Prokofywatch: Richard Bartle Is An Evil Marxist Racist Roundeye

Yes, I realize you’re so far gone, that when normal people talk, you can no longer understand them. Thanks for quoting huge swathes of my blog though : )

Sooooo…you’re for sequestering games absolutely airtight and never having real-money trade?

Well?

And…given that this is so hugely widespread that some games just finally made peace with it and start selling the game currency (Sims Online will even start this now)…your solution for making a closed, Soviet-style economy out of games is…what?

I hardly think my banning has anything to do with the quite proper take I have on Bartle. He’s a respected game-god. But he belongs to the past with men in tights. The world is evolving. We’re not on the moors with the elves and orcs and trolls anymore.

Oh, wait…

And yes, Bartle’s attitude toward griefing is disgraceful. He doesn’t get it. He’s for moral imperatives against things he doesn’t like, like game-gold commerce, but suddenly, when we need a moral imperative against crashing sims, he calls it religion.
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ReturntoNull, I’m not the global conspiracy nut. It’s folks at Terra Nova like Bartle or Dan “Zhelezniakov” Hunter, who, as leftists, imagine that there is this big evil American imperialist capitalist evil conspiracy afoot everywhere that will *gasp* regulate their games or even take them away! Ohnoes!

So, rather than engage in the usual invectives, could we hear from all the gamer boys here whether they ever sell their game gold? Are they for punishment of gold farmers? Do they think real life authorities should do that punishment?

I fail to see a single one of the ranters here grappling with the implications of a closed economy, and understanding the implications involved and the relevance of Marxist and socialist theory to these games’ designs and their command economies.

Dan “Zhelezniakov” Hunter at Terra Nova banned me on a whim last summer, writing that he was “tired” lol.

Ross, would you characterize EA-Land/Maxis as being from “Communist China”? They’ve just re-engineered their game to enable purchase of the currency and cashing out of the currency in RMT.

Would you characterize Linden Lab of San Francisco as “Communit China”? They long ago authorized user-generated content and cash-outs of the fictionary inworld currency of the virtual world.

I’m hardly any poster child for Second Life. I fail to see why, if someone has a business online, they are somehow a freak. Don’t you geeks by your computers online and lots of other stuff? Why is that any different? It’s ok for amazon.com to rent out server space, but I can’t do that on a small scale in Second Life? Huh? Why is that something to be ridiculed? I think you’re just not following it because you are gamers.

The chat and such should be up soon at http://www.metanomics.net

Scott, if you’re in favour of a TOS, why would you find Bartle’s remarks acceptable? He has this incredibly persistent meme that anything that I or any other Second Life business person would find as disruptive of business — common vandalism, griefing by crashing sims, etc. as somehow a cultural and religious problem — he uses the example of an American hamburger chain or whatever putting up a giant cow and offending a Hindu. The issues are merely the same zoning issues of real life, that putting up giant nuisances that interfere with the enjoyment of one’s property are dealt with by the law. In fact, the Lindens recently put in a policy against extortionist “ad farms,” spamming of lots of ugly ad signs on new sims and then setting them to sale to make people buy back the view. I’ll bet a lot of people in this thread so loath commerce and capitalism that the idea of a lot of spamming ad farms would make them absolutely seethe in self-righteous hatred lol.

Anticorium, if these ideas are *not* British socialism — and Bartle admits he’s to the left of Tony Blair — then…what are they? Controlled, closed economies. Enforced egalitarianism. Central control by an elite of progressives, etc.

I hardly think a critique of Bartle’s notions for games hinges on some celebration of Second Life. It doesn’t. There are some aspects of SL that are “revolutionary,” but others that are vestiges of the sad MMORPG culture that you see right here in this thread : )

BTW another touching little tech meme of all you children and gamers is that if you criticize a closed economy, and if you call it socialist, why, you must be Ann Coulter. My God. Ann Coulter is an extremist, an ideologue. I’m an Obama voter.

You folks need to get a really big grip on your lack of relevance to the rest of the world, with your childish and unaccountable recycling of Internet griefing memes and hackneyed political cliches. Only 20 percent of voters read political blogs. And…how many of them read gamer blogs?

>Catherine Fitzpatrick/Prokofy wasn’t banned from Terranova on a whim. She was banned for flaming, griefing, and trolling, all three of which are normal operating procedure for her.

I’m fairly sure she’s pledged to herself never to pen a post in which she doesn’t attempt to belittle or insult at least two other people.

–matt

1. Could you post for us again the 8 things we didn’t know about you?
2. Could you cite the speech you can characterize as “griefing and trolling”? Was it calling the professors at TN *gasp* eggheads?
3. My real-life name is easily linked to my avatar/pen name as I link it myself and Google has many links. Could you also link to the real-life names of the other people in this thread?

>Then again RMT sucks. The inherent unfairness, the disruptive behavior it causes, and there aren’t really any positives to be found. So if that makes me a Marxist then guilty as charged but I’m pretty sure that puts you only a couple of feet from Godwin’s Law.

I don’t play games. So gold farming doesn’t bother me. When gold-farmers botted and mined The Sims Online, which I viewed as more of a virtual world than a game, it decreased the fun for some people trying to play the straight economic game within the game, but since most people played a meta game, it didn’t bother them.

I can only observe in kids I see playing WoW that buying the gold on third party sites, and buying the characters pre-skilled, is part of the game itself. It may not be part of YOUR game. But it is part of THEIRs. I’m for, uh, oh, net neutrality, I guess you’d call it, when it comes to gaming and virtual social systems.

I want them to be open, and those who want them to be closed not to bleed their ideology and control into every other space. Close their own games, if they like. Good luck! Don’t impose that system on every one else!

There must be plurality of game/world systems just as in real life, the sliding scale between communism and fascism falls down for a lot of people around social democracy and for a lot of other people around democratic socialism.

The thing Prok can’t seem to grasp is that the real world and virtual worlds are separate entities. Sure the virtual exists within the real and therefore there will always be a little bit of spillover but limiting that is a large part of I and most people here want and strive to do.

Well, no, what YOU need to grasp — and can’t seem to grasp — is that you don’t get to dictate how various games and virtual worlds “should be”. For some people, virtual worlds will — and can and should be — serious businesses. That might be the object of ridicule for goons, but they don’t get to encroach on others’ freedoms in that way. Real and virtual aren’t separate for many people now — they just went ahead and did this, without asking your permission, or seeking your guidance about what “you want and strive to do”. Who the hell are you anyway, that you get to control the entire Internet and Metaverse? My God, *do* get a grip please!

It’s not me who dragged the real world into games. It’s kids. Teenagers. Not even Chinese. American. Brazilian. Russian. I dunno, they’re all over. You can’t stop them. Are you going to keep your head in the sand?

Scott,

Could you please back up your claim that I’ve somehow been “hypocritical”? You seem to believe that gold-farming is inherently “Griefing” and therefore immoral? But it seems to me like the normal human response to any socialist, closed system. People make and create value no matter how you try to keep them down. I find that very different than the other kind of activity, which destroys value — griefing. They are very different in genesis. You seem to be willing to allow the one when it suits you and not allow the other — but on a whim.

>That’s because you haven’t been paying attention. We’ve discussed it here for years. Admittedly because Second Life wasn’t involved and almost no one made ad hominem attacks or dismissed each other as easily caricatured stereotypes like “gamer boys”, it was probably beneath your notice.

Well, I’m quite entitled to call boys who play games “gamer boys” when they post an entire ad hominem attack ON ME FIRST as the OP did, basically calling me a tinfoiled hat nutter for…daring to call the great Richard Bartle on his socialist prescriptions for games. I don’t want his socialist prescriptions on worlds I am. Let him keep his socialist paradises to himself, and not bleed the ideology everywhere into prescriptiveness. So please, spare me your little hectoring lectures about ad hominems when you have nothing to say about a) the OP’s ad hominems and b) all the heckling nits in the comments raising my real-life name as a form of griefing; speculating on my trans-gender status; asking if I have a penis blahblahblah. Could you please be an equal opportunity bleeding heart about ad hominem attacks?

