Wikipedia is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons: where multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared resource even where it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen.
I love Wikipedia. I use it constantly, like in the sentence above. For the big picture stuff, Wikipedia works. Take the article on Hamas for example – a nuanced treatment of currently one of the most explosive (literally) topics in the news today. In this, it benefits from high visibility, and a lot of people pushing and pulling at cross-currents to come up with the “conventional wisdom” on a given subject. It has about 10 or so edits a day, and editing with an axe to grind is treated as vandalism and pruned in short order. Wikipedia works precisely as advertised here – the wisdom of the many is outed in the struggle of the everyday. Beautiful phrase, no? Pity it doesn’t work anywhere else.
Let’s take a look at two people: Raph Koster and myself. You know, I’m going to just go out on a limb here and say Raph’s had a bit more impact on virtual world development than I have. Yet poor Raph gets one breezy paragraph and a credits list, and I get a loving dissertation (which I didn’t write, by the way) on the various ebb and flows of my blogging history. (Which mind you, used to be even longer.) Richard Bartle freaking helped invent MUDs and his entry is mostly about how he pisses World of Warcraft players off. Good thing Rob Pardo has a good entry! Oh wait, no, he doesn’t, his entire biography is how he hates Paladins. NO, I AM NOT JOKING AT ALL. Thanks, Wikipedia, for focusing on what’s really important about the career of the lead designer of the most successful MMO in history. You rock. Especially since, apparently according to Wikipedia, I am the most important MMO developer of our time. I’m getting a plaque or something now.
As a result, we have a bit of a kerfluffle (described by Bartle and Koster) where an angry Wikipedian decided that a MUD he may or may not have used to play isn’t “notable“, meaning that it isn’t worthy of being included in the same category of knowledge as, say, ponyplay. To be fair, the article in question does read more like an ad than a descriptor. But the talk page (a page attached to each wiki entry where people can discuss the pros and cons of MUDding, ponyplay, or both) descends into Shakespearean madness and it’s pretty clear that some uninvolved rational adult needs to step in and thwap everyone on the nose. Of course, no such individual actually exists, so we get people with duelling ASCII signature tags arguing over encyclotrivia.
But maybe it’s just MMOs where Wikipedia falls down. Let’s look at two other people: Barack Obama and Lyndon LaRouche. Space aliens would, just judging from Wikipedia, judge LaRouche as equally notable as Obama. (Luckily, they’d probably also find it easier to communicate with him). This is a good example of where Wikipedia just craps all over itself – since Wikipedia is a hivemind, there’s no policing save that of interested parties – and the interested parties in LaRouche’s case happen to be, well, LaRouchies who think he’s the pre-eminent economist of our times or something. Again, there’s no controlling legal authority (thanks, Al Gore!) so the occasional random visitor dumbstruck by such statements as “LaRouche was credited by press in Italy and Argentina as the economist who successfully forecast the financial crisis of 2007–2008″ (note: this may in fact be true, if you come from the Moon) are attacked themselves as having “conflicts of interest“.
Wikipedia is like the web writ manifest – a huge body of knowledge, with no guidance save that of its priesthood, who ensure that there is no editorial voice whatsoever. Which would work, if everyone on the planet agreed on important moral issues, and was sane, and didn’t have axes to grind, and knew what they were talking about. Failing that, it’s much like, well, reading a blog. You might get something of interest, or you might get the leavings of some random game developer ranting about arcane geeky political issues on his lunch break.
And hey, if you think I’m off the wall when it comes to Wikipedia, try Prokofy Neva’s opinion. Having Wikipedia vetted through Second Life? Well, at least then we’d be able to grief the LaRouchies, I suppose.
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In this discussion, I’m not sure if Orwell was ever mentioned. But you make a very good point. They eventually admin-delete it all, and then only drag it up if they want to use it against you.
On two separate occasions, I had things brought up against me that were written on a page in my own userspace (your sandbox/work area). It was a page that existed for about 5 minutes while I worked on phrasing and formatting. I then used the required method of having a page in my own userspace “permanently deleted.” Of course, admins can still read it. And they’d pull things from it and use it against me in an argument. Totally corrupt.
-Michael
Muckbeast – Game Design and Online Worlds
http://www.muckbeast.com
To consider even for a second that the history of this event won’t be re-written wikipedia editors is a gross misunderstanding of how sand boxes’ work.
When the history is written by the wikipedia editors they will be the victims and they will effectively ban the other side for all eternity from wikipedia and mind you, based on the re-written history rightfully so.
On Wikipedia, yes. But the rewriting of history can only work if there are no outside sources to shed light on its activities. Certainly a few of those sources are verging on paranoia like Daniel Brandt, but there are groups and people asking very serious questions about Wikipedia. What they don’t have, however, is a powerful structure to back them up like the Wikipedians have.
I wish someone who has a good memory of these things and was there, would document that the key game design features of a DIKU are, if everyone is going to refer to MMOs as DIKU derivatives. The last time I mentioned this on Terranova, someone told me to read the source-code, which only works if you’re a programmer who has a lot of time to spend working backwards from the implementation to the actual design.
