From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Sat Feb 23 2002 - 02:56:34 MST
I'm pretty sick of society at the moment; restrictions, idiocy, double
standards abound. Makes you want to set up afresh. The traditional options
for doing so are not all that great:
a) build your own island in international waters
b) get off-planet in large numbers
and suffer from the problems of other people being able to stomp on you
before you get big if they don't like your style of government.
--- So following on from some topics touched on here in recent weeks and finding grumpy fantasies better than gloomy pontification on the state of freedom in the world, I'm postulating at a way to kickstart a virtual nation in such a way as to garner significant economic clout within a couple of years. With economic clout comes political clout. Assumption #1: there's no better way to start a nation that with an MMORPG. I'll take this as read, but convince yourself of this if needed. My thesis here is you need a fairly large number of potentially right-minded people, and you aren't going to get a sufficient number who can be swayed to participating in nationhood any other way. There is only one online pseudo/proto-nation of any note; Everquest [www.everquest.com]. It wasn't designed to be one; it's the natural end result of a critical mass of people playing a crude escapist simulation of real life. It's an unrecognized dictatorship with many part-time residents from real-world nations who trade Everquest intangibles on black markets in America and Europe. On the other hand, you have to be very into the whole virtual nation concept to have heard of any of the attempts at deliberate virtual nation building from any other starting point that do exist. (Serious or otherwise; http://www.smartuniverse.com/). Existing MMORPGs are seeding off into some interesting ideas on value, political systems and exchange rates. http://slashdot.org/articles/02/01/23/2131259.shtml (flawed Norrath study showing that one can consider MMORPGs to have an economy that can be related to the real world) Everquest (Norrath is a region in EQ) is a game, but nonetheless is probably the closest thing to a real virtual nation around. If it had a formalized exchange rate with the US dollar, decentralized servers, and the players had more control over the rules of the game (a la A Tale in the Desert)... http://www.ataleinthedesert.com/ (Nomic meets the MMORPG; players make rules, programmers change the virtual world to implement them) A Tale in the Desert shows that people are interested in playing games that are basically about politics. [Hell, politics shows that people are interested in playing games that are basically about politics]. But aTitD also shows that one can craft the boundaries of the politics in a virtual world to lead people to play political games in a particular way. And enjoy it too. http://www.projectentropia.com (Entirely vanilla MMORPG in development) Project Entropia isn't really expected to go anywhere in a big way, but it shows that other people are thinking about economic issues in the boundary between real and virtual. It does establish an exchange rate and, unlike other virtual worlds which are currently wrestling with currency and control issues that real nations have wrestled with for hundreds of years, is pretty straightforward about expecting people to bring capital into the game. In a way, immigrating for part of their time, or establishing a second residence. Necron [http://www.neocron.com/] is also worth mentioning as being close to the same viewpoint, but without the same explicit handling of real-virtual economics. [Aside: it's interesting to watch the de facto dictatorships (i.e. owning and managing companies) of these pseudo-realms practicing trial-and-error international monetary policy, black-market suppression, border control, and macroeconomic policies. The governments are supported by cash imports (player fees) and export intangibles through various black and gray markets. http://news.com.com/2100-1017-239052.html?legacy=cnet http://news.com.com/2100-1040-832347.html Needless to say, they follow in the missteps of real world governments quite closely.] Lots more games in development, many with equally interesting twists in player-ownership, governing structures, economic relationships with the real world, and so forth: http://www.massivemultiplayer.org/index.php?gIndex=1&gc=0--- So in theory, there's nothing stopping you making an MMORPG which guides and rewards the formation of governing bodies of your choice, while still being fun to play. A libertarian twist on a traditional MMORPG, for example. Because it is a game, it could garner a large and persistant userbase/populance/part-time inhabitants within a few years. EverQuest boasts 300,000 subscribers, for example. A problem with existing MMORPGs for virtual nation building is their centralization. Too easy to shut down by a physical world nation state that wanted to nip this thing in the bud. It's hard to wield economic clout if you have servers that can be shut down easily. One would have to take the next logical step and build an MMORPG around a decentralized peer-to-peer system. This would probably have to be built on top of some form of early model internet-scale operating system [http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1133]. Existing scalable peer-to-peer structures in development [http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/17/0530222&mode=threaduld probably suffice on their own if they weren't just regarded as a service. Big difference between something that's a service (Napster, Gnutella) and something that is, in effect, a second home (MMORPG). Although the line between the two paragraphs above is pretty blurry. Anyhow, so lets say you have your ultra-cool, libertarian-leaning, player-run MMORPG with 300,000 players based on the next Gnutella as a platform. Or freenet. Or whatever. And this will happen; it probably won't be libertarian-leaning, but we'll have an ultra-cool player-run MMORPG with at least 300k players on a decentralized peer-to-peer platform five years from now, I figure. So at that point, you have the real seed for a true virtual nation, one which could start to try for recognition by real nations through economic leverage and the traditional routes of extablishing exchange rates, legitimizing existing black and gray markets, etc, etc. It seems to me that this could head to a nice place to live a whole lot faster than building your own island or getting out of the gravity well. [And since I'm running out of steam, I won't start in on processing power and memory as currency in decentralized systems, analogies to imports and immigration, future tech advances that will make virtual space more habitable, etc, etc. Left for the readers to discuss]. But I am still pretty sick of society. We're overdue getting someplace to start over. Reason http://www.exratio.com/
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