Shooting for Democracy

Wallace continually references video gaming environments in terms of the life-encompassing fantasy MUDs, but online gaming is much more broad and mainstream; for instance, online shooters are played casually by many, including myself. SOCOM, one particular game I enjoyed playing, was a typical shooter that pitted "Navy Seals" against "Terrorists." I will address how the game maintained the convention of fair, enjoyable gameplay.

The Leviathan refers to the system that has the power to maintain order, and to which people willing give up freedoms in order to maintain this order. In this game, the Leviathan was a combination of a supreme power to regulate cheating, and a democratic system to maintain the overall experience.

The supreme power was the company itself, which theoretically had the power to do anything, but generally stayed out of the online community. The company did, however, handle the convention that cheating via console modifications was not fair to users and thus was not allowed. Before logging in to the server, the online system would check your console for any such enhancements, and would simply throw you offline and not allow you to play if you had a modified system. Thus, people learned this rule the hard way – if you tried to cheat, you couldn't play at all.

Most players didn't try to cheat, however, and the real question became how to maintain a positive, ordered environment. The answer was brilliantly simple - the game enacted a system where, in every game, players could cast a single vote against other players on their team, and if a majority of the team voted against a particular teammate, he was ejected from the game and not allowed to return. As time progressed, many logical conventions were informally established: team-killing, abusing the microphone (singing, excessive cursing, making racist comments, not allowing others to talk), and leaving your console during the game, as examples, all resulted in a universally negative gaming experience, and thus offenders were simply voted out. Reproaches via a verbal warning were used in the case of minor offenses, but anyone guilty of an intentional team-kill, for instance, was immediately voted out of the game. Similar to the Wallace example, nothing in the game prevented players from doing any of these negative actions – but nearly everyone willingly conformed to the emergent norm of cooperation and general order to keep an enjoyable experience.

The most interesting aspect of this system is that there were no official rules posted anywhere regarding these conventions, and every game consisted of new players who, in general, hadn't ever met before – thus, theoretically each game could have had its own set of rules and conventions. However, this was not the case. Every single game followed these conventions, simply because they provided the best online experience, which users learned and passed on through experience. While there was no "sign on the door," another interesting factor about this particular game was that it was, in fact, possible for new users to observe other experienced players to learn how to behave, similar to the French restaurant example in the text. This is uncommon and impossible in many online settings, such as message boards. Players were given the option of “spectating” games, in which they could watch every player and listen in on conversations. Even better, the statistics of each player (ie, how well they were playing) were always displayed, so expertise was made quite salient, and new users immediately knew who to watch / listen to and thus could easily learn what conventions to follow in terms of a maintaining a positive gameplay experience. For those who didn't choose this option, they simply learned the conventions the hard way - if they violated any, they were kicked out.

Also interesting is that while the "laissez-faire" approach to the Leviathan failed horribly in the MUD example in the text, it succeeded very well in this setting. One key reason for this is that there is little room for any sort of group polarization which could prevent the majority vote system from working. The MUD example describes players who often fell into opposing groups regarding new laws and gameplay elements, and were further polarized due to the highly communicative nature of the MUD. In the case of SOCOM, however, these issues did not arise – very few people actually believed the “outlawed” conventions created a positive experience. Additionally, a lack of communication (conversation was very task-oriented and brief within the short rounds) meant that anyone who did feel this way was unlikely to gain much of a following in the short timespan of an individual game.

As a final point, it's also noteworthy that players are first assigned to the two teams, which consist of characters with similar weapons and uniforms, and players can only make decisions (ie, vote) regarding players on their own team. By the group effect, players should immediately like and identify with their own teammates, which may have also contributed to the success of the democratic system – instinctive positive feelings toward one another would likely encourage fair and responsible use of the system.