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May 28, 2004

Nomic World

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Posted by Clay Shirky

A transcript of a talk I gave called Nomic World, at the fantastic State of Play conference last fall. It oncerns the possible use of MMOs as experiments in letting the players own and operate the environment, thus modeling the conditions of political freedom. (The title comes from Peter Suber's great game Nomic, a game in which changing the rules during the game is a legitimate move.)
Now what would it be like if we set out to design a game environment like that? Instead of just waiting for the players to argue for property rights or democratic involvement, what would it be like to design an environment where they owned their online environment directly, where we took the "Code is Law" equation at face value, and gave the users a constitution that included the ability to both own and alter the environment? There's a curious tension here between political representation and games. The essence of political representation is that the rules are subject to oversight and alteration by the very people expected to abide by them, while games are fun in part because the rule set is fixed. Even in games with highly idiosyncratic adjustments to the rules, as with Monopoly say, the particular rules are fixed in advance of playing. One possible approach to this problem is to make changing the rules fun, to make it part of the game.

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