So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have.

-Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About

Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all.  But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway.  Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like they were not always that way.

I wasn’t even going to write a post about the latest design vision posted over on the Stars Reach site.  After three rounds of pillars, I was feeling kind of done with a lot of promises and not much substance.

If you missed the pillars posts, you can find my thoughts here.

• Part I  – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
• Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
• Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe

But yeah, I wasn’t going to bother.

Stars Reach Announced

And then Raph had to get in there and call the tragedy of the commons a lie and my brain exploded.  I mean, fuck subtlety or nuance or reasoned thought!  This is so incendiary in my head that I am half convinced it was a troll for attention.  I mean, it generated a lot of comments over at Massively OP when Bree decided to lead with that in the headline.  All of which put me in a mood, and the only therapy that works is words.

So op success if it was a troll!

I could write a whole post about why that statement is absolutely NOT the correct summary of the work of Dr. Ostrom, and how a better interpretation might be that people pretty reliably find some solution before it becomes the tragedy, even if those solutions are not always fair or equitable, because survival often depends on it.  Don’t make me go into the communal distribution of arable land in Czarist Russian agriculture.  I’ll post about village level plot allocations and archaic strip farming traditions if you push me!

Anyway, I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me cover the other parts of the post from Raph and Playable Worlds… I’d like to think Raph gets input from the team before he posts these things, that it isn’t all just “Raph says” because he has Carneros on the team, who I know from EVE Online both as a fellow member of Reavers and as the former leader of a sizable in-game player group, which seems like useful experience, but these posts always framed as being exclusively from Raph so it is hard to tell… which goes through Raph’s four questions exercise.  Those questions are:

• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)
• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Seems a pretty reasonable set of questions, to the point I wish a few titles that went to Kickstarter for funding would have given them a shot.

Raph’s short answers for the four above questions were:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)

After ruining our homeworlds, we are given a second chance to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the natural world as we venture forth into the galaxy.

So we have messed up our home world and are being given another shot to do it again!  There is always an element of fantasy in science fiction I suppose.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)

Diverse groups of people with very different ways to play come together to build new societies, and grapple with the problems of building sustainable space settlements.

Sure, but how?  That is very nebulous.  I guess “how” is next, but this seems pretty light even for a thematic response.

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players work together to maximize their economic standing and in-game investment without destroying the resource pools they draw from as they build up their in-game investment and social groups.

Making the line go up.  Progression of some form or another along with resource management.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players form economic dependencies on each other’s characters by advancing in diverse specializations and skills, all of which draw from the common exhaustible resource pools available in each zone, thereby creating a Tragedy of the Commons problem to navigate as a group.

And here we get to Raph setting up the strawman so he can knock it down and call it a lie.  Why even bring that up in the answer only to turn around and say it isn’t a thing?  I don’t know why.  It is an outcome that people work hard to avoid because their lives depend on it, yet we can find some examples in the real world all the same.

I would argue that the well water situation in the central valley of California, the state where both Raph and I live, where the law is that you can pump all you want, has led to a situation where large almond farming concerns have been motivated to drill deeper, plant more trees, and pump all the water they can to irrigate them before the water runs out… to the point that during the last major drought the water table dropped enough that older wells to ran dry and even caused some areas of land to collapse, might be somewhere in the zone of tragedy of the commons.  It has the classic hallmarks.  The water in the ground is the commons and the industrial almond farmers are abusing it to the detriment of all… even themselves in the longer term.  But when does business think about the long term these days?

However, we don’t need to go to the real world because we are talking about a being online and virtual worlds.  One might be tempted to bring up Ultima Online and the whole natural spawning mechanics that were supposed to populate the wilderness so that if you killed too many prey animals then the predator population would drop off due to lack of food, a concept totally demolished by players harvesting resources in a way that pretty much clear cut anything in site.

But let’s go to a big obvious one.  Let’s talk about Usenet!

