Let Us Treat This Like We Were A Family: Cover It In A Dark, Hidden Place, And Never Speak Of This Again

No, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/03/broken-children.html

I learned she doesn’t understand the difference between a “state” and a “company”.

No, you don’t understand “reasoning by analogy” which they teach in English 101 in college.

>demand that people not insult you while simultaneously insulting people.
Re-addressed to OP, let he who is without sin, etc.

BTW, did you know that the Internet is like the Special Olympics? Even if you lose, you’re still special! : )

Hehe I thought it was me, but it really is the template for posting comments. Unless you push the cursor all the way back to the top, it only posts part of the comment. Now is that special>?!

So…it’s not PORKFRY but ProVOKy. Fear my wrath.

Every ruling class creates its own culture, and consequently, its own art. History has known the slave-owning cultures of the East and of classic antiquity, the feudal culture of medieval Europe and the bourgeois culture which now rules the world. It would follow from this that the proletariat has also to create its own culture and its own art.

The question, however, is not as simple as it seems at first glance. Society in which slave owners were the ruling class, existed for many and many centuries. The same is true of feudalism. Bourgeois culture, if one were to count only from the time of its open and turbulent manifestation, that is, from the period of the Renaissance, has existed five centuries, but it did not reach its greatest flowering until the nineteenth century, or, more correctly, the second half of it. History shows that the formation of a new culture which centers around a ruling class demands considerable time and reaches completion only at the period preceding the political decadence of that class.

Will the proletariat have enough time to create a “proletarian” culture? In contrast to the regime of the slave owners and of the feudal lords and of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat regards its dictatorship as a brief period of transition. When we wish to denounce the all-too-optimistic views about the transition to socialism, we point out that the period of the social revolution, on a world scale, will last not months and not years, but decades – decades, but not centuries, and certainly not thousands of years. Can the proletariat in this time create a new culture? It is legitimate to doubt this, because the years of social revolution will be years of fierce class struggles in which destruction will occupy more room than new construction. At any rate the energy of the proletariat itself will be spent mainly in conquering power, in retaining and strengthening it and in applying it to the most urgent needs of existence and of further struggle. The proletariat, however, will reach its highest tension and the fullest manifestation of its class character during this revolutionary period and it will be within such narrow limits that the possibility of planful, cultural reconstruction will be confined.

The Prokofy at 9:50 am isn’t me, but a spoof. I believe I see some other spoofs in here, too, don’t have time to mark them all. I think most people can tell my unmistakeable prose from the fakes, however : )

Say, is that Brent *Linden* there at 11:30 am? Why-are-we-not-surprised.

@brent

Um, let me explain how it works, dear.

And if you’re not willing to hear it from me, you’ll hear it from, I dunno, Cisco, IBM, Google, Samsung — somebody.

I pay for your real-life expenses with my tier, but your entire platform that you toil away on pays for *my* real-life expenses by enabling me to run a small business.

And collectively speaking, those of us who pay this tier and have businesses in Second Life, were we to average out our incomes, well, I’m not sure that they wouldn’t at least equal, if not surpass your salaries. You’d be afraid to find that out, wouldn’t you? Because to find it out would help you learn your place, one way or another. If we make more, you should respect us. If we make less, you still should respect us because if we don’t make more, you fold. There’s no way you win by making us lose.

It would help you stop being a common little sandbox script kiddy griefer harassing a paying customer like me on forums if you knew that you need more of us, and need to show us respect, if you want to keep paying your real-life expenses.

Ultimately, you are the wife of, say, a garage mechanic. The mechanic repairs my truck, which I use to have a business and support other people’s businesses, and that frankly puts your mechanic role…in its place.

Win all the threads you want, sweetcakes, those win/lose notions are old MMORPG vestiges that you need to weed out of your hippie product to make it presentable for the wider world, or you will have no more job for your Linden-significant-other.

I instinctively feel that the Time Cube guy is right.

