(2004-05-26) Shirky Nomic Game

Clay Shirky on Nomic Game. Instead of looking for the places where game users are currently suing or fighting one another, forcing the owners of various virtual worlds to deal with these things one crisis at a time, I want to ask the question "What would happen if we wanted to build a world where we maximized the amount of user control? What would that look like?"... While real world political culture has the unfortunate effect of being either/or choices - uni-cameral or bi-cameral legislatures, president or prime minister, and so on - the online world offers us a degree of flexibility that allows us to model rather than theorize. Wonder what the difference is between forcing new citizens to have sponsors vs. dumping newbies into the world alone? Try it both ways and see how the results differ. This is really the argument for Nomic World, for making an environment as wholly owned and managed by and for the citizens as a real country - if we're going to preserve our political Freedom-s as we moved to virtual environments, we're going to need novel political and economic relations between the citizens and their environments. We need this, we can't get it from the real world. So we might as well start experimenting now, because it's going to take a long time to get good at it, and if we can enlist the players efforts, we'll learn more, much more, than if we leave the political questions in the hands of the owners and wizards.