I wrote about Usenet earlier this year, so I have some links to hand.  Some old fart out there probably thinks I am going to bring up the September that never ended.  But that was just elitism, a bias against anybody new showing up and upsetting the established order.  That was practically a purity test… no, not that one… as to who deserved to be able to access Usenet.  Students and faculty of universities were good, AOL users were bad, simple as that.

Usenet dealt with that.  It was no big deal in the end.  What killed Usenet were the Green Card Lawyers, Canter and Siegel, who discovered it was extremely cheap to spam ads on Usenet, such that even getting one response after cross posting to thousands of groups was a complete financial victory.

And Usenet was then made unusable by spam bots.

This was facilitated by the fact that Usenet was designed to be a distributed system with no central authority who could do things like ban or block offenders.  Everything had to be done at the local level.  Your local sys admin had to care enough to subscribe your local serve to cancel channels that would remove know spammers, though there was always discussion as to who counted and what threshold had to be crossed to be worth of the list.

In the end people just left because unlike the real world, you can just walk away from any part of the internet you don’t find value in.

What else has been described as a distributed system with local authority setting the rules?  Why, Stars Reach!

To be fair to Raph and team, they know there is a potential problem and they at least acknowledge it in the post with this:

All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices.

It is my long time policy to dismiss as garbage anything that starts with a phrase like “All that is needed…” which is then, in the style of the underpants gnomes, is followed by a vague proposed fix to a tough and possibly insoluble problem, but at least they admit they have a problem.  First steps and all that.

The problem is, how much power do player groups running planets need?  Too little and then Usenet is your destination.  But too much power and it becomes petty tyrants and and in-groups and tribalism as those who show up first impose their system on the late comers.

Imagine if you will all those indignant Usenet denizens in 1993 if they had the power available so that they did not need to merely whine at you that you needed to read the group FAQ that is published on the first of every month, before you post because your question is off topic or already answered but could, instead, set up rules to make you adhere to the arbitrary group rules that a few zealots and try hards came up with back when the group was created automatically?

Well, Usenet might have been saved, but at the price of it becoming the domain of a host of online exclusionary clubs unwilling to welcome anybody who wouldn’t toe the line.

Likewise, Stars Reach will face problems if there is too little control given the free ranging ability to modify just about everything on a planet.  Sure, “we’ll spawn more planets” is a possible answer, but given enough latitude some will seek to tear things up just to annoy other players.  Griefing runs deep in some gamer’s DNA.

While on the other side of the equation is the homeowners association view of the world, which ideally keeps chaos at bay through common sense rules agreed upon by the community… but which can often turn into an irresistible attraction to those who seek petty authority and love to tell people what to do.

Do I even need to expand upon homeowner’s associations?  They’re not all bad, but when they’re bad they can be really bad.  I recall a guy on the association board in the for the condo development we lived in way back when my wife and I first got together.  He would dig through people’s garbage can’s and send nasty notes with threats of fines if he found anything that was possibly recyclable in the trash.  He would literally staple things like grocery store receipts pulled from deep in the trash to his notes.  We used to call him the garbage nazi.  That is the sort of person often attracted to such positions.

“We‘re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford. “And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t.  They win.”

Ford Prefect – Life, The Universe, and Everything

I am more Arthur Dent than anything.  I don’t want to run the homeowners association, I just want them to leave me alone.  Likewise, in online games I don’t want to run the guild, fellowship, or corporation, except occasionally as an administrative function with some friends.  Usually so I can spend my own in-game currency to expand the guild bank or hand out medals to corp mates.

It is those who do want to run things, those who are obsessed with a level of control, that send me packing online.  I see the need for a homeowners association in real life and in the vision that Stars Reach is pitching.  But I can see it going wrong.

There is almost a dichotomy of Raph where, on the one hand, he can promote ideas like “the client is in the hands of the enemy” on his rules for online world design while also espousing an vision where players… the people who are “the enemy” in that scenario… can be given responsibility to run an online game, to be the literal governing body that dictates how you will be allowed to play in a given space.

We’ll see what happens… but nothing will be happening for quite a while yet.

Related:

• Stars Reach – WHAT IS STARS REACH ABOUT?
• Massively OP – Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach

So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have.

-Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About

Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all.  But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway.  Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like they were not always that way.

I wasn’t even going to write a post about the latest design vision posted over on the Stars Reach site.  After three rounds of pillars, I was feeling kind of done with a lot of promises and not much substance.

If you missed the pillars posts, you can find my thoughts here.

• Part I  – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
• Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
• Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe

But yeah, I wasn’t going to bother.

Stars Reach Announced

And then Raph had to get in there and call the tragedy of the commons a lie and my brain exploded.  I mean, fuck subtlety or nuance or reasoned thought!  This is so incendiary in my head that I am half convinced it was a troll for attention.  I mean, it generated a lot of comments over at Massively OP when Bree decided to lead with that in the headline.  All of which put me in a mood, and the only therapy that works is words.

So op success if it was a troll!

I could write a whole post about why that statement is absolutely NOT the correct summary of the work of Dr. Ostrom, and how a better interpretation might be that people pretty reliably find some solution before it becomes the tragedy, even if those solutions are not always fair or equitable, because survival often depends on it.  Don’t make me go into the communal distribution of arable land in Czarist Russian agriculture.  I’ll post about village level plot allocations and archaic strip farming traditions if you push me!

Anyway, I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me cover the other parts of the post from Raph and Playable Worlds… I’d like to think Raph gets input from the team before he posts these things, that it isn’t all just “Raph says” because he has Carneros on the team, who I know from EVE Online both as a fellow member of Reavers and as the former leader of a sizable in-game player group, which seems like useful experience, but these posts always framed as being exclusively from Raph so it is hard to tell… which goes through Raph’s four questions exercise.  Those questions are:

• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)
• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Seems a pretty reasonable set of questions, to the point I wish a few titles that went to Kickstarter for funding would have given them a shot.

Raph’s short answers for the four above questions were:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)

After ruining our homeworlds, we are given a second chance to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the natural world as we venture forth into the galaxy.

So we have messed up our home world and are being given another shot to do it again!  There is always an element of fantasy in science fiction I suppose.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)

Diverse groups of people with very different ways to play come together to build new societies, and grapple with the problems of building sustainable space settlements.

Sure, but how?  That is very nebulous.  I guess “how” is next, but this seems pretty light even for a thematic response.

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players work together to maximize their economic standing and in-game investment without destroying the resource pools they draw from as they build up their in-game investment and social groups.

Making the line go up.  Progression of some form or another along with resource management.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players form economic dependencies on each other’s characters by advancing in diverse specializations and skills, all of which draw from the common exhaustible resource pools available in each zone, thereby creating a Tragedy of the Commons problem to navigate as a group.

And here we get to Raph setting up the strawman so he can knock it down and call it a lie.  Why even bring that up in the answer only to turn around and say it isn’t a thing?  I don’t know why.  It is an outcome that people work hard to avoid because their lives depend on it, yet we can find some examples in the real world all the same.

I would argue that the well water situation in the central valley of California, the state where both Raph and I live, where the law is that you can pump all you want, has led to a situation where large almond farming concerns have been motivated to drill deeper, plant more trees, and pump all the water they can before to irrigate them before the water runs out… to the point that during the last major drought the water table dropped enough that older wells to run dry and even caused some areas of land to collapse, might be somewhere in the zone of tragedy of the commons.  It has the classic hallmarks.  The water in the ground is the commons and the industrial almond farmers are abusing it to the detriment of all.

However, we don’t need to go to the real world because we are talking about a being online and virtual worlds.  One might be tempted to bring up Ultima Online and the whole natural spawning mechanics that were supposed to populate the wilderness so that if you killed too many prey animals then the predator population would drop off due to lack of food, a concept totally demolished by players harvesting resources in a way that pretty much clear cut anything in site.

But let’s go to a big obvious one.  Let’s talk about Usenet!

I wrote about Usenet earlier this year, so I have some links to hand.  Some old fart out there probably thinks I am going to bring up the September that never ended.  But that was just elitism, a bias against anybody new showing up and upsetting the established order.  That was practically a purity test… no, not that one… as to who deserved to be able to access Usenet.  Students and faculty of universities were good, AOL users were bad, simple as that.

