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Sustainability MMORPG

August 17th, 2008

games, sustainability

I recently read this blog post entitled Sowing the Seeds of a Future Society (emphasis mine):

Given that I believe a major environmental crisis is unavoidable, how might we ensure that genuinely sustainable communities could become a reality? Firstly I believe we should use the most powerful tool of the current age to design exactly how future communities should look, what technologies and system of government would be most appropriate, and how to ensure that such communities remain sustainable over time. Computer games already exist which allow users to design cities and societies. It would be a relatively simple undertaking to design an on-line computer game which would allow interested parties worldwide to refine the details of exactly what such a future society should look like. Remember that if communities develop in a haphazard manner, it is likely that they will fall into many of the traps that our current society has.

This, along with my current interest in educational science games, inspires me to reimagine Spaceship Earth Beta, my ongoing imaginary platform for exploring issues and strategies of sustainability, as a massively-multiplayer computer game.

First, there must be two competing goals which different players are working towards:

  1. To develop a society proven to be sustainable over a large time-scale;
  2. To be selfish or violent or “evil”, taking advantage of loopholes for personal wealth or power or ego, which ultimately leads to making the whole society unsustainable.

The first goal must be concretely measurable. Concrete definitions of a small number of metrics must be defined such that, if they can be maintained or improved over several generations of players, they would indicate that the society as a whole is sustainable. These metrics would at least include:

Playing the game through multiple generations of players, with different personalities and each generation being more detached from the start of the project, is important; cultural values are not transmitted by default to the next generation.

The second goal, while perhaps irritating to the larger community which devotes itself to the first goal, is nonetheless vital and the players which achieve it must be revered, even as the players who attempt it must be reviled. All systems which are composed of humans with individual volition will have members who desire to destroy the system, even if they must sacrifice themselves. The system must be resilient against any single point of failure, or any small-scale collusion against it. The exile or incarceration of citizens for what amounts to this “treason” must be enforced; their murder must carry the same emotional weight as it would in reality.

I do not believe that we can plan from the outset a completely sustainable system; the “metarules” that are in existence from the outset of the project, and the texts which define its culture and values, are all we can really control, and their ramifications can only be understood from playing them out to a reasonable conclusion. Now, the results of a computer game are obviously not the same as the results of the same experiment conducted in reality. However, we can work to create and refine the starting set of metarules to have the greatest probability of success.

This simulation will have to be run many times with many different people. This makes it different from existing MMORPGs which run continuously, with game designers (”GDs”) modifying the game rules to maximize fun and membership. Many variants will be obviously flawed, others more subtly so, but they should be aborted if and when they are irretrievably broken, and the system analyzed post-mortem to find the flaws that led to its demise, and a new system started with the modified meta-rules.

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