Bartle the Scrivener

Richard Bartle, the Zeus of Game Gods, is such a textnik, that when He comes to Second Life, he says he expands the chat window out THIS BIG so that it takes up the entire screen and hides the view of the streaming 3-D world, because, he says, "I don't care about the pictures behind it."

Ok, fair enough. Of course, you'll get the machinima, the audio, the backchat in the room, the backchat in the group (actually, they have Group Backchat but maybe not Room Backchat, that's for refined collectors) at www.metanomics.net which is now it's own website free of the old Metaversed.com dynasty of Nick Wilson. So this blog is just a sort of laggy pastiche of impressions.

I have to say I couldn't really find any direct connection between MUDs and Richard Bartle and the nouveau groovy topic of Metanomics, back when it was first posted (and that's why I accused the organizer of being just a name-dropper or worse, a star, erm, embracer).

How *could* Richard Bartle and his MUDs and whatnot have anything to do with Metanomics when Richard Bartle, as a good British socialist and intrinsic Marxist (although he'd deny everything but the British part likely) is opposed to virtual economies. He really really hates RMT, and he wants to set up a giant commission in the sky to scold REALLY hard all those nasty smug little Chinese boys that go around gold-farming and interrupting everybody's game! For shame! Shame, shame, little Chinese boys (and Western round-eyes who do the same thing, essentially, in Second Life or some place). Shame! Maybe if we all hold hands and chant STOP THE GOLD FARMING, KILL THE RMT really really hard, we can make Tinkerbell wake up and prevent money from leaking into and out of games! Evil money! Evil capitalism!

I did have a very important insight about Richard Bartle I hadn't gained before, however, by his appearance among us mortals in Philip-Rosedale-look-alike-noob attire, right down to the metal tire-tread sandals (you *do* realize, don't you that all newbie males are made to look like Philip Rosedale going in t-shirt and jeans to Burning Man the first time in RL and buying some...tire-tread sandals out of somebody who was like, recycling and Saving the Earth, right? Of course you did.)

And that is: what Richard Bartle plays aren't games as such, but the meta game of being the game designer. So his fun, as he'll be the first to tell you (and did at Metanomics) is enjoying the game-god fun of the game drive, playing with, toying with, thinking about, the design, which is at the meta-level. So he doesn't look at the game as, oh, those hordes of ordinary consumers who are just having ordinary fun for whom he has, well, a certain British upper-class fastidiousness.

So naturally, what I thought was missing here in his metaverse was a realization that *other people* would enjoy playing at the meta-level of game design *too*. Maybe not *lots*. But *enough to make the problem of political participation in games and worlds and power-sharing with devs an urgent one*. That's not something he's likely to take on board soon, because he is absolutely convinced that there is only one tribe that gets to play the meta-level, and that's the game god. So it's circular reasoning.

Unfortunately, with the usual crashes and lags and idiocies, I couldn't get more than about half of what he was saying, but he did dwell quite a bit (because unfortunately Robert Bloomfield set him up to dwell on it) on these four avatar classes in games, which were something like, um, let me think now: Asian, African, American, Middle Eastern. No wait. Man Boy Women Girl. Wait. Let me check my notes. Explorer. Doer. Uhhhh Entitlement-Happy Clueless Git Nutsack. And uh...

What was it again?

OK so after that part was done, Richard ranted on at an incredible clip about how awful the UI was in SL. And there, he's not going to get any argument from anybody in the room. But...some of his ranting seemed to come down to, "and THEN they put in something that involved not text, but a picture! And then they made something else work by a visual clue, and not a text command! And imagine! The horror! This other thing was predicated on the idea that you would LOOK instead of TYPING." and so on.

Next, comes Prokofy's question, that went something like this:

"You've written a lot about griefing, and said that the definition of griefing is becoming too diluted in Second Life. It's been defined as "disrupting immersion". Can you speak about both the definition, and the remedies for griefing possible in VWs? More immersion?"

And here, instead of nodding sagely and saying, "YOU know, we need more @toad commands in virtual worlds, and we need the sort of wise discretionary use of @toad that we saw delivered by that game god in Julian Dibbell's 'A Rape in Cyberspace'".

Or, he could have said, "Yes, we've seen such a textbook example of the dynamics of griefing in that utter savaging of you on Terra Nova in the w-hat thread, and the solution should be not banning people but enabling them speak in defense of themselves, to have good speech drive out bad eventually."

Instead, he began this total nihilist Marxian rant about the impossiblity of ever having any sort of agreed-upon morality such as to define some minimal code of behaviour (he wasn't even willing to concede a game-god's TOS, it was wacky).

[Let us pause for a Moment of Reflection, and recall that when it came to RMT...evil little Chinese boys...gold...there WAS an absolute, rock-solid, non-subjective, absolutely objective moral imperative which we could all invoke, which was (*holds up Cross*): evil, evil game gold mined by evil evil kiddies disrupting the game and CHEATING *gasp*!)

But griefing? Naaah, no moral imperative. It's anything goes. P.S. this is a good example why socialism always and inevitably turns to crime.

How can you possibly decide what griefing is? Says Mr. MUD and Text-Based World (guess he never heard of Hammarabi's Code and ff.). Why, it dissolves into a million subjectivities. Why, I could be a Hindu, let's say. And you put a giant cow up next to me and have it ritually slaughtered every day, and you could be horrendously offending me, but in reality, you are just an...American company that happens to have a SL installation for your...hamburger chain, let's say. You didn't *mean* to grief the Hindu. But he is griefed.

And you SL'ers want to define griefing as whatever anyone decides is griefing. How horrible!

Well, no, Richard, actually, it's a lot like your effort to decide a moral imperative for an economic system. It might very well be possible to decide a moral imperative for a...civil and political system too!

Har har, Richard. And I suppose if somebody pisses on your shoe in the metro, that's a religious experience you shouldn't be tampering with.

Of course, we get to see this enacted in SL, as we actually have cows, like at Ben and Jerry's with their cow-flop game, and I suppose there are Hindus forming a group even now to protest, oh, ritual slaughter of cows somewhere, while enjoying Dolcett RP on the weekends...

I waited for the lag to subside and lobbed a Dancing Cow Attachment over into Richard's inventory and he said, "Thanks, I shall treasure it always."

I don't expect my basic premise to be so visible in actual game-god interviews: that game-gods are bad for virtual worlds as a class because they represent socialist economies or harsh anarcho-capitalist economies with little regard for the individual's rights or the public weal -- that amalgam of technolibertarianism that combines socialist and capitalism on a prim, making it sway one way to their advantage, and another way to the players' disadvantage at a whim.

Yet I think there's no question that among the urgent tasks of virtual worlds, as a space and an industry and as a civic undertaking, there is the overcoming of game-god socialism, their allergy toward commerce and toward RMT, and their insistence on the dissolution of every principle into a million subjectivities...except their own design rules, which of course are sacrosanct Holy Writ delivered from the Mount on High.

BTW, Richard shows the exact same genesis of the pet game code at VW 07 in San Jose, when he says, "OH, I don't want RMT because that means whoever is rich in real life can beat me in a game, I want there to be a level playing field so that the game can be played on the merits and on the skills and not on stake."

This is like Philip Rosedale telling us "land barons" in September 2005: "Money and land are not recognized as stake in this world. Only creativity."

It's not every day you can see so visible what the problem with the MMORPG economies and the VW economies *is*: the game gods themselves.

And it's not every day you get to see the urgent task of the Metaverse, to ensure that it doesn't *all* become a controlled game-god economy of socialism, that will be masked with concepts like "open source" or "information wants to be free" and "interoperability" (all ways to destroy created value and private property) and that it is free enough to enable private property, in the form of corporate-controlled "walled gardens" to exist and thrive, as their "closed nature" is in fact more open to preserving value and creativity than the so-called freeness of the open-source.

Man cannot live on Marxist ideas about redistributing bread alone. The Internet was not built on open-source alone, but on commerce and walled gardens which help commerce and value thrive. It would be nice if this weren't so, but pretending it *is* so is just another version of Stone Soup.

And then...here Mr. Text Mud was telling us that he could "take the measure of a game" pretty much within an hour or so and obviously he had taken Second Life's measure and found it terribly wanting.

I tried one last time. "But in a world of user-generated content, how could you take the measure of the design so quickly?"

Comments

[Alex]

Game-god may be a commonly used term, however theese people behave as ordinary "barons" of medeval times. "I own it all (your life included)!" (don't quite remember who said that). :)
Thank you for the report. It was... entertaining. :)

[Alex]

Also, important point! I have identified where this 'leveled playing field' idea comes from: it's one of the 'scouting movement' principles.

[Nicholas Chambers]

Somebody really does need to read up on what Marxism, socialism and capitalism are. I'm actually quite surprised that this didn't drop on the level declaring Bartle as a "spawn of Stalin", which is a shame really. Other than that, yep, thanks for the show. XD

~~ Nicholas

[Prokofy Neva]

It's hardly to declare someone "spawn of Stalin" to point out their socialist beliefs. I always find it fascinating how outraged people *with* these beliefs get when you call them on it. What would *your* characterization be of a world view that demanded such enforced egalitarianism, not equal opportunities, but equal outcomes -- no one can ever advance, no one can ever start with a stake, everyone must excel on merit only -- except, never cash out, no RMT.

What would you call such allergy to commerce?

There's also the problem of nihilism and the end justifying the means.

If you look at even the classic simple definitions, such as material conditions affecting consciousness (code as law), exploitation (gold farming) -- it's all there. Right down to the hatred of landlords.

You know, your friend Richard Bartle has some really questionable beliefs. I realize he is held in reverence in the game world, but...so what? It's one thing to design games; it's another to start designing societies of people online and influencing their politics.

Example:

"Saying that players share sovereignty with devs is like saying humanity shares sovereignty of the universe with God."

Maybe there's another name for that belief you'd prefer than socialism?

This is one of the debates I attempted to have with him:

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/03/sovereignty_and.html

Like many tekkies, he's utterly sour on democracy because he can't use it to push over his ideas on people, and that maddens him.

In this exchange, he makes it very clear that he's to the left of Blair.

[Kr]

A gold farming/spamming is a mass griefing, do you understand it?

[Prokofy Neva]

No? How so?

[Prokofy Neva]

Here's Richard's wry response:

http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/

Now, in true socialist fashion (sorry, has to be said), he has a closed blog, too, where you can't comment at all (ROFL).

He's miffed at being called a socialist or being accused of Marxist views. Please, do tell me, Richard, in all sincerity, your name for the social system in your games. Truly. What would YOU call a closed system with enforced egalitarianism?

He's also rejecting me calling him on British upper-class fastidiousness about dirty Chinese gold farming kids. Well, sue me. Oh, he says he will, if I ever write a book! But j/k, j/k.

Seriously, you don't have to be very upper class (Richard seems to live in, and be at the social level, of, oh, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology who lives in Honeoye Falls, NY or something lol) to turn up your nose at these kids who gold farm. There is definitely an undertow here. Doesn't Richard ever do more thinking about what it means for rich white boys to be playing these games, and be willing to swap out their time for dollars and euros to poor brown boys? I mean, if Castronova and all of these eggheads are going to study game economies, well, really study them! Don't bracket out the black market as mere miscreant behaviour!

I'll bet the WoW economy has gotten a lot like the Soviet economy toward the end, where 1/3 of the country's food came from people's private garden plots.

[Prokofy Neva]

>I don't, however, recall saying I want "to set up a giant commission in the sky to scold REALLY hard all those nasty smug little Chinese boys that go around gold-farming and interrupting everybody's game!", which was apparently one of Prokofy Neva's takeaways.

Well, of course Richard didn't say that in so many words, this is just hyperbole -- but listen to what he does say! The takeaway INDEED is that...something must be done! About this awful RMT! About these horrible farmers!

And seriously, does he want them arrested? Because so far, he can only incite moral condemnation.

And I guess I can't really accept this, because if I did this, every kid I know in a 10 block radius would be going to the wall.

They are all gold farmers.

PSST tell you a secret. The people who buy from them are: adults.