Usenet dealt with that.  It was no big deal in the end.  What killed Usenet were the Green Card Lawyers, Canter and Siegel, who discovered it was extremely cheap to spam ads on Usenet, such that even getting one response after cross posting to thousands of groups was a complete financial victory.

And Usenet was then made unusable by spam bots.

This was facilitated by the fact that Usenet was designed to be a distributed system with no central authority who could do things like ban or block offenders.  Everything had to be done at the local level.  Your local sys admin had to care enough to subscribe your local serve to cancel channels that would remove know spammers, though there was always discussion as to who counted and what threshold had to be crossed to be worth of the list.

In the end people just left because unlike the real world, you can just walk away from any part of the internet you don’t find value in.

What else has been described as a distributed system with local authority setting the rules?  Why, Stars Reach!

To be fair to Raph and team, they know there is a potential problem and they at least acknowledge it in the post with this:

All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices.

It is my long time policy to dismiss as garbage anything that starts with a phrase like “All that is needed…” which is then, in the style of the underpants gnomes, is followed by a vague proposed fix to a tough and possibly insoluble problem, but at least they admit they have a problem.  First steps and all that.

The problem is, how much power do player groups running planets need?  Too little and then Usenet is your destination.  But too much power and it becomes petty tyrants and and in-groups and tribalism as those who show up first impose their system on the late comers.

Imagine if you will all those indignant Usenet denizens in 1993 if they had the power available so that they did not need to merely whine at you that you needed to read the group FAQ that is published on the first of every mont, before you post because your question is off topic or already answered but could, instead, set up rules to make you adhere to the arbitrary group rules that a few zealots and try hards came up with back when the group was created automatically?

Well, Usenet might have been saved, but at the price of it becoming the domain of a host of online exclusionary clubs unwilling to welcome anybody who wouldn’t toe the line.

Likewise, Stars Reach will face problems if there is too little control given the free ranging ability to modify just about everything on a planet.  Sure, “we’ll spawn more planets” is a possible answer, but given enough latitude some will seek to tear things up just to annoy other players.  Griefing runs deep in some gamer’s DNA.

While on the other side of the equation is the homeowners association view of the world, which ideally keeps chaos at bay through common sense rules agreed upon by the community… but which can often turn into an irresistible attraction to those who seek petty authority and love to tell people what to do.

Do I even need to expand upon homeowner’s associations?  They’re not all bad, but when they’re bad they can be really bad.  I recall a guy on the association board in the for the condo development we lived in way back when my wife and I first got together.  He would dig through people’s garbage can’s and send nasty notes with threats of fines if he found anything that was possibly recyclable in the trash.  He would literally staple things like grocery store receipts pulled from deep in the trash to his notes.  We used to call him the garbage nazi.  That is the sort of person often attracted to such positions.

“We‘re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford. “And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t.  They win.”

Ford Prefect – Life, The Universe, and Everything

I am more Arthur Dent than anything.  I don’t want to run the homeowners association, I just want them to leave me alone.  Likewise, in online games I don’t want to run the guild, fellowship, or corporation, except occasionally as an administrative function with some friends.  Usually so I can spend my own in-game currency to expand the guild bank or hand out medals to corp mates.

It is those who do want to run things, those who are obsessed with a level of control, that send me packing online.  I see the need for a homeowners association in real life and in the vision that Stars Reach is pitching.  But I can see it going wrong.

There is almost a dichotomy of Raph where, on the one hand, he can promote ideas like “the client is in the hands of the enemy” on his rules for online world design while also espousing an vision where players… the people who are “the enemy” in that scenario… can be given responsibility to run an online game, to be the literal governing body that dictates how you will be allowed to play in a given space.

We’ll see what happens… but nothing will be happening for quite a while yet.

Related:

• Stars Reach – WHAT IS STARS REACH ABOUT?
• Massively OP – Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach