Player Politicians

June 20, 2006 on 11:27 am | In General Gaming, Playstyles, Innovation

Building off of Character Accountability to seek a more massive solution, I've been wondering about empowered player politicians and policing.

History shows us though that player policing is not a consistently reliable method for the total playerbase to be kept in line. I would extend this into thinking the same about player politicians/governors, given the consistency I've seen in ruling bodies of large guilds and other forms of player organizations.

However, there could be a hybrid solution. As with everything, this has probably been tried before. But old ideas are not bad ideas by default.

Player policing can work (ala that vote-for-leader thing in SEED, unless it's just a SWG Politician implementation), but cannot be relied on for long, particularly in sharded worlds.

Sharded worlds require that every server have the same sort of personality that drives them to care more about politics than playing the game. For a game like SWG that's not so bad because there's not so many servers and the game probably has a higher percentage of social players anyway. But for a WoW where there's hundreds of servers just in the US and EU alone? Different servers have different cultures. A uni-server could help that, but then the politics and consistency would break down by region, ala Eve where one region is very different from another.

There's also consistency. Only the most dedicated person does not change at all over the time they play these games. Everyone else does. They have kids, change preferences, move, simply lose interest. They are not accountable to the game's revenue, and only relatively loosely accountable to other players in the game. They can just walk away with no repurcussion, and only need to be pissed off just enough to do it.

Finally, there's basic desire. But we'll come back to that in a second.

The freedom players to manage themselves could be centralized into a single ruling body, a council or even a person, depending on the game. However, while SEED plans something vaguely analogous to this (for lack of details), the problem of player consistency still comes up.

So how could a player politician be empowered with relevant tools and made to responsibly use them?

• Accountability. Players vote players into office, and they in turn answer to GMs. They are held accountable, they have to be available for certain periods of time, they have to have a track record of being active in the world. In a sense, they are like SWG Correspondents except thay can affect game rules. Think of it like a power sharing between omniscient benign overlords and politicans charged with managing the day-to-day of the world.
  • GMs can demote the governor for transgression, ban for major abuses and fine them for abuses that cost the company money. Obviously the player governor also gets a background check, as they're basically being "hired" as a consultant after a fashion.
  • Players can impeach, through rules.
• Power. With accountability needs to come ability. What powers should a player governor have?
  • Arbitrate disputes? Why not? They were voted into office by their peers in theory.
  • Set game mechanic rules? Similar to ATITD here perhaps.
  • Set player policies?
  • Direct content? Maybe to a degree governors could direct content. Perhaps if they have a strategic role in the growth of a city or a region, that growth causes counter activities. Take the SWG cities that would prevent spawning of lairs within them (in theory) and reverse it. Have a growing city encroach upon settlements that fight back.
• Voice. As the alpha player(s) of the server, the developers shouldn't just write them off as someone charged with managing a flock of walking wallets. These people are living the game at the top of the Player Pyramid, and do have insights into players.

Having said that, can I see companies going for this?

Not really.

With all the costs of conceptualizing, convincing, building, marketing, launching, managing and expanding, why should a company hand the reigns of daily power over to some player? Sure Second Life can do it, but their costs were nowhere near what even relatively cheap directed-game MMOGs were, because their focus was on building tools for players to use to create the content that usually eats up so much of the development budget.

But even that's not the most important issue in my mind.

Rather, it's the players themselves, and it goes back asking how much immersion they actually want.

Oh sure, many would actually say they’d love to be in charge. Who wouldn’t? But in the end, actual people management is more stressful and time consuming than even the most arduous XP grind out there. This is primarily because it has almost nothing to do with actually playing the game yourself. It’s about cajoling and directing and motivating dozens or scores of other people while managing the politics of power sharing. It’s a full-time responsibility.

On the flip side are the players that have so far proven they’d rather leave the creation and maintenance of policy to the developers. Players want to have fun, befitting their place on the bottom level of the Player Pyramid. But they also are the most numerous, accounting for the largest percentage of revenue collected by the company. This silent majority is also one of the major driving forces behind the continually devolving amount of impact players actually have on a game world, pushing ever closer to the purest definition of “persistence”, well into the “static.” They would just assume that all decisions are made by the people to whom they pay their $14.99.

This issue has two distinct sides to it, both appearing to stall further development in this area. Not-so-coincidentally, the sides are also on two sides of the genre:

• Game-directed experiences (WoW, GW, etc): Players in charge of anything? Developers answerable to them? Yea. Right.
• Virtual lifestyle experiences (SL, ATITD, etc): Bring it on, but only if we can still automate it to a fair degree. Player management costs time and money!

For now players fend for themselves. They create their own rules and through a combination of tradition, group awareness and applicability to the experience, push and modify such rules until they're acceptable to a large enough group of people that they become standard. In the absence of formality, or acceptable formality, players will develop their own rules. Devs and players are in a sort of tug-of-war, with both groups trying to enhance the experience for sometimes diametrically opposing reasons (the former for business and the latter for a better play session). Authority can be recognized and accepted sometimes regardless of source, such is the power of emergent behavior. For maximum efficiency, players will follow the established rules that make sense, regardless of where they come from.

So it's a question of whether the players desire even more power and whether the developers really need to give it to them.

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