Interesting stuff. I’d say the motivations of such people are psychopathologically compromised, and a reflection of the same internal states that reside behind real world phenomena.

I wonder if the success of such pathogenic groups in online worlds has to do with obsessiveness and persistence? In UT is was easy to bore aimbotters into leaving the server, but online worlds like SL just have so many more handles to grab on users and things to do with them.

I do know people who seem to get on okay in SL without trouble from these kinds, but I wonder if that will still be the case in 2 years. The “sterile happytalk” of LL is also quite worrying.

..where I discuss at length the SSG-type phenomena of Second Life, which abounds with far greater cunning and vice — W-HAT, the FIC, etc. Indeed some very disturbing cults and alternative groups have gained dominance and even periodically crash the grid and destroy property.

I meet a lot of people who are cynical about the future. Will might be an optimist, but any tech is two edged, and things emeging on the net now have a decided lean towards democracy. Authoritarian models are struggling to cope with this much data, if anything, trends are weakening authority rather than increasing its grip.

You point out some valid problems, such as majorities assuming they are right. Psychopathology will always cause people like the SSG to rise up in any social context, but trhey aren’t guaranteed majority or ascendency. Pathogenic things are not the only forces on the table.

Every human has innate motives that are healthy and self-preserving, and not necessarily at the expense of others. If we destroy ourselves, it won’t be a considered decision. Like all items of technology, games are an ethically impartial force that can affect in good and bad ways. I’m all for stuff like Will is advocating. It’s easy for a doomsayer to say he should have predicted the SSG, but similar scenarios aren’t playing out in Second Life or WoW.

Scammers and ragers are part of the background noise in just about any online community, it’s not inevitable that they gain social dominance though.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to interact with some young people, my impression is that an increasing minority of kids today are prone to the sort of abstract thought and self-expression Will describes, despite the continued prevalence of conformity demanding structures. Kids today also seem to be exploring bi-sexuality and painkiller abuse in increasing numbers, which seems relevant if you have a broad definition of interactivity. I think another side of the “Games For Change” notion is the evolution of play into countercultural pockets, after children play educational games for a decade or so they’ll naturally move on to games that could be considered the LSD of the 21st century.

I have to say that he has brilliantly put into his games the kind of positive and fulfilling facilitation of community and collaboration for which games are becoming famous. Even if it is just a silly group job object like the pizza-making machine in TSO, the inner movements of spirit and soul required to adjust, adapt, listen, collaborate are indelible and valuable — and that’s why games have to be taken seriously, whether static, closed “game games” or “serious games” or open-ended social worlds like Second Life.

Games create habits of mind and spirit that will shape the coming centuries. That’s why they are worth taking seriously now.

What Will was unable to do, however, was stop the malignancies of malevolent groups that either perverted collaboration (seizing the “roomies” function in TSO to ruin homes) or took advantage of people’s weakness and their lack of solidarity outside of the mechanical game tools (the destructive Sim Shadow Government which took hold, and which he abetted in its earliest stages).

A deep problem is memes. People take open-ended collaborative social software that they portray as open and free and “a wiki,” but then usually a self-selected cadre of those who think “we are the smart ones and we’re surrounded by idiots” begin to take over — often by wielding the technical power of being able to operate or program the game/world tools themselves. The game god/junior game cod wizard/mod problems are insidious in games.

That means they can make memes, spread them, and little or nothing mitigates against them — and they gain artificial credibility just by being spreadable and being aggressively defended, no different than the memes of communism and fascism in their day, which were also spread by the creation of virtuality through media control.

Memes that are spreading can work like this: “smart-mob” or “crowd-source” or “wise-crowd” decided — therefore it’s right. Dissent? Leave. The constant invocation of solution-by-exit makes for an aggressive force constantling meming and managing others.

Or how about the social-engineering favourite: “positive proposals only” and something like a features voting mechanism in Second Life *where you can’t vote no*. There’s no “no”. And that’s because programmers and helpers conclude that “no” isn’t useful; “no” creates short lists of negative feeling that aren’t relevant; “no” is spammed or gamed (as if positive proposals aren’t spamming and gaming, too?). And therefore legitimate dissent is silenced.

There’s never a management or conflict or a true collaborative and free and democratic compromise due to the final, deadly, mechanized features of games. Instead, there is the strong meming the weak and forcing them out by muting, ejecting, or betting then banned as “trolls” etc.

Will Wright says we don’t have to worry about such negative things happening, such totalitarian wannabes seeming to take over our metaverse because, why, we’ll see the ugly future and run from it, why, we’ll predict it and that will make it not happen.

No. Because people don’t look at it and turn down another path, they run toward it with open arms. They always sought a way either to be controlled or to control others. Now they have it. With more power of information-gathering and influence than any twentieth century totalitarian ever dreamed of.