“When the history is written by the wikipedia editors they will be the victims and they will effectively ban the other side for all eternity from wikipedia and mind you, based on the re-written history rightfully so.”
Isn’t that how history works? If the Nazis had won, do you think they write books about being villains?
I invoke Godwin’s Law. We all lost.
“I wish someone who has a good memory of these things and was there, would document that the key game design features of a DIKU are, if everyone is going to refer to MMOs as DIKU derivatives.”
A class-based RPG with the principal classes being fighter, healer, wizard. Advancement handled by earning experience points through combat, reaching a set amount of points, returning to town and “levelling up,” which unlocked new abilities. Classes were immutable (though eventually systems such as remorting, etc were added). Rewards for killing things also included equipment, which affected your stats and damage capability. If you reached the maximum level, common cultural practice was that you were invited to become a game admin (this practice dates back to MUD1).
Combat was generally on a fixed rate, with “faster attacks” consisting of actually running the same attack multiple times in a row (so you could only do damage on multiples: 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, 7x, 8x, 9x). Tactics were centered around controlling which target the mob was attacking, and using special state-affecting attacks that did things like trigger periods of indenfensibility (stun), periods of damage multipliers, etc.
Much of the gameplay consisted of moving about solo or in groups attacking monsters for XP and loot. Grouping was a typical strategy because it was a large force multiplier, permitting players to kill targets much more powerful than they were alone. Because of this, an array of systems including level limits on equipment, on grouping, and even on monster attacking were in place. A command called “consider” told you whether the monster was too easy or too hard.
Weapons, potions, and the like were all based on simply on performing spell effects, in the fashion today referred to as a “proc.” They were hardcoded back then, however.
DikuMUDs did not come out of the box with any quests, because they were not a programmable game engine. They were about combat and levelling up. There was no crafting either. They did come with good chat features, grouping, etc. “Clans” were a common addition — you would call them guilds today, except that they were formed by admin command, not formed freely by players. (Honestly, I am not sure where freeform clan formation came from. I know we did it on Legend, and we did it in UO, but I don’t even remember which came first!)
Eventually Diku games added questing engines, then scripting languages, etc, and diversity developed. But the core of Diku gameplay is the above. Because they were template fill-in-the-blank muds, most of them were very similar, and had to differentiate solely on their worldbuilding and fiction. However, few altered the basic combat equation. Among other terms “tanking” “nuking” and the like were common. In fact, “kiting” also took place quite a lot, by leading high level aggressive mobs into low level areas.
In the end, the central elements of phase-based combat, combat states, cool-down based special attacks, tank-healer-nuker triad, and basic aggro management are what you play today in WoW. A Diku player from the late mudding period would feel completely at home if you just gave them slash commands and a text box. They’d be astonished by the number of quests, would think the crafting system was insane, and would think that the entire PvP system was either a rip from an EmlenMUD or was teleporting you to HoloMUD, in the case of the battlefields.
I ended up taking the above reply and turning it into a freakin’ novel. It’s on my blog.
Paranoia and jealousy ftw.
I finally had time to write up an article with the full details of the incident, from beginning to end (well, end at the time of the writing). You all might find it an interesting read:
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/windows-platform/articles/22166.aspx
Uhhh, wasn’t this what I set up the Wiki for anyway???
Lum, you are so literal and for a game god dude, so lack imagination.
I didn’t say “vet” Wikipedia through SL. What I said is that Wikipedia needs a social media voting component that would help make it honest, and tried a few prototypes here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/voting_wikipedia/
Then I theorized that the way to make the editors of Wikipedia become more accountable and less sectarian and less governed by arcane orthodox rules and more governed by common sense and the public interest would be to have a platform that would enable the passive public to interact with these anonymous and unaccountable avatars. Wikipedia is not social media and is not new media; a wiki in fact is not social media most of the time. It is the most brutal form of old media.
So to have the experts/editors/writers of pages to be in a world where you could go to their sim/page and talk to them, where their avatar would build up reputation points, where you could have discussions for the public, where you could rate/vote entries — well, it might make it better. It might save the project from its inevitable communist end.
Lum-”Hey Nicholas Deleon – I disagree with what you said.”
ME TOO! Not to play the race card, but I suspect Nick is white from a affluent middle class family living in the burbs. Though now that we have his name maybe I should take the subtle queue and pay him a visit.
I love how people think the forums are so bad when probably a really low percentage of WoW players use the forums, and even fewer actually partake in all this “trolling” everyone is talking about. As someone who READs troll threads…. I think they are funny as hell. (90% of the time) I think trolling can be very therapeutic for frustrated individuals, and I for one have wanted to vent on occasion when someone pisses me off in game. I won’t make it personal. Maybe if you just hired a couple more moderators (who I think are doing an AWESOME job, btw) and make the penalties a little stiffer for being a “douche” you’d get the same results without punishing the majority of the forum posters that actually use the forum constructively.
I WAS optimistic about this, but now I just think it’s a horrid idea. Really. I don’t mind people know my real name, but gaming is an escape, only my personal friends know my real name. Just seems silly.
I canceled my WoW account, just so I could put it on record that I’m willing to quit because of RealID. I honestly will probably just re-up anyways, but I’m not really thrilled about it.
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