>Briefly, games are closed economies because they are imperfect simulations of worlds, and the checks and balances that keep real-world predatory capitalism in check do not exist. The games that have a more complete economic simulation, such as Eve Online, have little or no problem with gold farming, because it becomes a part of the world itself. Games with less emphasis on economy, such as most fantasy orc-smashers, have more of a problem because they’re designed as Hero’s Journeys, not as economies.

I’m aware of all that, hon, and your condescending attitude is so noted. You’d have to be living under a rock, even not being a gamer, to be incapable of reading, oh, The New Yorker on Everquest and Ultima Online, or the New York Times or Terra Nova. The problem is that in his presentation in Second Life, Bartle went on a RANT. Go to http://www.metanomics.net and listen when the tape is up. He ranted about the cheating little buggers who engage in RMT and didn’t make anything LIKE the nuanced presentation you imagine. He didn’t say, “Second Life is understandably going to have an open economy. Eve Online which has more stragic gameplay will also have a different sort of economic rule set. I just want to make sure that my favourite old-fashioned orc killing hero journey games aren’t touched and harmed.” Because that’s NOT what he says. It’s not what in fact most people (even Castronova) *are* saying when they rant on and on about the need to keep economies closed.

And I will definitely suggest that their problem lies in their wish to close real-life economies as well — they all talk about this same socialist paradise, this idyllic realm where the rich people who aren’t skilled can’t buy their stake in the game in advance. The maker of NeoPets talked the same way at VW07.

>None of which has anything to do with Second Life, which as you yourself often insist is not a game, so no one is threatening to take away your livelihood as a virtual landlord.

Oh, can it. It’s not about my “virtual livlihood as a landlord.” I make a modest income as a part-time landlord. I have real life jobs completely unrelated to virtuality. But what if I didn’t? That wouldn’t make me any less entitled to challenge somebody socialist prescriptions for virtual worlds.

It’s Richard you need to re-address your little homilies about people feeling “threatened.” He is feeling threatened in his livlihood as a closed games designer. I’m not the one feeling threatened by the potential loss of my minimal income from a virtual real estate business. Get over your stereotypes. Reexamine your values.

>Dear crazy lady: No one is trying to control the metaverse. We are suggesting that capitalists who create unique intellectual properties are entitled to control their own material, and if someone uses that material to cause harm to other customers, we suggest those capitalists have the right to protect their earning by banning the farmer. And to send that farmer to products such as Second Life that SUPPORT such behavior.

Surely a publisher of a game with a TOS has certain rules he can expect to enforce. But…what is he supposed to do if he, within his realm, cannot enforce him? Are you suggesting that Interpol round up all the gold farmers and put them in jail? Perhaps that’s reasonable. But…perhaps what we’ll see instead is more enlightened game publishers realizing that they need to supply more capacity for user-generated content and a users’ economy and simply learn how to profit from the transactions themselves, as Entropia does selling banking licenses, as Linden Lab does selling virtual world currency.

And as for “not controlling the metaverse”…Actually, that’s not true. None other than Jane McGonigal at GDC said that game makers — makers of these very closed games you are so protective of — said that reality is broken, and that game makers can fix it. They can take their ideologies about closed economies, code-as-law, and controlling masses in social media, and…fix the world. Make it a “better place”. Ugh. Look out!

Read Castronova’s book. He, too, wishes to port out of the closed economies of games various institutions that he wants to transplant into real life. Your little orcs on their little moors are not staying put. They are bleeding into real life. That’s the problem. That’s why I push back.

Prokofy Neva finally drives a stake in the Bartle Player Types!

Gosh, is that the sacrilege that I’ve committed here with the gamerz???

I haven’t seen anything so lame and ridiculous as those 4 game types since, since, I dunno, I happened to see a personality quiz in my kids’ teen magazines.

I took the test…except…if you don’t play games, how can you take it! lol If you never kill anything, how can you decide what is important, showing your sword o r killing something ROFL? I mean, it’s utterly retarded.

And the four types may be old hoary ancient classical types from the Shakespeare of games. But they certainly don’t work for today’s *actual* behaviour. I mean, where does the griefer and the clueless git fit on there? The social boors and asstards such as can be found in this thread? What “persona” are they? They don’t explore, they don’t socialize, they merely destroy. And why is Richard exempt, as a game designer with the “meta conversation and meta art”? It’s a type, too. And one not only limited to game gods.

>1) I’m actually the writer of this blog. I guess I could call myself out, but it would be somewhat schizoid.

I didn’t know you were a Broken Toy, Scott, thanks for sharing!

>2) Words do not exist in a vacuum. Your entire online history is one long primal diatribe; as Matt trenchantly noted, it is literally impossible for you to write a paragraph without insulting someone. After a certain length of time, that does make it silly for you to claim to suffer from the vapors at the slings and arrows of others.

It’s true that a certain sector of neuralgic and thin-skinned insolent youths and cranky middle-aged geeks find that I “insult them” or “write diatribes.” It’s just normal stuff.
If they dealt with the regular world on any sort of normal basis, they’d get that.

If you’re the one then writing the original ad hominem post, my God, you really DO look silly then begging me not to use a name on anybody else. For shame!

>3) The only person who makes ridiculous claims about “transgender” status, or even pays attention to it, in this thread is you. Which is wonderfully ironic considering at least one RL transgendered person has posted in this thread. Newsflash: in the “normal” world, Second Life has a magical reputation for flying phalluses lazily floating along the landscape. That’s what’s being referred to in places, not your own tendentiously argued sexual avatar identity.

By outing my real life female name, they are doing that, for one, and I see a number of posts here discussing my inventory. Hello? Are you deaf?

>4) You can’t demand real life identity in others (the reference to “who goes by real names” above) and proclaim that people referring to yours (which is well known from mainstream media interviews and your own writing) is somehow griefing. Unless, you know, you’re comfortable with hypocrisy. Which I guess is perfectly valid!

Oh, it is griefing. Real-life journalists who cite my name once for authenticity in an article don’t keep calling me by a name I have not chosen for this space. It’s common courtesy. That escapes you. Not surprising. I’ve always noticed two things about this: a) the people who make the biggest deal about transgender of f2m are usually vicious little manginas in the closet b) seldom do people to raise my irrelevant real-life name unless they are trying to harm me in some way in real life. It’s a nasty tactic coming to gaming forums. Ugh.

>5) I am deeply amused that you go on at length about the supposed desire of game designers to create an idyllic socialist paradise in the real world, let alone the games/VWs you play, while at the same time blissfully insisting that games you have no interest in, and less knowledge of the social issues of, should allow unfettered, unregulated commerce.

1. You are going to look at me with a straight face and tell me these games are NOT idyllic little socialist paradises?!!!

2. Where am I imposing any notion of what kind of social system a game should have?
That’s what Bartle and Castronova do, not me. I’m calling for plurality of social systems for games. You can see from your posters and readers here that there is precious little tolerance of this. They can’t even handle the idea of virtual worlds with real economies — it sends them into paroxysms of laughter and attempts to ridicule WHAT THEY CANNOT UNDERSTAND *cough*.

>6) Thankfully, there is no point 6.

Well, let me suggest it’s this: your need to get street cred and hits for your blog by bashing someone you view as a tinfoil hatter prevents you from having a real conversation about real issues in game economies. Grow up.

>Prokofy you said it yourself — you don’t play those games so the gold farming doesn’t bother you. You don’t consider it griefing because it doesn’t affect you. But it affects people playing those games — but I suppose THEIR feelings and THEIR gameplay also doesn’t concern you. Its just griefing when you say it is and if it doesn’t concern you then it isn’t griefing — have I got that right?

I’m not calling for an invasion of gold farming into games. It doesn’t bother me not because I don’t play the games, but because it is normal, ordinary, understandable human behaviour, like the normal, ordinary, understandable human behaviour in the Soviet Union or Cuba when people engage in black market activities that are normal things in the US or UK. That’s the problem. The ideological shrillness around this. I can’t get worked up to believing that a Cuban who takes some pile of cheap t-shirts from his uncle in Florida and re-sells them outside of state control is an evil criminal against the people’s social justice any more than I can get excited about a kid down the block selling my kid his WoW character. I mean, they do this. You can’t stop them. It’s normal.