>Shut up and pay me your $10 a month, little man. My Porsche needs some performance upgrades.

Your pixel Porsche that you bought with your spacebux?

I pay a lot more than $10 ROFL.

Making money isn’t dirty, kids, it’s what your game-gods do with your games. You pay them to make those games, and they make a profit. You don’t find *that* dirty, but you want them to sustain your illusion of a perfect utopian socialist paradise — one complete with mass killing! Ah, fidelity to real life!

I’m glad you find Lum the Mad, uh, smarter than me. That’s interesting. But, not on display, shall we say.

Gosh, if this is covering up something and putting it in a dark place like a family, I’d hate to see what happens when you publicize stuff!

>And you shall realize that there is *NO SUCH THING* as one thing that does it “right” for everybody.

Right, that’s what I’ve been saying. And that’s why I’m banging on these eggtards from Terra Nova, who keep insisting that it all be One Way, One Truth, One Light, which is the socialist paradise life of gaming, which will, uh, “fix broken reality.” They need to read this thread.

Scott Jennings, did you realize that adding that context added…exactly nothing? It’s not like it’s not understandable “as is”.

it’s the gaming equivalent of the Linden “There’s always another guy to buy the island. Can I help you tier down?”

To which I can say, I have two words for you:

Colin Linden
Kenny Linden
Adam Linden
Ben Linden
Eric Linden
Corey Linden

etc

@brent

“Although reason is common to all men, most men believe they have their own private understanding.” — Heroclitus

>What annoys me is when they don’t want it but the RMTers decide they know better and give them it anyway.

And who can stop them? And how? Perhaps have a big committee in the sky, and shout REALLY hard, stop!

>there are “worthy” virtual worlds that are neither games nor capitalist wonderlands

Do you have a problem with capitalist wonderlands?

**REDACTED**, but there is a generic thing to be said here: anyone who punctures your cherished self-image — which you all go to enormous lengths to preserve here, like a folie a deux multipled by thousands — will seem self-aggrandizing to you. That is, unless someone horridly conforms to your little tribal rituals, with little linguistic tics and memes and shared silly memories of some World of Warcraft battle, like some ancient warrior race, they can’t have a say. The slightest bumping of that will feel like a crack in the armour. And that’s ok.

I can’t help thinking if people want to have a conversation, if it goes to 1,000 replies, why stop it? **REDACTED** Kayn has a great idea, but the only problem with that is the central asset server. The thought of it straining not just to review copies of things and render them on sims, but also strain through bar codes on every item and call it through data bases of identity and such, well it sounds like another lagbomb.

And Blizzard taking a percentage is a good idea too, but the problem there is that if they convert their own game gold, then all the problems that have come up with Second Life — banking, casinos, fraud, money-laundering, transaction disputes — all crash on their heads.

And here’s the funny thing about **REDACTED** who feel some evil Prok is trying to take their pristine non-RMT game from them, and wrest the impermeable caul of code away from Richard Bartle’s clutching hands. They may get their way. You think they find RMT evil? The U.S. Internal Revenue Service might agree. The RMT games/worlds all face huge problems eventually with real-life authorities. The IGE guy is in the dock. The Lindens are wrestling with fraud and banks collapsing and having to ban interest-bearing inworld accounts, etc.

So perhaps the gamers will prevail ultimately and they will then try to make everybody jump to an even grander illusion that people will spend even more time on, immersed online, trying to gather credits in a realm where really it will depend on your skill in battle or wile in fraud (Eve Online) and you can’t buy your way up to a level. A world where the game god does get to keep fixing his Porsche forever, with your $10 and you never get to buy a Porsche. I don’t think even most people playing games would like real life to turn out that way.

Since Jeff Freeman huffed and puffed in, and created a total mash-up piece of fiction out of what he thinks I said and his general addled riffs on the topic, let me point out again what my legitimate critique of Bartle is.