[Taemojitsu]

Yes, Richard Bartle is definitely arrogant and thinks players cannot understand things at the same 'level' that he does. This leads to him not understanding the reasons why people play games.

However, I have no interest in your economic argument because the only reason I play games is for social reasons and to 'have fun'. The purpose for the virtual worlds I am interested in does not intersect with the purpose of virtual worlds like Second Life. Understand that, and understand why gold farmers are looked down on in games like WoW. Perhaps you want games with user-created content and economic freedom, but I just want games that are fun.

[Taemojitsu]

Oops, note that when an economy *is* influenced by gold farming, there is a social responsibility to isolate those who participate in such activities... but in the end it is still the game company's fault for designing a game where people feel the *need* to 'buy gold' at all.

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm glad you can concede the arrogance of this particular game god, but it's not personal -- they are all arrogant. They are all elitist, and they all want to block players from participation except very much on their own advantageous terms.

As I've told all these kids whining at Broken Toys (I guess I broke their toy!), I don't care if you want to have a fun social game that bans RMT. Have one. But don't bleed your ideology further into gaming strategy in general and a roadmap to the Metaverse.

When Prof. Rob Bloomfield of Cornell University who wants to study game/world economies digs up Richard Bartle to come speak, it's not just a history lesson. It's an ideological debate about what kind of economic systems should be put in place.

And I must emphatically push for plurality in such systems. No one system can be permitted to crush the others. And frankly, when Castronova spawns these ideas for real life out of games, we have to be very afraid. It's very creepy.

What you have to concede is that you don't have a good way to stop the RMT where it is banned, just like the Soviets couldn't stop the black market. Perhaps all these babushkas wanted to stay in their virtual socialism, and perhaps all these bad teenagers kept undermining the people's power by selling blue jeans they got from Western tourists and having more rubles in a day than those babushki saw in a year. What is the solution?

Socialism doesn't work. It can't last. That it lasts as long as it does in games is a marvel.

The chief evil that game gods bring to the Metaverse is their utopianist socialist belief that they can create an artificial space for humans in which "only merit" or "only skill" or "a level playing field" can pertain.

It's as false a lure as Jim Jones and his punch. They can't. And they don't. And perhaps they shouldn't.

If they aspire to do this just as a game, well, I guess if they are wealthy enough, they can do that, eh?

But their leftist ideology bleeds into real life. They want to fix real life too! They want to have a "better" world! Why, they even have a foundation they support in real life called "Level Playing Field" -- it's not an abstraction!

When game gods and social media magnates start aspiring to political power, pronouncing on elections, even declaring representative democracy as "dead" and themselves as kings, we have to worry. We have to push back hard. I can't let a few squealing men in tights worried about their game prevent me from doing this, sorry.

[Prokofy Neva]

>but in the end it is still the game company's fault for designing a game where people feel the *need* to 'buy gold' at all.

That's an interesting idea. Is it? I never heard anybody say that. Maybe it is.

But can you breed the greed out of human beings? You can't. Perhaps all you can do is harness them to that famous invisible hand.

When I ask people, kids and grown men who do this gold buying, why they do it, they seem completely guilt-free. They don't want to skill. They want to enter Level 10,028 or whatever and do the more fun things there with the more cool looking gear. I dunno. It's a mystery to me.

But then, I'm playing the Sims Online straight without game gold, and always have. I once bought some game gold off a roomie in TSO and had all this loot to finally buy the grand piano or whatever. What a letdown! It does take all the fun out of it. But...you can't stop people. Lots of people are selling the TSO gold now again, because people don't want to grind and skill for 2 weeks to get a large lot. They want to skip the bullshit and socialize and play a meta game, not play the dumb job objects.

And game designers need to create more flexible games that enable more people to do that. To trade game play not for time but for money.

[robusticus]

Actually Lum the Mad of Broken Toys, going completely against the grain, was one of the few to say RMT is indicative of a design flaw.

Which leads to "plurality" or leaving virtual economies out, as in a pure game with a short time frame, as in it doesn't make sense to have a currency exchange for Monopoly.

The problem with plurality is that there are so few possibilities, fewer ideas and even fewer discussions about that. It would be foolish to implement a plumber craft, as an example.

[Prokofy Neva]

>It would be foolish to implement a plumber craft, as an example.

Not in the Sims Online there wouldn't be, and "mechanic" is one of the skills categories to fix the broken toilet.

[Ace Albion]

I never had a problem with gold farmers in WoW. Well, except for the annoying spam-bots, but those weren't the guys working on those hunter characters killing trolls 24 hours a day.

I didn't need gold. I never bought gold. You can play the whole game from level 1 to 70, without ever going near the auction house, and that's what I did. There are those points where you need so much gold to get your horse or whatever, but they didn't seem to be a problem.

Of course, there is no level playing field when you are playing in the same game as players who spend all day at home in it, while you're out working to pay for the gold so you can catch them up!

Meanwhile, what to do when you get a friend into WoW, and you are all level 70, and they are level 1.

[Robert Bloomfield/ Beyers Sellers]

OK, the link to the Bartle interview transcript is now available at http://metanomics.net/11-mar-2008/recap-richard-bartle-visits-metanomics.

I admit, I do not see much evidence of socialism in what Richard is saying. Richard argues that in a world that bans RMT, engaging in RMT is bad. He also believes that RMT elevates trade value over use value, which is a Marxian concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value). But that hardly makes him a Marxian, much less a socialist.

Unless, of course, you want to apply notions of state economies to other organizations, like corporations. Corporations rarely allow their employees to make side payments to exchange work duties. Do you really want to argue that corporations are socialists?

[Prokofy Neva]

Robert, you're just wilfully obdurate, and trying to appear cool and "above it all". My God, what the hell is *your* name for a closed, command economy with forced egalitarianism, capping of wealth, confiscation of wealth, etc. Please.

It's really astounding the deliberate blindness to the obvious. You're evil willing to concede that he makes a Marxian argument, but "that doesn't make him a Marxian." You're just trying to ingratiate yourself to him.

What's so awful about game-gods and those fanboyz who suck up to them like yourself is that they are unable to face the consequences of their policies and their actions. Richard Bartles is indeed a socialist in his design of games and his advocacy of policies for games, and even in his real-life views. Why the ducking and bobbing and shirking of the label, just to appear too cool for school?

Much of the liberal British intelligentsia has some degree of socialist outlook. Gasp, you would think it was mass murder to declare the obvious.

Oh, stop it, with the analogies to corporations. These game companies make worlds, the worlds have intrinsic and inherent properties. You can't suddenly back out of them and argue that the companies themselvse are profit-making entities and therefore they can't possibly make socialist worlds, don't be silly. Of course they make socialist worlds, they of all people. Their makers hold these ideals.

It's very striking to see, whether it's the ancient Richard Bartle with his MUDs, or Philip Rosedale with his Burning Man hippie Second Life, or Neo Pets, they creators all talk about the same exact utopian SOCIALIST ideal: that there will be an independent autonomous zone that people will be forced to shed all their real-life wealth, status, class, etc. to enter, and they will be judged and will perform only on the basis of skill ("from each, according to his abilities, to each according to his work") (yes, that's the actual Soviet re-adaptation of the original adage that talked about "need"), and that they will live in this separate, sequestered utopia without the ability to cash out or come out of the membrane and return to that other world of rating by class and wealth.

This is so glaringly obvious in their ideologies that I don't know how you can willfully ignore it, but I've seen this sort of denial before.

And...what is this "world that bans RMT?" Some worlds do, some don't. It's more of a sliding scale than he or you seemed prepared to admit. My point is that you can ban it all you like, but observe human behaviour, it won't sit still for it, it jumps the wall the minute it can. The Soviets tried to ban conversion of currency and sale on the black market, and look how well that worked!

Everywhere there are such closed socialist experiments, they always lead to crime: the common goods are plundered, the "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us" ethic enters, people feel they can destroy or steal what they don't individually own, black marketeering becomes the norm, and graft and an official system of privileges. It always ends collapsing on itself. I should think there'd be enough real-life experiments now that make this obvious.

At the root of your unwillingness to see the obvious seems to be a deep need not to critique socialism.

[Prokofy Neva]

heheh *even willing But evil, too!

[Prokofy Neva]

One of the ways the graft and corruption of the closed systems is obvious is in the volunteer/game wizard sort of system. It's really an eye-popper to read the brokentoys.org guy's rant about the collapse of his game's volunteer system -- it's just like the dramas of the SL mentors or the AW mentors.

[Taemojitsu]

"but it's not personal -- they are all arrogant. They are all elitist, and they all want to block players from participation except very much on their own advantageous terms."

In the case of games for fun tho, what is to their advantage is the same as what is to the player's advantage... assuming the playerbase is enough to realize long-term gain vs loss from a virtual environment.

What usually ends up happening tho is that devs of 'games for fun' are just incompetent tho, /shrug. So while they think they are doing something that is to their advantage, it actually ends up ruining the game and everyone quits.

"But don't bleed your ideology further into gaming strategy in general and a roadmap to the Metaverse."

Yes. Definitely. That's why I posted here in like support, despite all the flaming and trolling going on at other locations on the interwebs.

I can only say that I hope intelligence and capitalism win out, and that Second Life-type virtual worlds tend towards freedom instead of restriction. You understand the currents involved much better than I do.

However,
"It's as false a lure as Jim Jones and his punch. They can't. And they don't. And perhaps they shouldn't."

They can :P A market needs both supply *and* demand. A virtual world that is intentionally linked to real-world economics will tend towards demand because the game company itself is encouraging the value metric, but a virtual world that is a game for fun will only tend towards demand if the game is incorrectly designed and not fun.

"When game gods and social media magnates start aspiring to political power, pronouncing on elections, even declaring representative democracy as "dead" and themselves as kings, we have to worry. We have to push back hard. I can't let a few squealing men in tights worried about their game prevent me from doing this, sorry."

No one cares about games :P They are a form of entertainment and community association, just like TV or books; virtual worlds that have an economy are different, but I suspect the real actors here do not give a half-eaten rat's @#$ about what these 'game gods' might think or do. The universe is larger than you might suppose from close examination. However, it is also much larger than I suppose, so I concede that I might be wrong here. ;)

[Taemojitsu]

Have more time to reply. I honestly laughed when you talked about the ideal of the 'skill-based economy', Neva. Whether 'game gods' actually believe in such I don't know, but as for my experience there are only three things in an MMO: effort, time, and how that effort + time is interpretted.

Skill has no place here. You can express your skill in the game, but it has very little to do with your character's place in the economy.

People buy gold because for them, the game is Not Fun unless they buy gold. Officially banning RMT in a virtual world does not mean it is 'wrong' to do so; altho conversely openly allowing RMT means that it is definitely not wrong. What makes it wrong is not the rules, but its effect on other players and how justified buying gold would be in the first place.

So there are, mostly, two reasons why playing the game normally in an MMO would not be fun: either 1) you do not value the achievements that are you are purchasing, but want to pretend that you still did them legitimately. Or 2) you don't care about them at all, and just want to get to the 'real game' which requires a greater amount of progression for participation.

A lot of it is social, because that's what game-type virtual worlds are all about. Is X achievement something that other players will respect? If it requires effort, and presents itself correctly, the answer should be yes. This is the measure of how well a game is designed. However, what ends up happening is that players on the higher tiers of progression do not care about what other players do, because *the game gives them no reason to care*, and so players with less progression feel they are wasting their time unless they reach the uppermost tiers; and so they buy gold.

If every player feels this way about lower-level progression then buying gold is morally justified. However, this has nothing to do with *your* main concern which is games that are intended to have RMT economies, where players should be free to act as agents of capitalism because that is the point of the virtual world.

[Taemojitsu]

*just a suggestion tho:
>If you name is so linkable, link it? And then take a phone call at home from me, like I’ve had to endure from the Internet’s children.

You need more practice reacting to trolling. encyclopediadramatica.com has many wonderful techniques and examples, but you can find some anywhere intense discussion is going on. Know your enemy. Understand your enemy; and understand yourself. Sun Tzu, etc etc blah blah blah

[Prokofy Neva]

You need to get a life Taemojitsu, even a SL would do.

And I'm reminded now that this Broken Toys thing is winding down that you don't:

a. Have a Second Life avatar first and last name
b. Have a recognizable blog name
c. Have a real-life name.

Being in Ironforge or Encyclopedia Dramatica aren't a substitute for one of those 3 things.

So, those are my rules here, and have been for like 2 years. That means you can't post here unless you come up with b or c because a) would merely be a quickie alt.

I just don't find it useful to keep chatting with anonymous people who can't take responsibility even at the level of Second Life or a blog with a pen name for what they constantly write to other people who *do* provide at least that much -- and even a real-life name that is linked.

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, silly me, I hadn't caught up with the Lindens' latest iteration of the Four Archetypes in Second Life, which they've thoughtfully provided here on their new website:

https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/security.asp?task=knowledge&questionID=1&cFname=Random_Unsung&cLname=Unsung&cUname=random_unsung&cSlaName=3abe124ecc82bf2c2e22e6058f38c50c&cEmail=ravenglassrentals@yahoo.com&sessID=6206e5222cdbe0d529eaa5f75dd393b3&deptID=4417&sessEmail=systemuser@lindenlab.com&cStatus=REGISTERED&CUSTOMER_URL=https://osiris.lindenlab.com/csr/home.php/Summary/a6d6204ff71c48e1abf327befc501ecf&

Business Owners
Creators
Educators
Land Owners

This is thoughtfully provided in a section called "Roles" just like, oh, the entry on corporativism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporativism

I always chuckle when I see the Lindens' land allergy reflected in silly notions like this, that landowners aren't business owners, or that the land business isn't a business. It's illegitimate to the Lindens because Philip says so.

Naturally, it's too bad they left out "non-profits".

This new Knowledge Base is a total laff riot. Try this, for example:

"If you're trying to fine-tune your current avatar, but they happen to be the wrong gender, a gender swap is quick, easy, and surgery-free."

Here's another hilarious one:

"Recommendations for Self-Governance

* If you are being pushed or thrown around by scripts, sit on something. Remain calm, and don't panic. Sit on an object, or on the ground. If you're not on damage enabled land, nobody can hurt you. Most offenders get bored pretty quickly and go away if you don't respond to them.
* Consider using the mute function. You can mute both residents and their objects! To mute a person, click on their profile and push the 'mute' button. If you want to mute an object, point your mouse at the object then right click with your mouse to see the pie menu. Click 'more' twice and you will see mute option. You can also mute an object by name by using the mute list under "View" on the menu.
* If you're on combat/damage enabled land, being shot at is not abuse. Look for a little red heart to the right of your Help menu at the top of the screen. If you can see it, you're in a valid combat zone, which means weapons fire is permitted. Use of weapons outside areas marked this way is not.
* If the problem is an ongoing one and you are not able to Eject or Ban the problem person from your land (or it doesn't help, for some reason), head for Help Island and talk to someone there. Give them a quick description of your problem, that it is an ongoing one, and let them know that you have filed an Abuse Report. If a Linden Lab Liaison or a Mentor is able to come and help you, they will, but there are many Residents and few Liaisons. They will do their best, but may not always be available.
* If you are friends with the person, or have their calling card, remove them. This will prevent them tracking you if you decide to go elsewhere. "

[Boon]

I just can't figure out all this mumbo jumbo.

So your telling me that if I am a real person in (real life) that I get to be a real person in a game too. So what if my game happned to be Counter-Strike and I killed some other 'real person' who was playing a terrorist. Real world laws would apply to me.

Or better yet, since we are talking Virtual Worlds, lets move over to World of Warcraft, and say I am playing an Orc Fighter and I go in to a PvP instance and I kill a Human Mage. All the sudden I am having real world rules applied to my gameplay?

Thanks but no thanks. Many of us 'normal' people play games (video or virtual) to escape the confines of the real world. With the word game comes a set of rules to help establish a set of actions one can and can not take in the game, there is a goal you try to reach.

We play these games to do all sorts of activities outside of what we can humanly do in the 'real world'.

