
Taking lessons from the rise and fall of divinity in online games (2014) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/10/mergers--acquisitions/how-we-make-gods
======
Steltek
The article's "Egor" operated in a world with PvP. If the article is implying
that you need a government (society, community) to solve these problems, then
you must allow PvP as player governments need state sponsored violence in some
form. Humanity hasn't figured out any other way (yet). Except many modern
games went the other way: revoking PvP and imposing more rules from above.

Early Ultima Online had the makings of the most scalable player-driven/secular
solution: karma (reputation). It operated on simple rules to identify good
guys and bad guys so it couldn't capture all forms of griefing but it laid out
a way for players to identify and police themselves without "Gods" (for the
most part). Serial Player Killers (PKs) would earn negative reputation and
titles (e.g. Dread Lord). If a PK was spotted near a town, a posse would form
to hunt them down.

Later versions of UO rolled back this system, unfortunately, and even
introduced servers where PvP was not allowed. This had the unfortunate
consequence that PvP server users were seen as asking for a fight.

~~~
jbattle
Did the reputation system work? Or more to the point - how easy was it to
abuse and in which directions did it break? I gotta think if it worked as well
as designed it would have been replicated more widely by now

~~~
watwut
Well, Dread Lord sounds like a cool badge to get.

~~~
jbattle
Good motivation to be bad, right? A game needs some villains, so I can see why
you'd want to make room for both fame and infamy (as long as weaker players
aren't totally at their mercy).

I only played UO for a month or two. The only skill I leveled up significantly
was Hiding. I'd go where the loot was, and adventure for a few minutes until
the inevitable gang of PKers came wandering through, looking to loot all the
players like me. Some players ran, some hid, most died.

If you successfully hid, your player would be invisible to everyone else. So
the PKers would walk a pattern through the dungeon, trying to step on every
square. As a cowardly hiding level 1 character, I'd wait in hiding as long as
I could, then jump out of hiding when I saw a chance to escape. Invariably I'd
be spotted. I'd run around a corner, hide again, and the process would
restart. I swear I spent more time hiding behind rocks than fighting whatever
monsters the game made available to low level players. I could never tell if I
was having fun or not!

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _A game needs some villains_

Reminds me a little bit of REAMDE.

> _The only skill I leveled up significantly was Hiding. I 'd go where the
> loot was, and adventure for a few minutes until the inevitable gang of PKers
> came wandering through, looking to loot all the players like me. Some
> players ran, some hid, most died._

Really expected your story to be focused on scavenging the loot the PKers left
behind.

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tontonius
Awesome article, and I highly recommend reading the manifesto [1] mentioned.

Now the article claims that "gods are almost entirely absent from online
worlds" – something I severely doubt. Take for instance this message board: is
HN completely anarchistic? Not so likely. Is it meritocratically governed?
We'd like to think so. Or do "gods" – those who write exist here as well?

When it turns out Spez (Founder and Arch-Wizard of Reddit) has the power to
change contents of users' comments on reddit – and exercises this power for
his own apparent amusement – is he not a "god in an online world"?

When I read Lorry's manifesto, about the hierarchies of essentially mods on
his MUD, its difficult not to think of all the mods, supermods and admins on
message boards large and small across the Internet.

[1] [http://arch-wizard.com/confessions.html](http://arch-
wizard.com/confessions.html)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think the article focused more on RPG-type communities, where direct
interaction was possible with more than just words.

WoW certainly has Gods, but they are prevented by certain Covenants from
manifesting their powers except in limited cases...

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pavel_lishin
> _An admin named Lorry ruled over of the multi-user dungeon MIST in the
> mid-80s. “I am the law!” he would announce, killing 1 in 10 players on his
> server in a digital plague. His legendary manifesto preached the virtues of
> arrogance, ego, and random destruction—and somehow brought his game active
> converts._

Anyone happen to have a copy of this manifesto? The page links to a 404, and
archive.org only has a copy from 2016 - which is a 404 as well.