It is not some sort of “ad hominem” against this revered figure merely for the sake of dissing him — but it definitely is a sharp critique precisely because the elite of SL is inviting him into SL to Metanomics to try to reinforce some of his thinking to apply to the Metaverse. It is Second Life insect politics.

So my critique of Bartle is a label of him as “socialist” which he vehemently, fiercely rejects because he doesn’t think he should have *any* label, least of all any that he knows is perjorative, especially coming from an American. He can also play the “anti-anti-communism” card and say that ANY political labelling is McCarthyism. He think is he *does* have a label, it should be things like “Grand MUD Master” or “Doctor”.

I really can’t care if he is offended, as grand a poobah as he is, or if the broken children are offended, because there is simply a much, much more important topic to discuss here (and it came up again today in a talk with Henrik Bennetsen, which I will discuss more on my blog because the interlocutors there are more coherent).

And that is this idealistic notion that people should enter world/game spaces stripped of wealth, class, and privilege and enter into the Realm as equals, but then not only with equal opportunity, equal outcome as well, i.e. they may gain more gold than the next person, but they are never to cash it out.

**REDACTED**: this isn’t the literal scene of your World of Warcraft. It is a meme, a notion, an ideology, a Platonic ideal, that infuses and informs everything, not just World of Warcraft, and therefore because it infuses, must be challenged. Must be! So that *in addition to the anti-RMT majority of worlds* there can emerge some minority pro RMT.

Nobody ever wants to talk about that dark, hidden place in this Family, of what happens when you Reach the End of a game, when you have all the gold, all the swords of wonderfulness, you beat all the bosses, and you’re done even playing the sort of meta game of going back and ganking noobs or whatever it is you kids do. So..you then move to another game. And…that’s why your worlds always suck, because the only way to fix them is by forced migration. First, forced egalitarianism — which is prepared to punish anybody who goes outside the borders to buy their way in with illegal RMT — then forced equal outcome (no cashing out, except illegal gold-farmers) and then forced migration (a variant of this boredom-forced migration is “if you don’t like it leave,” from forums harpies.

I’m just saying all this forced egalitarianism, forced stripping of inworld wealth, and forced migration takes it toll on the soul. It has an affect on culture, on relations, on thinking, on real life. I realize it’s not politically correct to say that. But given the enormous toll it *is* taking, it has to be said. And Richard Bartle is in part responsible.

He ardently embraces the idea that we “should” all be equal and “it should” all be based on merit (a boy in a British suburb from apparently a non-upper-class or wealthy family can reach distinction through code, through merit, through education — almost like the American dream. But the reason I can reference “upper-class fastidiousness” about gold-farming is because the attitudes of the real culture still pervade).

What bothers me most about Bartle (and it could be said about half a dozen other big makers of pet games or mass games or Second Life) is that they think it *is* better to strip everyone of their wealth, dump them on the moor, force equal outcome, and force migration. That’s their socialism. It turns from a lovely notion of social justice and paradise to nasty brutality very quick. And I don’t feel that they should get to pervade the culture with this meme, this ideology.

I think frankly, gold-farmers and even Second Life and even its adfarmers fight against the dictated socialist paradise, because they want something more real and free.

It’s not about attacking the freedom to make a game any damn way you want, with whatever rules and punishments. My God, you ALREADY HAVE THAT and to be wussy and neuralgic about criticism of the PRIOR IDEOLOGY is retarded.

No, it’s about framing the debate about the larger economic and cultural issues implicit in games by challenging some of this received game-god designer wisdom that privileges the socialist paradise over other models, whether they are parliamentary democracy and a mixed economy or anarchocapitalism.

**REDACTED**

BTW, here’s a good summary of the higher issues involved and my very summary response, **REDACTED**
http://www.worldsinmotion.biz/2008/03/sxsw_human_and_property_rights.php

>I think this may be the context that we were missing earlier. Think of all the madness we could have avoided if we had discovered it earlier.

>Anyhow, back on topic… I prefer grapefruit juice. I prefer as much pulp as will fit in the container. I prefer it mixed with vodka.

I agree. Oh, except without the vodka. Oh, P.S. you have no sense of humour or irony re: Time Cub.

Yes, it’s special name is “Todd,” Todd.

I have to go to extra special lengths to burn in that point since about 100 people on the first thread accused me of “wishing to make everything like I want it” or “wishing to impose my way on everybody” or “insisting on taking away RMT”.

As long as Bonedead will stay in his little perfect utopian worlds and not impose his socialist crap on my free and open economy, I’m good : )

The End.

erm *insisting on taking away NON RMT

Damion, it’s hard to see normal stuff when peering through such hatred and vitriol. What I say is pretty normal.

Re: “t of comparing the basic notion of a level playing field with socialism. Which, I understand, is what you do”. No, I’m not stupid. If this were all about a level playing field, I’d be for it. Level playing field is what I call on the Lindens to put in all the time — because they are always feting elites in the inner core.

This is about COERCION. About stripping people forcibly. Oh, you say. They willingly joined a game with these rules, so shut up? But kids don’t even know there is an alternative. A teenager could make a store and sell things in Second Life legally. They don’t have to buy from WoW goldfarmers to fill up their afternoons. That’s my point. It’s about choice. The “level playing field” you talk about is uravnilovka, which was the Soviet term for forcibly levelling everybody — not providing equal opportunity, but providing equal income and outcome — forcibly. Oh, I get it that people WANT that. But in part it’s because they are induced to think there is something delightful and pastoral about this lovely “level field”. They never get to ask: is there a different kind of level field that is made by THE RULE OF LAW over even the game-gods, rather than game-gods stripping everybody at the gates. Can you grasp these subtleties?

You’re imagining in a tendentious and snarky way that I’m claiming “fairness” is socialism.

It’s not.

Fairness is the rule of law. The kind of rule of law that even Eric Bethke or Raph Koster, enlightened game gods though they be, can’t concede. And it is not about their right of free expression as publishers. They have that right already under real-life law — a rule of law that they get to play THEIR meta game under. Now we need to have that TOO. That’s all. We as users, as co-creators.

Um, I totally get it about how fanatical people get about fairness. In part, this is a bit of uravnilovka spirit nesting deep within them –t hey cannot be happy that their neighbour has a cow, and they must aspire to work towards a cow — they want the state to take away that cow.

And even more basic idea underneath all this is how people view wealth. Either they believe it is generated by work and creativity. Or they think there is only so much of it, and every dollar I earn is at your expense.

It’s the belief in the latter, socialist concept that generates legion of screaming fanboyz hating land barons, hating those who criticize anti-RMT as limited (if extended throughout the Metaverse), screeching in general about people they view as “ripping them off”. But, all that’s happening, if you believe the *other* idea, that wealth is created (just like the game gods created!) is that goldfarmers and cheaters are creating wealth with ingenuity. You may not like its tackyness and cheating, but all they did was get other people to buy from them. All the hate on the gold farmers, nothing to say about those who buy?

Raising the valid scrutiny of the Specter of Socialism Wandering Through the Metaverse isn’t dust and noise. It feels that way because it’s true and biting; it feels that way because you would have to question your religion.

It’s about asking why integrity comes *at this price*. Allowing a side market in trading cards is like the Soviets having the beriozkas with the little matryoshka dolls and caviar for ridiculous prices only in dollars. It’s not an economy, it’s mere tourist trinkets.

Again, I’m all for the integrity of games. I can fully grasp how un-fun it is. But I don’t want this worldview to prevail. It’s not merely about integrity and a level field. It’s about wealth and power and social systems. You cannot pretty it up. It’s what it is.

Gaming is big business. It’s about to get bigger! 10 million WoW is a level playing field with integrity threatened by RMT cheaters. 50 million WoW is a republic with socialism as its social system and the need for brutal, repressive measures to keep socialism in one country.
So please, don’t tell me I don’t know anything about socialism. I’ve eaten more socialism for breakfast for 30 years than you’ll ever grasp in your lifetime.

>- Calling another commenter, or groups of people, “crazy”, “unbalanced”, “stupid”, or other ad-hominem attack (as opposed to their words or ideas).
>- In a related vein, referring to this blog or its community as not worthy of attention (if you truly feel this is the case, then you should not be posting here, and if you do not feel this is the case but say it anyway, you are a lying troll)

Scott Jennings:

Do these rules apply to you as blog owner/chief poster?

Do they apply to your tags?

If so:

/Abuse report. Tag on this post is “crazy”.

Scott, that hardly seems rational, given how markets work. The value of widget X in World Y can put a price on that component of labour, hours, bravery shown, skill, whater. After all, you buy these items in the auction house, no? And they have their prices. And sometimes kids dump stuff because they’re tired and they want a sandwhich. Once I saw my son give a little kid some game gold and some kind of shield, and told him to go buy a Subway sandwhich 10 blocks away, and deliver it to his door, because he was busy. And the doorbell rang. There was the little kid and the sub.

That’s not Second Life. That’s First Life Plus.

Scott, and to go back to your whole painstaking previous widget exegesis.

Look, you act as if your game trinkets are special. But, 23 of them, and maybe you can buy Manhattan. I don’t know. They do have value. YOU place a value on them. When there are 20 million — 40 million gamers and worlders the analysts say — then that’s a real economy. This is what Castronova has been writing about since day one of his epiphany about Ultima Online. You ascribe value to it, you find 20 other people — and hey, it’s no more special or unique or rare than me buying the 1928 copy of Colliers because it has the story by Kathleen Norris in it. Nobody else will want that issue. Only collectors of old magazines might buy some in bulk in the hope of making something on them. But there is a collectors’ market of sorts. Collectors’ markets are real. It’s just you collect little pixelated widgets that have emotional and ingame value. But they also gain time/labour (this is argued with vehemently, because people think coded things can only contain the value of the coder’s time, but in an interactive virtual worlds, they are co-created and co-owned in each instance.)

<What matters is whether or not the community collectively decides to accept this.

Collectivism. Yikes, that’s socialism. No. Wait. It’s communism!

>that’s where the game starts to get *strip mined* by people/organizations that just want the cash potential for what they are mining, have no regard to the in-game value of what they are mining… in short, without regard to the ‘environment’.

I’ll bet some people would say that all these sandwich-fetchers and lazy sandwhich-eaters were driving down the price of gold, because they were willing to have a remittance economy out to real life.

Strip-mined? But these are pixels. You can make more. There isn’t any air pollution in World of Warcraft. And that’s just it. The scarcity is time/attention, not the game itself and its widgets and rares. In fact, you apparently believe there isn’t wealth to be created, that wealth is scarce and has to be distributed. THerefore if the gold-miners get some, they’ve left less for you, or sucked out your fun.

@Neil. We need more orange farmers. You get cheaper orange juice but mine is going up to like $3.79 for the Kid’s Healthy Plus Tropicana, awful.

Also, Scott Jennings: if you are so pure and utopian, and, well, socialist, and if you play just to have fun, then why don’t you just enjoy the game and the thrills and the mastery of skills and comradely raids and stuff, why do you care if some kid buys a widget from a gold-farmer? If you are fighting someong in an instance, the game is neutral as to whether that person came by their spells and swords honestly, or bought them. Your game is still intact.

Montague, the Lindens print currency to keep the currency stable. It’s not advisable in the real world. They devalue our labour. They strip-mine our work and our value. Evil overlords.