Are we to fly in the face of reality and the study of normal human behaviour for the sake of keeping gamers in their illusions?

>Otherwise what do you call it when you are trying to do a thing — and it doesn’t matter what thing it is but it is a thing stipulated by the game you are playing and you need to do it to get that shiney thing or go to the next level or whatever — and you can’t do it because gold farmers are busy camping the area so they can do that thing over and over. Kind of similar to landbots in SL now that I think on it.

Well, the Lindens haven’t banned landbots because of their other overarching tekkie belief, which is “we never met a script we didn’t like; there is no bad script; all scripts are exemplars of human creativity”. So, they can apply this to scripts, but not the economy, which they control.

I can quite understand that if you leveled for 60 hours to get the Sword of Wonderfulness and some 10-year-old buys it from a 12-year-old for $25 dollars, it’s annoying. Well, what can you do, then? Don’t…value Swords of Wonderfulness by working 60 hours for them then? I dunno. It’s a problem. A real economic problem. I’m not completely sure that the tools that game gods devise to control these things, like this constant grabbing and blocking of IPs and calls for age verification and extensive credit card information, etc. to foil gold-farming isn’t going to harm other parts of the Internet freedoms that these very goofs here would scream very loudly about if they were taken away.

>In SL there is private land and spammers can be banned by the owners. In other games there is no private land and it takes a GM to ban someone. So what do you call it when a company whose sole purpose is to make money sits there and spams an area trying to get customers — making it impossible for others to conduct business, have conversations, socialize, cyber, etc…..

That sounds like a problem of spamming, not a problem of gold-farming. It’s like all tacky and cheap e-commerce, however. It uses spamming because it harvests a few clicks out of a thousand. It’s like the SL ad extortionism problem. If the Lindens sold ad space normally in the welcome areas, businesses could fetch 1,000 clicks for $1,000 Lindens normally, instead of spreading out 1,000 signs in the hope of not even 3 clicks across 60 sims. See how it works? If the game gods put up the gold selling sites in their lobby and sold the advertising space, maybe that would reduce spamming.

>I understand you have a very limited gaming experience but I’m here to tell you that griefing was invented in MMOGs and not so massively MOG’s LONG long before you probably knew the internet existed.

Nobody needs to have much gaming experience to see how these rigged, set, rigidly controlled economies work. My God, entire books have been written on them, and *I’ve read them*. I’m afraid I’m well aware of both the history of the Internet and the history of MMORPGs, and your claims to specialness here are in vain — there are many people who know this and can access the knowledge without MUDsters even if they weren’t there!

>For the record, your observations are wrong. Gold farming and buying gold is not a ‘way of life’ in WoW and most other MMOGs.

I guess that’s why spamming um…isn’t a problem then lol? that’s always the problem of ads. Nobody ever sees the people who keep them alive: the buyers.

>And I don’t think SL having an open economy is much of a threat to Richard Bartle’s game developer chops or employment possibilities. Despite the open economy of SL, not everyone in the world is abandoning fantasy-style-kill-and-level type games to go build blank worlds where the users can create all the content and get rich doing so.

You would think! But how else to explain the terrible anxiety you see coming from him and other Terra Novans, as if their place in the world and in history is being usurped? How else to explain the banning of a critic? (read what I wrote, my God, pretty mild stuff). How else to explain the terrible HYSTERIA with which a simple factual statement of the socialist nature of these economies is greeted!

Uh given that Scott’s like a real game designer working for a real game design company and designing a real game and you are like, not — I’d say bashing you is just a little side entertainment and not stopping him from having real conversations about real issues in real game economies at all.

I’m unimpressed. Real game designers working for real game design companies cannot control the Metaverse; cannot invade every aspect of our lives with their sectarian ideologies. They’re going to be getting a definite pushback. If they’ve never experienced that in their young lives, they will be soon, as they grow and have more influence. I don’t want the Metaverse to be a skill-grind and questing and killing theme park in its morals, methods, and technologies. If it wants sequestered spaces, stay in them. Don’t bleed the ideology out into everything else.

I do stop by now and then to this blog, and i’ve never found anything hugely interesting on it, but I live in hope : )

You’re such an internet newb, it’s horrible. It reminds me of newcomers to ANY online game. They get on the official forums and start tossing out ideas that they think would better the game, as if the game just went into beta, as if your ideas haven’t been discussed thousands of times before, as if anyone cared, as if you actually had any idea of what you’re talking about.

>It’s sad really.

Um…let me suggest that the real problem is that you are…a real-life newb and a newb to virtual worlds and virtuality in general that is outside your particular gaming world. Do you imagine all worlds are like your game? That the “players” dare not tell the “game gods” what to do? Gosh, are you out of touch and out of date.

>The games are not coming into real life, and you’re not pushing them back. You’re pulling them out, into your real life. You claim you’re being griefed? Are you fucking kidding me? Mentioning your actual name is griefing you? If you google Prokofy Neva, I believe on the 4th result, you can clearly see Catherine without even following the link. IT’S THE INTERNET AND IT’S FULL OF INFORMATION. I am almost 100% positive that googling Bonedead will eventually lead you to my real life name, which doesn’t bother me, because as a participant in the internet, I am aware that this is possible, and I don’t cry about it.

Just because it’s THE INTERNET AND FULL OF INFORMATION doesn’t mean that you invoke someone’s real life name in a discussion where they don’t use it because they use a pen name. You don’t do that to the other people in the thread, and are content with their game names. So don’t be a hypocrite. You are doing it not because you *can* but because you wish to try to punish, to inflict some kind of “damage”. It’s immature.

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.

>Griefing happens in games, it’s when you’re killed by some guy and he brings you back to life only to kill you again. It’s being surrounded by 2 people in a way that you’re unable to move until they decide. It is NOT someone saying your real life name on the fucking internet.

Says who? I’d suggest that if you talked to the local police precinct or FBI, they might give you a very, very different take on what it means to stalk and harass and incite harassment. Mr. Broken Toys here knows full well that if the real-life disclosure of someone on his blog leads to their real-life harassment, he has a real full-blown problem on his hands. We saw Second Citizen be closed down for such violations. The power to endlessly harass people whose names are linkable from your anonymous or semi-anonymous perch may seem limitless, but it is less and less so, and the buck stops actually right at this ISP provider’s TOS.

>I would almost let it slide if someone said, hey, this is her name, she lives in New York, on a certain street in a certain building, why don’t we all take a dump on her doorstep? Sure, that is an instance where you can call something in real life griefing. But, since the word griefing isn’t in my Firefox dictionary as a real word, it doesn’t belong in the real world.

Do you have a degree in criminal justice? You know, for just 18 months of study and about $9,000, you might be able to get one! Your notion of where griefing ends or begins is drawn from silly games. I wouldn’t respect your notion of it, as you and others are far too filling to tolerate harassment of people whose ideas you don’t like, and not insist on uniform standards for all.

>Auction Houses, Vendors and other in game money making mechanisms (you can set up a business within the limited world economy). Not everything is “provided by the State / Gods”. Compare that to trying to make money _outside_ of the game with disruptive businesses like gold farming (the comparison to land bots in SL has some merit. Or how about texture / design thieves who just exploit the SL world to make money. Their sole concern is themselves).

Wendelius

If you can’t cash that money out into real life, how is that a business? It’s selling a limited license to access game content. It’s fun role-playing store when you are 3 years old. I used to love it. Now, I like to monetarize that time spent on line, however.

>Yes, but don’t you see the slippery slope? If a game developer tries to keep his or her space free of RMT, it means that someday they’ll be coming for YOU.
I await, with rapt attention and bated breath, Profky’s next multi-paragraph missive wherein she explains how it’s all neofascist communist evil and stuff.
In order for there to be a true “Metaverse,” there’d first have to be a common platform…since there’s currently not.

No, Cmdr, there need not be a common platform. The Internet is not made up of common platforms. It is a mixture of open source and proprietary code, of voluntarism and commerce. Deal with it. Don’t insist that it all be one way or the other.

And what *is* your suggestion for how your little games will be kept free of RMT?

>Well, there’s your confusion right there. They aren’t Congress and they aren’t designing the next Patriot Act. They’re game designers. The only thing they want to control is their game. They couldn’t care less what you do with the rest of your life.

The game is not your life.

Please send this memo then to:

Ted Castronova
Jane McGonical
Raph Koster

and other assorted game gods who have various notions of how games can be used to Do Good in real life.

It’s not hysteria. You’re just wrong. Or possibly using a different definition of socialism than, oh, everyone.

What is your name for a closed, state-controlled economy with punishment of free market activity, a privileged avante-gard ruling class, and forced egalitarianism?

Perhaps I should have used the word “communism,” sorry.

>But this thread isn’t about that. It’s about supposed pinko commie game designers that are actually making robust simulations of closed capitalistic systems.

Um, no, let me suggest that silly terms like that come from the OP, and the hysteria he brings to the slightest criticism coming from me about anything he reveres.

Game designers, taken as a whole, guided by their ancient master Bartle, *are* in fact aspiring to realize their ideal, which is a “level playing field” that boxes out real life values like wealth, stake, class, education, etc. and substitutes it with the special magic-circle world of enforced egalitarianism. This has real consequences on people’s valuations and on their ideological formation.

It extends so far, as I’ve said now several times, that Jane McGonigal will urge that games be used to “fix reality”. That Castronova says institutions taken out of games based on appeal to the reptilian instinct in human beings be ported to real life.

You’re right that the war on RMT is like the war on drugs and in some respects like the war on terrorism. It sometimes spawns worse things than what it purports to fight.

That isn’t to say that a game maker can’t *try* — but perhaps the market is beginning to demand more sophistication from its game gods. Maybe people need more nuanced and sophisticated games where people can trade money for XP and gear and not have to grind skills and spend time for it — why not take advantage of the fact that some people have time, and others have money, and match them? Perhaps there have to be more flexible routes and paths. Game design has evolved, maybe it will have to evolve further.

TPR, I’ve played WoW, Runescape, ATITD, and a few others. They’re boring. You skill grind. You earn loot. You kill stuff. You get ahead. It’s as boring as dirt. I hate killing and being killed and grinding. If I am going to grind, I want the ability to do other meta things on top of that as you can in TSO. And my demographic contains many more people like me — it’s just not YOUR demographic, that’s all!

The idea that you have to spend hundreds of hours playing games in order to “understand” their rather rudimentary structure and purpose is fanciful, but erroneous. You don’t. It’s all clear. I do see what is happening. Your toy is broken, and you are crying. I sympathize. You need new toys.

What do you do with a bonehead like Bonedead?

He is too old-fashioned for his hobby lol.

If you can’t absorb basic lessons in Netiquette about people’s real names and such, so much the worse for you. I hope you don’t have to absorb it by a legislator’s success in passing bills on Internet harassment that you will find uncomfortable. Those who cannot regulate themselves find that others will regulate their behaviour for them.

You need to learn to read, Bonedead. I haven’t said what you claim I’m saying, and my experience, when you are on a forums with children who can’t even read correctly, you don’t have valid interlocutors.

Richard Bartle is very strong willed on this anti-RMT position. I think he concedes that not all games should have them, but he doesn’t like them, and kind of finds them socially inferior — you can tell. It’s a cultural thing. For him, for his class, for his aristocracy, the “right sort” play games with no RMT. It’s only the masses, those sods, who do things like gold-farm.

I, on the other hand, don’t care if somebody wants to dig for gold or skill for gold for hours in a closed sweatshop. I don’t care. Let them. I don’t want their ideology invading the rest of the Metaverse without consent; I’d like to see more freedom and pluralism in games and worlds. They are merely a niche market still precisely because they don’t appear to a wider base.

I don’t claim that every game or world have RMT. That’s retarded. YOU are retarded if you’ve pulled that out of anything I’ve said here.

Bonedead, your toy is broken. Run for your life!

Because I just can’t wait for Prok to work the personal revelations therein into her next sneering diatribe:

Sneering diatribes are *your* specialty, champ. You’re the OP with the nasty crazy nutter headlines. BTW, I didn’t call Bartle, who is a gentleman and a scholar, a “racist”. I said that the disparaging views of Chinese gold farmers need to be re-examined — they could be racist. I didn’t call *him* a round-eye. I said the round-eyes in fact were in Second Life running rentals like me : ) This was intended to be a humorous statement about the hatred of “the evil Chinese gold farmers” and the hatred of their round-eyed gold-digging counterparts in SL — although there, too, you can find stereotypes, as Anshe Chung, the millionaire of SL, is Chinese. Good for her! Sorry it ruins your game!

As for your essay, I don’t get all the inside baseball. But number one, volunteer programs are evil. *Holds up cross*. Evil, I tell you. Evil, evil. Corrupt. And did I say: evil? Hire benefited and salaried employees or outsource it to non-profits or inworld businesses, but my God, get off this Boy Scout approach to the problem of management of social media, including games. Evil!

What I can see from the personal revelations, is that you have a belief system, and that you do indeed think that your chosen profession of making games IS something that you do think can fix the real world, including your own broken self.

I personally don’t share your beliefs, as I do think people have souls, that there is an after-life and an Eternal Creator of some kind, and that the virtual has consequences. I don’t think man’s condition is only to be broken, as I think you can chose from a variety of world religions that ofter all sorts of concepts for the healing of man’s broken condition. I personally don’t chose to wallow in any condition of brokenness.

I think you did nail one thing right, and that is this horribly fake altruism of the MMORPG volunteer, the mentor, the wizard, whatever. They are all horribly corrupt and horribly involved in merely gaining reputational enhancement, if not outright sales in their stores (as in Second Life).

The clean-up you describe is not somehow “special” just for your game. I’ve seen this “clean-up” in other places — TSO and SL. But seriously, we should take volunteer programs should take the women and children out, and nuke them till they glow. Wait, on second thought, leave the women, they could spawn more. Wait…

VPellen, can you explain why an adult should be spending a single minute performing summaries for you because you just logged on and are too lazy to read a thread? What is this entitlement-happly culture from which you spring!

>You son doesn’t own it, because his friend never owned it. Blizzard always did. What you’re paying for is access to a virtual environment own, moderated, and completely controlled by the owners of said servers. They ARE Gods there, because it is THEIR world. This makes your T-Shirt analogy worthless because there was never a physical product to be “sold”.

Well, not any more. This model is changing. Just as, oh, models of human society that involved making women, children, or Africans slaves and chattel had to change. In a way, you could say, oh, the market induced it!

Your toys are broken. Run for your lives!

>refer to someone widly well known by thier first real name instead of thier handle, especially when they made themselves a particular splash? at worst it seems like a minor slight.
i mean. i’ve only been on this intertewbs thing since 1994, and gosh golly the big o

Um, because I’m not widely well-known by my real life name, asstard? Duh.

I bet it makes you feel special to write “interwebs” like that, like you’re in a special sort of tribe, eh? Are you about twelve, with that kind of self-deprecating lower-case “I” in your sentences lol?

If you google me, you will see the only people that dredge up my real-life name are griefers and stalkers. Real-life media demands that you produce a real-life name. So I do. That isn’t being “widely-known by my real-life name”. Google will help you understand that.

>Madam, you missunderstand me. My request stems not from lazyness, but from my inability to comprehend the exact details from the.. well, the baggage, I suppose. I feel that myself, as well as all involved here, would understand better if you were merely to summarize your position.

Also, the others seem biased against you, and I’d like to hear what your position is in your own words.

Learn to skim. Good skill to have when you get to college! : )

>Games are unimportant. They’re a fun (or should be) distraction. To take them so seriously is exceptionally depressing.

Gosh, I’ll say! You folks take your games very very seriously! lol

If Bartle is on board, it’s because his intrinsic socialism isn’t much at odds even with those who introduce RMT, but still retain the lofy game-god leftist ideologies of a Better World. Some game-gods, like the Lindens, have anarcho-capitalism merely as a temporary expedient on the road to the more socialist and perfect Better World.

VPellen, I think there’s a funny web site out there that has web forum personalities in various caricatures. Your name is something like Consoling Consuela or Reconciling Rita or whatever. I can’t help you play your game, sorry. Learn to read.

<Learn to be concise. Good skill to have if you want to blog.

I write as I please. You are free to read something else that plays to your infantilism : )

>Do not presume to judge me, madam. As a would-be designer, I want to see if you actually have any points to make that are worth hearing. You seem interested in making yourself heard. I am interested in listening. I see this as a compatibility. Frankly I don’t care what anybody else here thinks. I want to judge you directly, not based on how a mob of people see you

Then…read? And stop asking to be spoon-fed. Pro tip: go and read the original article that spawned this irate and hilarious post from the OP? And see if it is even portrayed accurately.

tannenburg, it’s good to keep questioning and seeing where the real-world analogies might apply. Perhaps it’s socialism in one country, indeed. Or perhaps the state capitalism that latter-day Trotsykists rail again. Or maybe it’s NEP. Whatever it is, it *is* socialist.

You can disagree about what kind it is, but to claim that it is irrelevant to discuss socialism with regard to a closed game that is the property of a game company is silly. Is no one capable any more of reasoning by analogy? And is a company town run on the self-financing system, or making it’s world run on a kind of sharecropper system at best, is it any different than Soviet Union, Inc?

In any event, these questions aren’t being asked by “crazy cat ladies” as you all imagine me to be, but by people like Susan Wu.

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/03/liveblogging–1.html

There is only so much I can do to drag you kicking and screaming into the discussion. For now, my work here is done.

>So in short, a game producer should be denied the right to control how its intellectual property is being used by the customer, in favour of free capitalism.
Last time I checked. when property rights were being denied to its owner in favour of the masses, it was called communism.
To summarize, a game producer is either a communist because he actively opposes RMT, or a communist because he renounces his property rights in favour of free capitalism. Check.

Gwaendar, this is the kind of fallacious trolling that continues to unnecessarily inflame already flaming debates.

This is a false characterization of my position or indeed the position of any normal person simply endorsing what is true and normal about normal human behaviour: they wish to buy and sell.

No evil capitalist is interfering with your precious game-god’s property rights and his intellectual property, let me assure you. Heaven forfend.

Instead, I am arguing for a pluralism of systems, where game-gods of the stature of Bartle cannot be allowed to dictate this model for all games. Because that’s what he’s doing, frankly, when he has the kind of bully pulpits that he has — at game conferences, panels, privileged pages like Terra Nova.

It’s hobbling any new thinking about games, and it is an atrocious old dictatorship that needs to be overthrown so that the space can be freed up for more innovation, so that game devs can begin to see what their players are asking for, in spite of their old game master socialist prescriptions: games with RMT, open-ended economies. Yes, this is what players, when you ask them, ask for.

Does that mean that little worlds of men in tights where the kids wish to remain in their socialist paradise rewarding “merit and skill” (read: slave labour grinding) will be invaded and rolled up? No. Why should socialism in one country, in one game, be so threatened if capitalism breaks out all around it? Does it…have a problem retaining customers? What, you’re saying there aren’t the millions who want socialist games? Well if they do, fine! Let them come! Put out a game for them! See if they stay! No one will stop you.

You just don’t get to dictate that socialist oppression to every other space on the Internet.

Gasp, heaven forbid, that we touch a hair on the head of the hobbits. They will be allowed to exist. Who can stop them? But they can’t invade every other space with their socialist ideologies. They can’t be the Cuba of the game world, showing up at every conference to flak old-style Marxist prescriptions — as in fact they do.

So spare the heavy sarcasm and irony, and get a grip on what YOUR model is saying, and all your little fanboyz here: you’re saying that because the existing new class of privileged game-god elites have a socialist prescription for their admittedly profit-making enterprises with admitted legally-protected property right to their creative product published as a game, we all have to suffer their enforced egalitarianism all over the Metaverse.

Why?

We have to suffer their idiot socialist prescriptions everywhere we go, traveling across a barren landscape where everywhere, police informants report on our criminal trading of currency on the black market, and smarmy little fanboyz sucking up to the game gods abuse report us (I say this figuratively, as I don’t play in these games). That’s your solution.

**Because I want you to follow through on your logic here. If you go on adamantly pushing the banning and criminalizing of RMT in the face of a growing user base that either openly advocates for it, is willing to pay for it, or engages in it anyway, you are going to have to use increasingly draconian methods of prosecution.***

For all these fabulous game-god economists like Castronova out there, nobody is studying the growing market in RMT outside the legal confines of the games, and trying to draw up some prognoses about how this will go. If a Dutch policeman can prosecute a boy for stealing Habbo furniture, we are entering a new era.

SO grow up, get over your snarky tendentious little forum habits, and wake up and smell the coffee.

And learn to read. I never called for enforcing anything remotely like what you claim. Yet YOU and others here are for creating privileged pride of place for the anti-RMT model and shoving it down everyone’s throats. The merest hint of criticism, and you fly into batshit crazy harangues like the people do here.

Who says you get to control the Metaverse? You don’t. And that means you don’t get to enage in fake portrayals of people who criticize your efforts at control as blanket controls, either.

Anybody who has the time, talent, and treasure can publish a socialist game if they like, and either use it as a serious game type of enterprise to indoctrinate little children to hate evil oil companies, or use it to indoctrinate little children into the belief that they should aspire to a world of a level playing field and level outcomes, too. — and nanny states willing to cater to their entitlement-happy whims for endless socialist paradise content, too. By all means, use the capitalist systems of the developed democracies East and West to publish such games in droves, and invite millions. Who could stop you?

But…look out, your world is being rocked. Your toys are broken!

BTW go to http://www.metanomics.net to see my handy expose of Richard Bartle’s atrocious statements about SL, and argumentation step by step through his rant about land barons showing that indeed, he is a socialist. It’s trully appalling that neither he nor you can accept these labels. At least have the courage of your convictions.

I always marvel how the idiot fanboyz on these forums fume and gossip among themselves and utterly distort positions. If you criticize the status quo of their game gods, they immediately, like hysterical, craven, manic little children imagine their games and their gods are being taken away, that someone will “impose” something on them.

So that’s why we get a typically tendentious and stupid remark like this one:

>Not just that, but it seems like she seriously believes rejecting the idea of, say, letting players who feel a little put out by the difficulty of playing in the world chess championships upgrade some of their pawns to queens for cash, or paying Kramnik or Anad to play in their name.. is evil, repressive, and possibly Marxist.

Um, no. Chess doesn’t have RMT. Unless, of course, you count the huge prizes or something. Games are games. It’s more than fine to make them closed, to have their walled gardens — I’m a big fan and respecter of walled gardens.

I just want there to be more than one type of walled garden, and I want there to be more than just walled gardens. Can you grasp in your Internet-educated brain a concept called “pluralism”. More than one type. Choice. Multiplicity. You know, like a multiple-choice quiz?

>And that this rejection somehow ideologically contaminates the people who believe it, making them unable to compartimentalize between what’s a game, and what’s a market.

Again, what do YOU call a model for a game world that requires that everyone be forcibly equalized at the gate, stripped of wealth and class and title, and made equal, as on a collective farm, and forced to skill-grind, with their labour exploited, up to a level that the game gods can respect. Would you rather call it feudalism?

But imagine that in this actually not-feudalist system, you can grind, collect gold and now you have at last a chance to punch through the game-god imposed walls to the coveted level 70 where the game is more fun because you have the Sword of Wonderfulness. So, being busy in real life, you buy it on ebay or something (actually you can’t any more!) and go there to have fun. But then the game-god punishes you and reduces you to chattel again.

