Book review: Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games by Edward Castronova
Castranova is one of the first intellectuals to notice the importance of new societies that are being created in cyberspace. Much of this book is devoted to (sometimes redundant) explanations of why they are more than just games.
Around the middle of the book, he switches from describing a typical world for the benefit of those who doubt the importance of virtual worlds to describing how to design good worlds. This is where I started to find the book interesting and the questions thought-provoking, but the answers often unconvincing.
His most important discussion is about the near-anarchy that prevails in most virtual societies. He attributes this partly to the “Customer Service State” of for-profit world builders who are too cheap to pay for as much government as he assumes citizens want. But he seems to believe this is too inevitable to be worth much analysis. His more interesting question is why don’t the world’s citizens organize a government of their own? His answer is that citizens don’t have enough power over each other to enforce laws they might create. But he doesn’t convince me this is true (are boycotts useless? is repeatedly killing an outlaw not punishment?), nor does he explain why the designer face little pressure to change the design of the world to make it easier to enforce laws (what would happen if the world were designed to enable one person to effectively banish a person she doesn’t like from her view of the world?). I suspect part of the answer is that there’s less demand for government than he expects. I see some hints that his desire for government in cyberspace is a simple reflection of his desire for government in the real world. Yet I’d expect the analysis of whether government is desirable to be nontrivially affected by such differences as whether poverty and death cause much harm.
He claims “A fun economy should have property, theft, and jail too”, but only gives a few cryptic hints about what theft and jail add to an economy.
He claims “there should be no goods which never depreciate”, and partly justifies that by pointing to some benefits of a continuing need to produce new goods, but leaves me wondering why the rule should be universal or even close to universal.
He hints at the desirability of creating p2p virtual societies so that control over them can be decentralized instead of being determined by a corporate owner, but I’m disappointed that he fails to analyze whether this is practical.
One insight I liked was this description of how to deal with the desire for everyone to have high status: “How do you make a world in which everyone is in the top 10 percent? The answer: AI.”
He has a disturbing idea about the military uses of virtual worlds – an aggressor need not be hampered by unfamiliarity with the land he’s invading if he has unlimited ability to practice the invasion in simulation.
He has some ideas about how virtual worlds might help deal with threats such as grey goo, but doesn’t develop them as well as I would like. His ideas on using virtual worlds to make AIs more friendly appear to anthropomorphise AI in a rather naive and dangerous manner.
Archive for the ‘Virtual Worlds’ Category
Synthetic Worlds
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
Accelerating Change Conference
Monday, September 26th, 2005I was somewhat disappointed by the latest Accelerating Change Conference, which might have been great for people who have never been to that kind of conference before, but didn’t manage enough novelty to be terribly valuable to those who attended the first one. Here are a few disorganized tidbits I got from it.
Bruno Olshausen described our understanding of the neuron as pre-newtonian, and said a neuron might be as complex as a pentium.
Joichi Ito convinced me that Wikipedia has a wider range of uses than my stereotype of it as a dictionary/encyclopedia suggested. For example, its entry on Katrina seems to be a better summary of the news than what I can get via the traditional news media.
Cory Ondrejka pointed out the negative correlation between the availability of violent video games and some broad measure of U.S. crime. He hinted this might say something about causation, but reminded people of the appropriate skepticism by noting the correlation between the decline in pirates and global warming.
Someone reported that Second Life is growing at an impressive pace. I’ve tried it a little over a somewhat flaky wireless connection and wasn’t too excited; I’ll try to get my iBook connected to my dsl line and see if a more reliable connection makes it nicer.
Tom Malone talked about how declining communications costs first enabled the creation of large companies with centralized hierarchies and are now decentralizing companies. His view of Ebay was interesting – he pointed out that it could be considered a retailer with one of the largest number of employees, except that it has outsourced most of its employees (i.e. the people who make a living selling through Ebay). He also mentioned that Intel has some internal markets for resources such as manufacturing capacity.
Daniel Amen criticized modern psychiatry for failing to look at the brain for signs of physical damage. He provided strong anecdotal evidence that the brain imaging services he sell can sometimes tell people how to fix mental problems that standard psychiatry can’t diagnose, but left plenty of doubt as to whether his successes are frequent enough to justify his fees.
T. Colin Campbell described some evidence that eating animal protein is unhealthy. He didn’t convince me that he was a very reliable source of information, but his evidence against casein (a milk protein) sounded fairly strong.
One odd comment from Robin Raskin (amidst an annoying amount of thoughtless sensationalism) was that kids don’t use email anymore. They send about two emails per day [i.e. they've switch to IM]. The idea that sending two emails per day amounts to abandoning email makes me wonder to what extent I’m out of touch with modern communication habits.
An amusing joke, attributed to Eric Drexler:
Q: Why did Douglas Hofstadter cross the road?
A: To make this joke possible.
Accelerating Change Conference
Thursday, November 11th, 2004The 2004 Accelerating Change Conference focused much more on current changes than last year’s attempts at providing long-term visions led me to expect.
The one topic that excited me was a virtual world called Second Life. While it might sound superficially like just a virtual Burning Man, the designers are serious enough about their nationbuilding to encourage commerce, both within the system and via currency exchanges such as The Gaming Open Market with other worlds. Their VP of Product Development Cory Ondrejka described Hernando de Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital as "must reading". They have been careful to insure that people have few incentives to take disputes arising in the virtual world to meatspace courts. For instance, they once banned a vandal from the game who owned a fair amount of land; they auctioned off the land and sent him a check for most of the proceeds – $1600.
Some of their customers are doing well enough in the virtual world that the company that runs Second Life has trouble offering them a salary good enough to compete with what they’re making in virtual life.
They don’t seem as concerned about the highly deflationary effects of their monetary policy as I expect they ought to be. Why will people buy their land (the sale of which seems to be their main source of income) if they can earn a safe and sure return by just holding the local currency?
The responsiveness of the company to citizen complaints (e.g. simplifying and later abolishing taxes in response to tax revolts) is fairly strong evidence that a non-monopolistic dictator is better than a democracy with monopoly power.