Gold-farmers put in time, and get money, or use scripts that at least require some ingenuity to run and evade prosecution, and get money. That’s creation of wealth, through time and creativity. Not cultural appealing to you, but is valid economic activity. It’s not like gold-farmers leave the realm of economic forces just because you think they interfere with your game. Gold-farmers are like the black marketeers of the Soviet Union. Everybody needs them. Everybody loathes them. They wind up in jail some times.

They only go away when you legalize RMT and free currency exchange and let people be entrepreneurs. And if you aren’t willing to do that, and you need draconian punishments, well, think about why you even have money then? Think about what impact it will have to criminalize all those kids, especially in the Third World? Are you going to put them in jail?

Lumley, I *know all that* about currency. I thought you were talking about like swords and helmets and stuff. I mean, I guess the game gods have to keep them in short supply. And not overprint them. But…if the game gods print them and people buy them at what they’re worth, even if they are gold-farmers, why is that strip-mining? That’s how economies work. It’s too bad the gold-farmer got it, but the game-god at some level can’t care.

Absolutely right that the spam — and I’ve seen it on the screen too — is a customer service, disciplinary issue. If the game gods can’t figure out how to filter, nodraw, whatever it is they call it, that’s their problem. They need to get it done. They don’t have the Lindens’ excuse of running common carriers or pretending to.

<Actually at a fundamental level there is a limited amount of real wealth in Second Life and each dollar (not Linden, they can and are created somewhat arbitrarily) you earn and then remove from the system is a dollar that someone else put into the system.

This religious belief is very deeply held, like the Virgin Birth. Yet, it’s false. If I work hard and create value and bring in new people, the Lindens have to print more money. And more people are motivated to cash out at a higher rate and they buy their money and I am paid and cash out at a higher rate for more dollars. So, there isn’t this zero-sum game you imagine, literally.

@Jason. I’ll bet there are more than 51 percent of WoW players who have bought something outside the official game economy. So, by their actions, they voted for RMT, even if they scream they don’t want it in general because they want to be the exception, not the rule.

Democracy needs to be liberal democracy that protects minorities, not last-election democracy.

@Scott, the collective is not wise. It’s a dumb beast. I don’t care what it wants. You need the rule of law, and that you achieve by freedom of speech and private property. Ultimately, RMT will prevail, or at least be a much more common option.

>That’s OK, Prok: nothing you say about me offends me. I deliberately avoid responding to your various allegations not because I’m bothered by them; rather, it’s for reasons entirely to do with self-aggrandizement: the more you defame me, the better I look.

Richard,

I’m not “defaming,” you Richard, and fortunately, we’re not in England where you can speciously and vindictively sue me with petty concepts like that.

And I’m not “making allegations”. I’m reporting on your views. You seem unwilling to take individual ownership of these views and their consequences. I marvel at this. Ah, you want the ownership to be collective. Right! *REDACTED*

I would expect, talking to someone like you who claims to be a grand master that if your views are characterized as “socialist” — particularly hearing your rant about the Second Life land market and your aversion to it — that instead of being petulant or mutely mutinous, you would say, “Well, I concede that my concepts are a bit utopian, this idea of equality and justice, but I can’t concede they are socialist because of X Y Z.”

You are unwilling to convert any game/coder discussion into another realm of property/power/social systems. It’s as if you don’t think your code has any consequences, as if it exists unattached in an ethereal realm. Your code has consequences, Richard, and you need to take responsibility for them. If you shape a generation of games and gamer culture, have you no responsibility, and are you going to pretend that code is blindly law with no coder accountability?

Are you really going to claim that you, maybe more than anybody, is responsible for disseminating the impractical, socialist meme that everywhere and always, some game-god should level the playing field, strip us all of wordly wealth, and plunk us down to skill grind like serfs and factory proletarians and kill other people until we’re bored and are forced into migration, being sure to prosecute anybody who tries with persistent ingenuity to bypass these horrid barriers? and we’re supposed to say “it’s a game” and “not a meme” and not *the* culture in a world where there is no longer any literature? No longer any literature. No young people studying verse or reading or editing poetry magazines, but only games…

In this world of social media “transparency” where we can learn of your child’s orange juice preferences, what’s the big deal, Richard, about describing one’s personal or public political positions?! There would be no 1,000 page threads here if you were willing to step up and be a man and say after the first sentence, “Why, yes, I voted X about Y and I also think A about B and C.”

