald

The State of Play: Post 2

by Alphaville Herald on 19/11/03 at 12:14 pm

Sorry I’m being so slow about posting summaries of these sessions. Here it is almost a week later and I’m only up to my 2nd post. Nevertheless…

Session 2 on Friday was entitled “‘Century 21′: Property, Intellectual Property and Creativity in the Virtual World.” The session included presentations by Dan Hunter, Ted Castronova, and Yochai Benkler. Benkler, both in his talk and at other points in the conference expressed a great deal of concern that everyone was rushing to turn MMORPGs into little capitalist enclaves and that folks are therefore overlooking a great deal of possibility and potential with this medium. Underlying all of this is also a concern that once you surrender the gift economy of these online games and turn them into little commercial enterprises you jeopardize their ability to serve as places where free speech can be exercised. Clearly there is an issue here, although there isn’t a whole lot of barrier to starting a game that is founded on more idealist principles if they want to (it is hard to see, however, that one can prevent capitalist enclaves from breaking out within the game – hmm, possible test case here for the stability of various models of socialism).

I love Ted Castronova, but either I missed his point or just simply disagree with his apparent riff. He seems to have an idea that there is a clear demarcation between the game or play aspect of these worlds and the RL business end. Guess I don’t get that. Just a few blocks away from the talk, folks on Wall Street were engaged in RL activities which for them were also very fun games. I seriously doubt that there is even an interesting question as to what “the game” in a particular MMORPG is. People take advantage of the platform to engage in all kinds of play and even meta-play (like trying to make money on ebay or duping objects or currency) and of course no end to the social games that one might play when logged on. Castronova gave the example of the poor Cubs fan who reached for the ball in the playoffs, and the point of the example seemed to be that there was a question about whether the fan actually interfered with the game or not. But of course one level fans and the possibility of fan interference just *are* part of the game, whatever the rules may say. Then too, there is the larger game of Cub fans rejoicing in their misery of which this was well within the boundaries of play. All I’m saying is that play and games break out everywhere and at all levels and that it is pointless to try and specify one game or set of rules as *the* game or set of rules.

I remember thinking that Hunter’s talk was great, and being completely charged up about it, but now I can’t remember it so probably I just internalized everything he said and have absorbed his views and mistaken them for my own. Also confounding this were some very interesting discussions that I had with him between sessions. As best I recall, his headline point was that the notions of economy and property within these games is completely viable from any sensible economic and legal theories of economy and property. I also remember him being on the same page as me (or me as him) on Ted’s hard distinction between reality and play.

More to come.