~~~
zimpenfish
> An admin named Lorry [] preached the virtues of arrogance, ego, and random
> destruction

I was wondering if that was the same "Lorry" as the (in)famous UK ISP "Lorry"
and, yep, it's him. Looks like the article just missed the trailing 'l' off
the URL (linked via his Wikipedia page) ->

[http://arch-wizard.com/confessions.html](http://arch-
wizard.com/confessions.html)

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mcguire
" _The man who played under the screen name Egor was a nice guy. His rampages
in MUD simple expressed a nascent hacker ethic._ "

I wish to object to these statements.

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rlyshw
My friend and I were online “gods” back around 2012 when we ran a Minecraft
server with a small-but-dedicated player base.

Gods in online communities aren’t totally lost, they’ve just reduced in scope
to smaller private servers in more niche games.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Godhood just doesn't scale. Even the article notes this:

> _Community users couldn’t turn to the wizards; they had grown tired of
> settling social arguments in the large world, and forced players to come to
> collective agreement before they would mete our justice. Enough players
> wanted to “toad” Mr. Bungle—a variation on the Finger of Death—to get the
> superpowers who ran the servers’ attention, and the sentence was meekly
> carried out._

~~~
astrobe_
However the Godhood system is much more educational than programmatically
enforcing rules (PK/PvP zones or ToS and ban threars).

I have two examples in mind:

Riot implemented a player tribunal in League Of Legends. Players would examine
chat logs to judge verbal abuse and misconduct cases. Eventually a Riot
employee would decide on the punishment (warning or temporary or permanent
ban). I don't know if this system is still in place, but at the time they
reported good results and players saw it as an improvement.

A French high-school is using Minetest (a FOSS Minecraft) to run a student-
driven server. The "administrator" chose to let the player-students do their
own thing with as little intervention as possible. The admin even created a
reward system granting privileges (fly, ban) up to full admin powers (that is,
a god).

They saw player-students create a laws, then a police and then a tribunal. For
sure those kids got a better understanding of the society they live in.

In one case, the admin invited his colleagues to introduce them to the
tool/game. Those people were clueless and apparently thought that because they
were teachers, they were above the rules. The student-players banned them.

Games being an entertainment-only device is a severe misconception. Online
interaction in an MMO or a MOBA is often a form of social training. One role
of games is to allow to experiment with dangerous things safely. The
pseudonymous online society allows people to test different behaviors on
others, and I believe that some of the "toxicity" comes from that.

So Godhood is a way for people to experiment with the exercise of power. And
as the article concludes, "it ain't that fun after all".

I believe that if more people could have the chance to come to that
conclusion, that being able to do anything is not fun, it would be a
significant contribution to humanity I believe. Because it seems to me that
too many people are driven by the delusion of wealth and power.

~~~
pavel_lishin
This is excellent. Thanks for sharing! It seems like a very close parallel to
the adage of "my kids will wait tables for a living at least once", to teach
humility, respect and empathy.

I'm super stoked that students ran their own in-game government, where no
citizen was above the law. I'm curious what rules the teachers ran afoul of.

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robotsquidward
Awesome article. Can't help but think of South Park's infamous WoW episode.

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brazzy
> $14.9 billion in annual revenues, greater than the gross domestic product of
> Iceland

Er... this doesn't sound right.

~~~
iaw
Just did a quick google search, the article was written in 2014 so the annual
GDP of Iceland leading up to that period were:

$13.3B in 2010

$14.7B in 2011

$14.3B in 2012

$15.6B in 2013

$17.3B in 2014

So presuming the article was written prior to the 2013 GDP figures being
released then the statement was indeed correct when made (and may still be
barring new information about revenue growth).

~~~
LyndsySimon
Those numbers don't come close to matching what I find when I search. For
instance:
[https://tradingeconomics.com/ireland/gdp](https://tradingeconomics.com/ireland/gdp)

~~~
strig
Iceland not Ireland.

~~~
LyndsySimon
Well, crap :) Mea culpa.

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Berunto
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ChrisSD
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