You can’t cash out your game gold or sell your sword outside his heavily restricted auction confines where he strips out the value of your labour.

What, indeed, is YOUR name for such a system?

>And that Prokofy is the sole arbiter of what virtual spaces should be considered games, and which ones a markets, as opposed to the people who actually design or inhabit them.

Actually, it’s the opposite. I’m saying that Richard Bartle, with his forced-galitarian and socialist beliefs about paradise game worlds, should not be allowed to prevail.

That other games should be encouraged to emerge, and to compete with the socialist model.

Are you…uh…fearful that if you don’t impose draconian rules on socialist preservation that it will collapse?

Apparently that’s what is driving your need to grossly misrepresent *me* as desiring some control by myself (?!) over all game worlds (I’m not even a gamer).

This is one of the hilarious byproducts of silly forums like this, that people take a normal criticism that in real life would be stunningly obvious and exaggerate it into a bid to take over the universe like a dictator. It’s as if you can’t bear a critique without assuming it will undermine your world.

It let’s me know how brittle your world is! My God, your toys are broken!

>Like they say, the worst arguments don’t need to be refuted – just underlined.

Their fallacious premises can also be exposed, too : )

>Oh, by the way, now that Prok has gone, I should point out that I did actually mention Marxism in the interview that so incensed her.

ROFL. Afraid to fight like a man, Richard? I didn’t say I was gone, I just said “my work here was done.” My God. Look at your rant on the land market. I’ve exposed that, truly. Can you seriously look at me with a straight face, say your rant about how you find it annoying — and implicitly evil! — that there is arbitrage of land in Second Life and isn’t that wrong — and not admit your socialist leanings. I’ve taken it down line by line at metanomics.net

Why this hatred and aversion of commerce? It’s always one of the biggest puzzles I face in dealing with the liberal British intelligentsia such as yourself, which indeed does include mainly socialist viewpoints.

And let me point out that I don’t “make my living in Second Life” and my land business is merely a small part-time job. I don’t stand to succeed or fail whether Second Life crashes or burns. I don’t lose anything if socialism is imposed, or if opensim or some other project devalues land. I mainly engage in this business to study the world up close and in granular detail and gather a lot of detailed information about virtuality. So please, remove all discussion of motive, business, crass greedy profit motives, blah blah blah (they inevitably come in).

>I was responding to a point about there being economic harm if you stop people from trading (something along the lines of “every time you stop a trade, God kills a kitten”). I said that this only takes into account the exchange value of goods, and not the use value. I then mentioned that this was a Marxist characterisation, but that it nevertheless made a valid point.

Actually, this is only ONE of the many, many, inherently socialist views that you put out during this lecture. I’ve taken just the land market bit for exegesis today, but I could go on and fish out lots more. This bit about the use trade is only the tip of the iceberg.

>What I didn’t mention is that it wasn’t actually my idea. I came across it in a paper by Sara Grimes (http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/retrieve/2200/etd1862.pdf), from Simon Fraser University in that bastion of communism on America’s doorstep, Canada.

Yes, Richard, like the UK, the Canadian liberal intelligentsia in universities — where BTW I was educated, tend toward the socialist viewpoints as well. Laugh and hoot and snort as you will about “Canadian communism,” but I got free health care and dirt-cheap land in Canada precisely because it has a more socially-oriented economy in which there is a huge top-heavy bureaucratic class and where most people are employed by the government. And it’s legitimate to debate whether such systems work or not, it’s not interesting for me to do it on games forums, however.

>Hopefully, this will save me from deportation when I visit the USA later this month, should Homeland Security have read this thread.

Oh, stuff it. That sort of fatuous and opportunistic remark cravenly playing to the anti-Americanism on fanboy forums should be beneath you.

Your task, Richard, should you rise to the challenge, is to ponder what it means for the poor Chinese boys of the world to be game-golding in Wow and being punishment, even with threat of real-life prosecution, and the transfer of wealth this indicates, and the turfing out of games everywhere of poor people who grab at the big online economy to try to advance themselves. Their stories of harsh expulsion from socialist paradise are real, unlike the fake stories of your non-event of “Homeland Security” following your expression on game forums.

I have to chuckle at the ADD-attention-span kids constantly haranguing, beating, bawling, and screeching for a summary of a position, in a situation where…the person being attacked has written an essay to which the oP has responded with a snarky comment. They can…go and read the essay. They can…go and read the exegesis of a very good slice of visible socialism coming from Richard Bartle on his hysterical and erroneous comments on the land market in SL. I fail to see why I need to provide little summaries every five minutes for attention-challenged children. Screaming, banging your fists on the table, trying to impugn my intelligence — sorry, curiously unmoved. If you can’t understand simple premises in a relatively short blog post linked by the OP, then…move on. I’m not here to do your Cliff notes and your Coles notes for you.

Scott Jennings provides a curious link to a post that actually doesn’t even discuss Karl Marx historically, but talks slangily about the Chinese. In fact, you can find loads of Marx on RMT. In fact, one of the things that really chafed Marx’s butt, sitting in the library back in 1865 or whatever it is (I always marvel at the persistence of these century-old religious doctrines like Marxism among youth and professors today), was the idea that people in those other countries, those non-German inferior people with their tacky craftsmenship, could undercut the fine craftsmenship of the German people and sell their goods cheaper, so that evil unscrupulous (!) business people could import those shoddy goods and resell them and still make a profit! He was the original protectionist, Marx was. He *loathed* globalization. He was the first anti-globalist! Hate, hate!

If there are any educated and intelligent people out there, perhaps they found this sort of statement indicative of the problem of a broken forums like this:

“So buying and selling is innate behaviour. Any serious research backing this opinion of yours, perchance?”

>Look, given that Bartle can be credited for giving birth to online virtual worlds in the first place, the existing pluralism of systems is a clear demonstration that the man exposes opinions which are far from being accepted as the word of god. Looks like you’re barking up the wrong tree.

The existence of plurality IN SPITE OF Bartle proves nothing. He ranted and raved about WoW, too! He’s a curmudgeon!

>To get back to your premise that humans wish to buy and sell, in an open market, as you conceded, it is fully within a game developer’s right to decide whether its virtual goods are open to RMT or not. It is fully within that same game developer’s right to deny service to players refusing to abide by the rules they set (just as you can refuse entry to your home to someone who sells your couch without your consent).

>From there, the market decides. And you know, it actually works pretty well in the sense that systems who don’t meet a sufficient customer demand go out of business while the others thrive. I fail to see any form of socialism in there. Supply and demand regulates the market freel

This is a false argument, because it argues from the existence of various worlds and choices to saying that my characterization of Bartle’s game philosophy as socialism is false. But it isn’t. He wants a controlled uravnilovka of the worst sort.

Thousands of people DO vote with their feet and march out of games whose content they burn through, whose gold they sell, inflating the game currency and making the game not fun. They burn and burn, and they sell by the millions. Doesn’t this behaviour tell us something? It tells us that MMORPGs are at best a medieval fantasy, or a socialist paradise for the modern man that can no better keep him happy than the real life USSR did. And out he will go, and down it will come.

In 500 words or less, citing links from credible sources, make your case for why you think RMT should be legal in every virtual world

Once again, I have no such position. I’m not arguing for RMT to be in every game, or to be LEGAL in every game. I’m noting that the emperor has no clothes. I’m noting it IS in every game and that some games have legalized it, and that must MAKE YOU THINK.

Perhaps more games should have legal RMT?

Perhaps it’s too hard to have RMT?

Perhaps draconian measures are needed to secure it?

THINK, You know, entertain various thoughts, turn them around, ponder what may be best. I haven’t imposed any recipe whatsoever. Meanwhile, Richard Bartle *has* and you all still kiss his feet. Amazing.

It’s sad that 95 percent of the discussion here is stupid and infantile, and therefore one can’t even justify participating. I look for a few glimmers of intellect…I see them, and they flicker out.

