Utopia: Riding Free

Some of you may recall that in the spring of 2006 there was a massive meeting on IRC, organized by AllianceRankings, with most of the notable players of Utopia present (see here for the AR announcement, here for logs, and here for mIRCstats). At one point some five hundred players were present in the channel, and one had to disable the join/leave/quit notifications in mIRC to make the discussion legible.

Though the meeting was compromised from the start (as there was a separate, exclusive, quasi-secret channel for all the self proclaimed elite players) it nevertheless showed a timeless pet peeve of Utopian players: the issue of (dis)honourable play.

Predictably, no-one could agree on anything, suggestions for a pan-Utopian disciplinary force were laughed away, and soon everyone forgot about the project, despite a second attempt to kick some life into this stillborn horse. It was adorable while it lasted.

Players enjoy idealizing the past, saying that "back then" there was more integrity, less cheating, less power abuse and so on. To me, the issue has been a constant one ever since I started playing in December 2000. Already in the early ages I heard horror stories of someone with 200 multi provinces destroying some top kingdom. I've personally experienced a 9m nw kingdom intra land-dropping to our size at 6m nw just for honour-raping purposes.

Humans do not self-regulate. You saw this when even Alan Greenspan, notorious free market cheerleader, commented on the epic fail of the US banks: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief". Of course, the same goes for the internet, as much as people would like to believe otherwise.

In the social sciences people have long struggled with the "free rider" problem. I'll use a silly Dutch example to explain. Suppose a community of smelly Netherlanders are tired of getting flooded all the time, and agree to get together and build a dike. Ideally everyone would chip in, get the thing built and at the end of the day they would sit around feeling smug, Dutch and dry. But the cynical among us see the problem: if one of these Dutch figure that getting up at seven to spend a whole day shoveling sounds like a terrible pain in the hindquarters, he or she may opt to let others do the work, while still reaping the benefits (since one can hardly build a dike that allows for the flooding of a select slacker). And so the situation may arise that everyone loses, as mutual distrust builds up, nothing gets done and people find themselves glaring at each other as the water rises to their exceptionally smelly armpits.

There are a number of ways in which the free rider problem can be overcome. The most desirable option - but simultaneously the weakest one - is a person's own moral imperative (I help build the dike because I don't want to leech off my community). This happens when someone has internalized group morality and loyalty. Readers who have been monarch can undoubtedly recall moments when they have consciously tried to guilt-trip slackers - this is when you try to appeal to this sense of community responsibility.

If internalized morality fails (as it always does in human groups) then one can set sanctions on free rider behavior. One kind of sanction is social shunning (I help build the dike because I don't want to eat everyone's bitching). Almost no-one likes to be gossiped about, to be excluded, derided, ridiculed or worst of all: ignored and neglected. This sanction is not purely emotional, it can also be practical. For instance, even if you are a sociopath who doesn't feel bad when being ostracized, you would still suffer in terms of not getting certain help and services.

The second kind of sanction is violence/force (I help build the dike because I don't want to get my rectum savaged in prison). In the case of Utopia, the best example is getting deleted by OMAC. There is a strong incentive for everyone not to fall prey to this kind of sanctioning.

Note that the above mechanisms do not eliminate the free rider problem: they merely marginalize it. And a good thing too, else we would never be able to organize into sizable social groups.

Why did I make you read through this sociological drivel? Back to Utopia. It is (still) a fairly substantial community. We have got, at the moment of writing, some twelve thousand players in six hundred kingdoms. We have a very meager sanction system headed by OMAC, only concerning itself with enforcing some of the less vague rules. We have a handful of morally conscious monarchs who will not allow what they perceive as dishonourable behavior out of principle. But by and large, Utopia is consigned to social sanctions. And anyone who has spent any amount of time in the networth top 50 can attest to the inefficiency of these sanctions. Indeed, the top in Utopia largely resonates with geopolitical behavior, which can be reduced to the "the law of the jungle" principle, where opportunism, backstabbing and power politics reign supreme.

So why is social control doing so poorly in Utopia? Apart from the lack of a central sanction-distributing institution, there is very little transparency. Players can easily maintain shell Kingdoms or satellite resource/intel provinces because it has been fairly easy to evade detection. But even technically legal behavior, such as breaking agreements and vulturing generally have more benefits than costs.

The free rider problem for Utopia is this: even though backstabbing, power abuse and cheating reap short term boons for the perpetrators, on the long term the disillusioned will exit the game in droves and the opportunists will find themselves playing a deserted game. Everybody loses. That the game has held together more or less thus far is most likely due to the tenacious in-group loyalty of players rather than the actual pleasure of playing the game.

So here is the issue: if appealing to personal honour is insufficient, and a serious central policing neither present nor desirable (we are not online to be regulated as much as in RL), what can we do? It seems we would somehow need to increase our social shunning capabilities as a community, but how? I have some ideas, but I may save it for a future article. This has gone on long enough.