Here is the World of Warcraft TOS:

WORLD OF WARCRAFT® END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ CAREFULLY.

BY INSTALLING, COPYING, OR OTHERWISE USING THE GAME (DEFINED BELOW), YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, YOU ARE NOT PERMITTED TO INSTALL, COPY, OR USE THE GAME.

I mean you don't even have to read the whole thing, its right there in the first few lines.. its also nice a bold and in capitols too... which in Legal speak means -- this is important --.

Second Life FAQ:

2. Is Second Life a MMORPG?

Yes and no. While the Second Life interface and display are similar to most popular massively multiplayer online role playing games (or MMORPGs), there are two key, unique differences:

Creativity: Second Life provides near unlimited freedom to its Residents. This world really is whatever you make it, and your experience is what you want out of it. If you want to hang out with your friends in a garden or nightclub, you can. If you want to go shopping or fight dragons, you can. If you want to start a business, create a game or build a skyscraper you can. It’s up to you.

Ownership: Instead of paying a monthly subscription fee, Residents can obtain their first Basic account for FREE. Additional Basic accounts cost a one-time flat fee of just $9.95. If you choose to get land to live, work and build on, you pay a monthly lease fee based on the amount of land you have. You also own anything you create—residents retain IP rights over their in-world creations.

This is a common model on free to play games, that they will have some sort of reason for players to spend money on the game, most commonly to the company itself for consumable items. But second life allows players to create content and to also own it.

If you really feel you 'really' own a piece of land in Second Life, only time will tell when the company pulls the plug on the game, and the courts have their say.

I just think 'some' people can't grasp that Second Life is not real life, and that Second Life is not the second comming of the golden age of gaming. Second Life is pretty lame in the scope of video games... Get outside your Second Life and back in to the real life and you'll see that people really don't care about this as much as oh say Gear of War, Halo 3, World of Warcraft (mostly outside the US).... and so forth. Heck, Dungeons & Dragons online is more popular than Second Life.

Second Life is not going to save or change who you are in real life. You might get to do some talk shows like the host of this site Prokofy Neva (can't mention her real name on her own site, cause she might get griefed) which can only happen in a game.

People like these have found a way to make real world money through the work and initial creativity of others and what to continue to exploit this. Second Life made their game for this purpose, but others are not made to dictate your power in the game to your bank account.

Like what was mentioned to YOU Prokofy Neva over at BrokenToys is that Richard Bartle is not against games being different, he does not want every game to be WoW clones where RMT is not a wanted feature, or that all games should be Second Life.

But your inability to either read english or communicate effective in the language is a hinderance to the discussion over there. Your posts are very incoherent at best. I guess unless your living in Second Life. You also need to realize that if Richard Bartle was such a Game-God there most likely would be no game Second Life as you play it today.

Richard Bartle write and does his speeches to help promote 'thinking', not to conform everyone to one singular idea, ideology, or Socialist view of the small world you live in. There is zero conspiricy to have second life ruin your business of making real world money of the programming of other individuals.

This how-ever will not be tolerated in all games that exists out there. There are a lot of us (and I do me a lot) that will not put up with having real world money dictate our status in a online virtual world that we log in to to escape the real world.

If you feel like those Chinese kids should benefit from breaking laws and regulations established by the 'game', then you might want to donate some of your earning to helping them. Also if a real life person in the real world is bound by those laws inside the game, then why should be not punish them for breaking the laws.

Do you really think those kids are paying taxes on that money they do make. Also you might want to take this type of debate up with people like Yantis and the Chinese government as they are the ones whom set up the conditions for these kids to break the laws, to want to break the laws of the game for their own benefit.

Notice they don't do it for the benefit of the game, they only care about themselves. They don't farm gold, items, and characters to make the game a better place to be or play. They do it to make a buck. Much like you play second life to make a buck.

Most of us care less about playing games to make money, that is not our passion. Its not why we play. We play for the challenge, the learning, and the feeling of escaping the real world and its issues .

Do I feel capitalism is so great... no, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. If you want the utopia, you need to figure out a better way of evening the playing field.