The idea that you have to have played a game to understand skill grinding and game golding is silly. Playing 17 minutes of WoW as I have I get it, trust me, about the need to kill the boars and get the gold and go to the auction house.

So yes, you *are* woefully ignorant. You can’t seem to see that there is an interesting debate to be had. To report on what really happens in games. To come out of the cloud of unknowing about them. To see what people really do in them.

If it’s not interesting to you to have a meta discussion, fine, but don’t be such an ignoramus as to portray my postion as one dictating a social system or political economy on a game. Again, I’m for diversifying them more, as they are not diverse, and I’m for disrupting the horrible lock on discourse that the game-god socialists do have on the debate now.

>Why bother? You’re clearly ignoring anyone talking to you, to the extent that you’re attacking people who you actually agree with. To wit:

Um, Brokentoysboy, you attacked me in your OP? Hello? So…you didn’t agree with me. You didn’t agree with me about my characterization of Bartle, and you didn’t think socialism is a problem in games, so why the faux agreement as merely a cunning means to agree?

>So sorry if I use “slangy” language instead of your clearly superior writing methodology, which apparently involves inserting random Russian words with reckless pseudo-intellectual abandon,

You did use slang, and it was stupid, like, “Chinese say: gimme sum o’ that”. Whatever. I used one Russian word. not “random Russian words”. There isn’t any pseudo-intellectual abandon in using one very good, very well defined Russian word that normally I translate, but I was busy. Uravnilokvka is like when the Russian’s neighbour has a cow? He urges the state to take the cow and divide it in half. The American emulates the neighbour and works hard to buy a cow himself. It means levelling, forced redistribution, dumbing down.

But, as China is discovering, the child-like idealism of socialism tends to melt in the light of day, and the enlightened self-interest of capitalism often tends to be the best solution in an imperfect world.

Um, I read the post. It’s not about Marx, in some kind of large sense. It’s not about the problem of closed worlds. It’s about something else, which is state capitalism — the pragmatic Chinese communist’s realization that he has to go with the RMT model and “get sum”. Enlightened? Hardly. Self-interest? Yes.

And…uh…where’s that “melting under the light of day” of that “child-like idealism of socialism” that you can’t seem to recognize in your friend Richard Bartle?! Hello! YOu think if you a post out there about how socialists like the Chinese went capitalist, that that can do service in a debate about a game-god promoting socialism and expressing rabid aversion to capitalism.

Richard’s childish idealism does not melt in the light of day. I’m quite certain he prides himself on it. I’m sure his fan base prides him on it. In fact, I’m in his fan base and don’t expect he’ll depart from his childish clinging to that idealism of a perfect forced egalitarian world. I think he needs to be challenged, however, on this idea that you can create a world where you strip away everything and make people skill grind and trade labour for dollars and then expect people to stay put, to not gold farm, to not cheat, to enjoy this egalitarian paradise they’ve forcibly been put into.

>Which you loudly declaim you are fighting for against the horrible gaming industry Marxists led by… Richard Bartle. Whom, last time I checked, wasn’t actually working on any online games. (I guess he’s a secret master from behind the scenes. Those Marxist fifth columns, they’re crafty beasts.)

Are you daft? Or just one of those dumb-as-post literalist tekkies that has to see somebody’s influence over gaming as only when they actually work on a game, which you assiduously “check” on the “last time”. Yes, he is a non-so-secret master, and not behind the scenes but on every conference panel from here to breakfast. Stop being so stupid.

>But of course, you’d rather sling random assaults in every direction, heedless of what people are actually saying, proclaim repeatedly that you’re the lone voice in the wilderness who actually has considered such issues (to an audience that, mind you, has done so for years),

I’ve never said I’m any kind of lone voice considering issues. I do realize, however, that the MUD/MMORPG crowd imagines itself to be THE only empowered source to comment on gaming and virtuality and the Metaverse. So you regard interlopers with surly slit-eyed suspicion and kill them in the first few frames. Your toys are broken, however, and your world is rocking!

My insult isn’t random, it’s direct: you’re stupid. You’re dense and literalist. You’re cranky and defensive and obnoxious to me because you don’t like my thoughts. And YOU are the one who attacked me in this OP, and YOU are the one that wrote all this tripe about round-eyes and all the rest — it’s understood to be hyperbole and all that, but with all these even stupider fanboyz here on your blog, you should be ashamed of yourself.

>and ending with a loud smug declaration that this venue is far too idiotic for you to grace with your presence (that, yet, remains).

It is. It’s disappointing. Every once in awhile, you’ll have a glimmer, as I said. But you’re not on my smart blogs list, sorry, dear. I’ve actually been motivated to make a new list for myself of Kinds of People I Simply Will Never Debate On Forums.

>Are you sure you’re not a Hillary Clinton supporter?

And one of those kinds of people will be those who assume you are a certain kind of voter.

A statement I believe to be true *is* a fact until it is *disproven*.

Absolutely, champ. You believe no differently. Don’t you believe what you believe, until somebody succeeds in arguing persuasively that you are wrong? Of course, You j ust don’t admit it works that way : )

Taemojitsu, don’t be fearful of using big terms like “communism” and “capitalism”. They’re useful and descriptive. They have many RL manifestations and debates around them. It’s ok! You don’t have to be scared!

Ryuujin, um, I don’t have “problems” grasping property rights and right to free association. I’ve said that, oh, about a billion times now here and elsewhere? That’s what I’m all *about* is property rights and freedom of association. Games get to be what they want. Clubs can be what they want. The Boy Scouts can keep out gays, legally, did you know that? It’s just how that Constitution plays out, if you are going to posit “freedom of association”.

But just as I could say, hey, we shouldn’t have the Boy Scouts meet in our parish hall, then, if they are going to discriminate against gays! Or, we shouldn’t have our kids go to Scouts if that’s how they are! — we’d get to push back — so it’s MORE THAN FINE to criticize and push back, when the socialists of the game-gods go stumping around on their game conferences and Twitters and such and say: no thanks.

This idea that if you have an opinion, and stick to it, despite a lot of fucktards accusing you of having “cats” and “no life” and “need of medical intervention” is all part of the new Internet totalitarianism. It says that you can’t have a debate without it being a game where someone must always lose, and be sacrificed to the tribal consensus and conformism. I hardly see why I should trim my perceptions, honestly gained and sincerely held, about Richard Bartle and his games, just for the sake of a lot of lulcatz and code monkeys who had 8 hours off today.

Just because I posit something, doesn’t mean that somewhere else, there is a negation. I just don’t believe that a) all games have to be socialist b) that those that are will stay unchanged.

And just in case you’re not clear on *this* Ryuujin, you don’t solve every problem of society by forced migration. By demanding that everyone leave if they don’t like the TOS. By pushing and shoving people who won’t conform to the exits. You have to ask what kind of society is like that! You have to say, how could we make it better!

This idea that all of us online for much of our waking hours *have* to be sold into game-god indentured servitude just to be entertained — or worse, just to make a real living or have some educational or non-profit work is just utterly insane. We don’t!

I don’t *care* at some very deep level about some game that arranges itself like a dungeon with dragons, and has RMT severely prohibited in its TOS. Who could stop it! It has a right to exist!

But just like all those Serious Games nerds — socialists, too, BTW, many of them — like the idea of “harnessing” games and kids interest into them to force them to learn something, I ask: but could there be a more fun game? One that doesn’t coerce people? One they could use for a game or for something not-a-gam? Something with a higher level of comfort for more people than these dreadful boys’ medieval games?

And I have no doubt these games will be made, they will come along, and like MUDs dried up, so these old medieval quest games will rise and fall, but go into the minority, compared to everything else that is interactive, 3-D, streaming, and virtual online of every conceivable type.

If the people who design games insist on spreading their ideology into *that* they will get a pushback from me, but I don’t even matter. They will find a wall of people coming at them in the other direction. Many people don’t want games. Only some do. The mechanics, the culture, the belief systems of games need to stay in their games, and not bleed into the rest of the Metaverse.