While I quite respect the problem that develops in trying to prove you’re not a camel when someone calls you a camel, this isn’t about A Tale in the Desert. This is about reading what you write, plainly, even about your real-life district and politics, and concluding that you sound like you’re to the left of Tony Blair. And you’re going to turn out to be a closet Tory? I don’t get the fastidiousness here.

Many British intellectuals are socialist in outlook. The “liberal” of the American type is considerably more conservative in foreign or domestic policy. It just seems like a normal conversation to locate oneself on this spectrum. You’re apparently pretending that you live in a realm outside of lowly meat-bound representative politics because you create games and are therefore beyond reproach.

Redacted? What are *you* afraid of?

And it’s not political “vetting,” like the Hollywood blacklist to demand accountability? Hello? When people have that much influence. Over culture. Over you, me, our kids, the world. Sorry, but there needs to be a grand calling to account. You can ridicule it coming from me. You will not ridicule it coming from not only Congress but the liberal media. In fact, it already comes from those sources and your ridiculing of it doesn’t hold up, much of the time.

McCarthyism is about political warfare using guilt by association, fear-mongering, falsehoods. All that is well documented and understood. But…are you to say that if someone backed Moscow in the 1930s, and was silent about the show trials and mass murder, and even celebrated the Soviet regime, that if they made movies, that it didn’t matter? that if they had cultural ideas that sprang from their Soviet fellow travelling, that it didn’t matter? Why is that ok? Wagner and Ezra Pound are picked apart for their following of fascism. What, communism is exempt from analysis of cultural influence?

Somebody’s political views are not, in social media, kept in a jar under the sink. They permeate their game and world design, my God, if that isn’t clear, I don’t know what to do with you, you are obdurately blind.

Kayn, um, thanks for implying that I can’t tell when Gordon Brown replaced Blair, but my reference was to an old post on TN obviously, when he talked about Blair — duh.

It’s one of the cherished ideas of British extremists who really loathe Americans these day that Americans have “become conservative” and they are “still liberals”. They have no awareness of how far gone they are to the left. This isn’t a blog about politics so I’m not going to go on about the obvious: that British liberals had no plan for what to do about Saddam and his mass graves, and that’s part of the problem why we have even more mass graves today for which we are implicated.

Mira, rant away and make all the attacks you want without redactions *cough* but at least try to broadly stay in touch with the facts. I’ve never refused to explain my views, ever, in my life. You are mistaking me for another. I constantly post on my blog about my political views, affiliations, voting patterns. I’m an Obama voter in the primaries. I vote a straight Democratic ticket most of the time, except when I might veer off to a local Green candidate on a local issue. My only crime is a 911 Pataki vote. I haven’t supported Reagan or Bush or anything remotely connected to them. I’m a card-carrying dues-paying ACLU member. I oppose the war in Iraq, and go to demonstrations about it. Did you need anything else? Oh, gosh, I could become a McCain Democrat if Dave Winer doesn’t shut up about Obama. Still, my plan is to vote for Obama. Isn’t this an urgent national and indeed world task for our time?

I’m glad Richard spent his countless, uh, minutes spent on one page on Terra Nova, which someone could Google up, in which I pointed out that he was being anti-American. He remains unconscious of this. Most Brits do. They rant and rave and carry on and don’t hear themselves. It’s impossible to make them aware.

The idea that one has to “air a history of Richard Bartle’s voting history” is silly — and you’re completely ducking my very well-placed confrontation about the way in which political and social views meld into game design and have cultural influences.

You think designers don’t have politics, and they don’t influence games, and games don’t influence culture?

Oh?

And anyway, we are to conclude that this voting list is non-existent, since he feels his vote is pointless in his Conservative district (see, electoral nihilism, dissing of representative democracy, so common among geeks).

What’s interesting about people who don’t want to participate in participatory representative democracy, and who sing the praises of social media as the big corrective for all this corrupt evil biased stuff is that they don’t then want to say what they believe. Richard Bartle can make a petulant lob over the cultural barricades of a claim that he won’t debate his political philosophy as if this “just isn’t done” by gentleman or “just not relevant” (it reminds me of Mark Zuckerman refusing to ask the direct question of whether or not he is worth a billion).

To me, what this says is, “I get to have influence over culture and even politics but I don’t have to explain my real agenda, my real views, my real thoughts, I can surf endlessly on the surface of amplified social media and games and never have to be accountable — furthermore, any effort to make me explain myself will be treated by my fanboy operatives as “McCarthyism”.

>Mainly because one of the more inspiring presentations I’ve heard at an industry conference was Richard Bartle espousing precisely this: that code *does* have consequence, and that game designers are helping to build new and better worlds, and that we should think long and hard about the implications of this for society.

I’m glad we’ve flushed this out now, and there is a resounding validation of what I’m saying, even without any fucking clue about the consequences. It’s very, very scary. (Do you have the reference for his speech at this industry conference?)

Code does indeed have consequences. These cultural memes he and all his comrades and you are coding into games and game blogs have consequences. They sure do. And you are just one of the many lieutentants of the game gods purveying this idea of “new and better worlds”. Nobody has demonstrated at all to me or any other libel that they are better. Indeed, we only further document that they are worse, with horrific implications.

Just start with a tiny little thing. How can a world/game that makes you kill everything all the time be right? We’re told WoW makes you “collaborate” better. I hear grown men at the IBM learning summit making this claim about management training of the future occuring in WoW for only $10 a month with this generation. The cheapest after-school management training program in world history! But…collaboration about killing things. And brutally rejecting anybody who lags behind, falters, isn’t skilled enough to make it on the quest.

>This may strike you as horribly collectivist or silly or “literalist” or something (note: dismissing an argument you cannot respond to as “too literalist” is profoundly silly), but to those of us actually familiar with the problems of modern society, it’s actually quite meaningful: the hacker ethos expanded to levels of implementation. (Which, by the way, is libertarian, not collectivist.) We *can* help to reform broken social connections. We *can* aspire to something greater than what we see around us. We *can* help to make a better world.

I find it appallingly scary that you can imagine that you are familiar with the problems of modern society, and I am not. Are you fucking out of your mind?

The hacker ethos pretends to be libertarian, which people think is “liberal” without the “tarian”. It is in fact horridly collectivist in the worst kind of tribal way. We have lived inside the biggest collective coding experiment in modern history, Second Life. We’ve seen the ethos, thank you very much. Nothing “libertarian” about it, if that is to be understood in any kind of positive way. Rather, it’s the most chillingly malicious and conservative machine out there.

You cannot reform broken social connections when in fact your Broken Toys is all about imparting a really destructive and nasty form of socializing amoung people right here on your blog. Surely even you can see this.

It’s useful also to document what you are saying here about your belief that you are doing good with the hacker ethos. I would hear the same argumentation made by those in countries where mass atrocities have taken place, that the perpetrators believed they were doing good.

Scott, what you have written here is tendentious, because you’ve merely believed what somebody said based on zero information right here on your blog.

You’re advocating show trials for designers for whom you disagree? Who is being the unreasonable Marxist again?

Did you see me write anything like that? Where? Of course not. You’re just saying that to be provocative. You, who run a blog, where people are slayed and skewered in kangaroo courts of tribalist mob rules constantly.

I don’t know where to start with you. But…I do know where to end : )