Neil, every time I watch WoW, I say to myself, isn’t it a shame, everybody has to rush and run everywhere and keep killing all those monsters. Too bad they can’t settle down, grow some flax, buy some land, put up a house, you know, evolve beyond war. They could soak up those excess gold coins if they had *land*. You can’t make a world without real estate.

Where Prok goes wrong is seeing leninist conspiracies everywhere, which is a natural consequence of her being a russian translator at the UN for many decades, she’s imbibed so much Soviet propaganda (which really should be regarded as a toxic substance) that she’s internalized an inner stalinist determined to rid the world of trotskyism/leninism. The woman is clearly mentally disabled due to job related stress. She does need help. (geeze the “I’m an Obama voter” did it for me, after she once claimed to me to be a libertarian)

I’m afraid I have to deal with factually incorrect and *libelous* material here.

I am not a UN translator.

I am not required to describe my real life jobs to you.

I do work as a Russian translator as anyone can see by Googling me, but keep in mind that half of what people dredge up about me on the Internet isn’t *me* but somebody with the exact same, or a similar name.

I studied and worked in the Soviet Union for some years, but it’s merely a helpful experience to understand closed systems and totalitarian ideologies, that’s all : )

I do not see Leninist conspiracies everywhere.

When people pronounce others “mentally ill” on the Internet, they are merely engaged in a form of griefing and harassment. Real professionals don’t make diagnoses over the Internet. So when people talk like this, they are at best amateurs, but at worst people who think you can issue diagnoses as a form of warfare. I’ll refrain from discussing Intlibber’s personal life here.

I am an Obama voter. I never claimed to be a libertarian, which is an ideology I find rather distasteful (Intlibber *is* a formal real-life Libertarian and also a major proponent in Second Life of extropianism and anarcho-capitalism — he runs a continent called appropriately Ancapitstan.) I am a *liberal*. There’s a big difference between a liberal and a libertarian.

I agree with Richard that the off-shore RMT he’s talking about in the games he makes and loves where it is banned is cheating. It was cheating in the Sims Online to have bots run the pizza maker 24/7 and harvest simoleons mechanically out of the platform. That was widely perceived as wrong. I am certainly capable of grasping the moral dimensions of what he feels about this.

My point about it goes further, however. I say that if you posit these socialist paradises where you don’t want people to invent a better machine and figure out how to trick the game company’s engine, then…sell the currency. Remove the black market. Make the cash cash out. And — guess what! That’s what EA.com/Maxis is doing now with their re-engineered EA-Land. Of course, it’s going to have problems. Of course, there are those already making extra-game sales of simoleons. But at least now there is a place you can go to buy the currency without fraud or high cost.

What Richard doesn’t do, given his fury about the moral impropriety of RMT, is propose remedies that make sense. His remedy, as I said in my blog, is just to basically try shouting harder and shaming harder and making committees to say “Bad gold farmers!”. If he goes the route of real-life prosecution, there will be a certain lack of credibility for real-life authorities, who will have a hard time believing, quite possibly that they have to prosecute someone because…they were willing to work live making gold for very long hours to sell to those who don’t want to work long hours. See what I mean? If you can build a case against bots as fraud or software hacking or something, perhaps that might stick. In the SL context, the Lindens have refused to stop bots, and merely put out more land for them to eat up in the hopes of choking their owners on tier bills. The software company then becomes complicit in the ruination of the economy with land-glutting…

The other point I keep making about Richard’s rigid game universe is that he can get on his high moral horse about cheating and illegal RMT, but when it comes to griefing, he suddenly acquires situational ethics as capacious as, well, Eliot Spitzer. Suddenly, it’s ok to prosecute some stuff but do the stuff yourself. There’s no law.

Richard Bartle. The four player personality types that Bartle rails against is an urgent plea to game developers to not be myopic and create one-dimensional treadmills, but rather to make well-rounded experiences for players to explore and socialize within. I don’t agree with many things that Bartle has said over the years, but Ms. Neva’s meandering tripe completely exposes a worldview of online gaming that is myopically focused on Second Life’s problems (and therefore bent by Second Life’s faults), with no real appreciation for the theories that have been advanced by ‘game gods’ such as Bartle.’

Spare me the condescending tripe, Damion. I’m hardly the only one annoyed with the grand “four player personalities” and it isn’t ABOUT Second Life versus all games but it’s about…all games and all worlds.

Richard Bartle’s four player personalities are not ENOUGH. Anyone can see that! Not everybody *is playing a goddamn game in virtual worlds*. The types just are too old-fashioned, too stuck in games. Even *for games* of various newer types they just don’t fit. They don’t have a concept like “Innkeeper” which is in fact something you find in some MMORPGs. And obviously, if someone uses virtual worlds to hear live music or get medical treatment or prototype a build, how can they be “showing their sword or killing an orc”. The questionnaire is simply insufficient for all the many activities people will find to do, and types of personas doing them. It does not damage to his classic 4 and their application to classic games to say the simply obvious thing: they can’t fit.

And that’s why I said “clueless git”. Because he has no way of explaining the bad behaver, the griefer, the hacker in his 4 types. It’s as if they don’t exist.

Gwaendar, don’t be silly. We all realize that “Bartle didn’t write them” — well, he explains the story himself and it’s a bit more complicated than that. But they are known as his, and the test up refers to him, and HE has been dining out on it ever since. And read his Second Life chat transcript, he is set up and primped by Bloomfield to talk about these ridiculous useless 4 categories (inapplicable to open-ended virtual worlds and even games these days) and he natters on about them and says he didn’t write them but he doesn’t say, gosh, I should revise tho. Or, gee, maybe I should get some input on how these could be updated. Nothing like that. I don’t mind if people are classic curmudgeons. He’s entitled. He’s earned the pride of place. But I don’t see why I can’t criticize them. That’s insane. You are all such horrid conformists.

>In that sense, Prokofy’s stance is akin to me going to Saudi Arabia and demanding that homosexuals have the right to marry. If a community decides on a particular social norm, and the people of that community are largely in agreement, then no matter how much I feel I am in the right and they are in the wrong, it’s not my call. These issues need to be decided by the groups involved.

Neal, oh, stop it and grow UP. First of all, international gay rights movements do just that. And that’s fine. People get to espouse their beliefs? And support those who are likeminded? Hello? Like you demand to do here? They express solidarity with one another. Gay rights couldn’t have come as far as it has without this solidarity nationally and internationally. You don’t let “the community” dictate your life, my God, what a backward, medieval position! I thought you folks were supposed to be technolibertarians?

As I’ve already said a billion times: if a group wants to decide to be backward, they get to do that. They want to have women as chattel in a role-play, well unfortunately, who can stop them if you can’t demonstrate breaking of any real-life law? The Boy Scouts get to discriminate against gays and not have them in their group, by court ruling, brushing off all challenges. Freedom of association trumps freedom of expression when freedom of expression begins to encroach on freedom of assocation.

But…it isn’t that the rebuffing of that effort to trump it then leads to its utter collapse. Freedom of expression gets to stay, and keep making its case, and keeping saying that Saudis cannot execute gays, let’s say. The idea that you cannot go to another country and invoke universal principles and express solidarity with others goes against international law and justice. It may be the way of war in games, it may be YOUR ethos, but don’t impose THAT on everybody else.

And, truly you’re notion is so utterly false. Why should a bunch of thuggish indemocratic government goons get to be a group that decides stuff?! It’s like games and game god goons deciding stuff. Who the hell are they? Why do THEY get to be “the commuuuuunity”. They don’t! Some other group gets formed! Aren’t you all supposed to be for groups and wikis and whatnot? And that group has gays, and they demand tolerance, and we give solidarity to them. Very simple. That’s how universal principles work. But of course, you scorn them in favour of a million local situational ethics.

>A lot of it has to do with how over-hyped Second Life is/was. The subscriber numbers and technical quality are low when compared to the amount of press it receives. Also it was the “in” thing therefore right after that it becomes the “in” thing to bash it.

[...]

>And lastly some are just dicks

Or, it could all be the reverse of what you say, and you don’t know, do you? lol