MMO games as a virtual model of post-scarcity

[M.Thrane]

Now, this might seem silly initially, but I'm convinced that some of the socio-economic aspects of certain video games could be useful as a study of human relations in a post-scarcity society.

Bear with me,

I'll narrow down my thoughts by limiting them to one game in particular:
Runescape. These are some features of the online society of Runescape back in 2006-7:

Rules of this world:

1. No one can die from starvation or disease.
This means that, in effect, there are no more physical needs, although material desires still exist (will come to this further down).

2. Self-realization is the only percievable goal - which occurs in direct competition with other players.
With all basic needs covered, the only "goal" to life in this world lies in self-improvement through levelling skills and obtaining material wealth. Only through individual labour can you get more skilled at something, but certain skills require materials and others can be easier to work with better material tools - both of which carry real scarcity in this world. This self-improvement is visible in relation to the world and wher you may travel and what beats you may defeat, but mostly it is comparable to the relative social stature of your fellow players. It is easy to directly compare what material goods and what strengths one player have over another, because they all have the exact same potential to obtain both.

3. Death in combat is not permanent and can only result in material loss.
If you are killed, either by beasts or by other players, all you may lose is inventory - This "death" must therefore only be seen as sport, and we cannot study the phenomena in relation to human mortality. We can, however, study the effect material wealth has on social elevation in a post-scarcity world.

4. A living economy
All material goods carry economic value in relation to demand - as in a capitalist society. However, as noted above, none of these goods are necessities for life - They only serve to give players more power, make it easier to improve ones own power, or as a means of displaying wealth in a symbolic manner.

Results:
1. A thriving economy
Despite all needs being covered, material greed remains an immense driving force behind the game's mechanics. This must be seen in relation to the capitalist culture of the real world the players come from, but still shows a possible outcome of post-scarcity. I feel the need to stress that this was a very real economy, where trade-centers naturally sprouted around all major banks, and prices fluctuated greatly based on scarcity - which could be felt very immidetly local. Fish could be bought very cheaply from the fishing players by the rivers, which could be sold for more than twice the original price at a trading center - due to the time-consuming labour process of carrying all the fish there. Merchants would stand in huge groups by the trading centers and market their wares - always trying to outdo each other with colourful text and animations to draw attention.

2. Wage labour
Many players -most of them, I should think- became full-time labourers for the rich high-levelled players. With enough material wealth, getting more wealth was easy, and manual labour started to seem pointless. To obtain the resources needed to level further, most rich players would simply "employ" players of lower stature to produce goods and carry them to the trading center. These workers had no rights whatsoever; They did what was asked of them in hope of getting paid, but sometimes the rich player would go back on is promise, or simply disappear - Usually, though, the produce of the labourer could be sold to other merchants, and as no goods were tied to any physical need, this abuse of labour caused no uproar.

3. Economic crime
Crime flourished in various forms. The simplest form of "scam" was tricking other players into believing your goods were worth more than the actual market price - but by many this was just seen a part of the game. Those with more knowledge and economic prowess prospered on the ignoranc eof others and that was "as it should be" - according to capitalist doctrine. However, there were also those that would trick newer players by luring them out to areas were they could be killed and robbed, or who proposed trades and just before the other player clicked the "accept trade"-button would alter his side of the deal (from ex. 10.000 gold pieces to 1000). These act were illegal, and subject to harsh punishment. If you got reported for such acts, you could end up with your account suspended, or even permanently deleted (like a death-sentnce), and even so, pretty much everyone did perform such crimes.
As bots (illegal programs that could automate player characters) became more and more popular. They worked like machines, needing very little supervision - which lead to a great price drop (over time) in products like ore, fish and wood. This, in turn, made such expensive goods more available to the poor players, and gave life to the myth of "trickle-down economy".

4. Social relations
But was social elevation the only good in this world? Is social elevation at all a good unless you socialize? -No, seemed to be the short answer. The long answer is that people socialized a lot, made friends, were nice to each other and shared. Yet, the pervasive economy also dictated a lot of the free social interaction. Rich players were by many adored, and many (both men and women) made female characters and sold their company to lonely male players. However, the most notable thing, I find, is that the social familiarity and friendliness only extended so far; In a bustling community of thousands of players, most people made their own little cliques. Within these cliques, people mostly treated each other with respect, while at the same time having no qualms when it came to scamming and abusing other players. Even in this world of post-scarcity, a popular collective understanding didn't exist - people roamed in packs, in competition with and at war with the rest of the world. Not on the basis of self-preservation, not on the basis of belief or ideology, but on the basis of sheer competition and greed.

5. Charity and power
So then, what to do when you have become immensely rich and have reached the highest level in most skills? Simply by being present in your expensive gear garners attention, and some held so-called "drop-parties" for attention alone (a rich person would gather a group of players at a location and start dropping valuable goods and watch them run around trying to get to it first), but many also "bought" the loyalty of other players - this gave them very real power, and some often travelled about with their own attachés of lick-spittle servants.

Now, why did I write this and what can we draw from it?
Me, being a communist myself, I have a hard time envisioning how the world may look post-socialism. Although the things I mentioned happened in a game-setting (a form of social interaction most akin to friendly sports), and in a setting of a real-world capitalist mentality, they are very real issues. Issues I feel are very much worthy of discussion - For, how much of this can be ascribed to culture, and which are expressions of human nature?
It is difficult to predict, especially about the future, but what are your thoughts (personal or derived from other historical thinkers) regarding these matters.

The company owning Runescape eventually removed player killing and took control over the economy (removing all possibility to scam, as well as all possibility of making a profit from deftly manoeuvring the economic landscape), which made the game incredibly boring and pointless, and everyone left.

[Conscript]

You should probably do this with star wars galaxies and its economy. I don't know about runescape, but mmos like wow are based on artificial scarcity and artificial labor (rolling a die with % chance determining scarcity), whereas SWG tries to emulate a real economy, with actual production (in fact players and their productiveness gear you, through charity or the market, not raiding or something).

[Comrade-Z]

Minecraft servers would also be interesting to study from this angle.

Rules of the Minecraft world:

1. You can die from starvation, monsters, accidents (like falling from a high cliff), and other players.

2. Unless in "hardcore" mode, death is not permanent and only results in loss of inventory on hand.

3. Goals of the game include surviving, defeating the "Enderdragon," building neat things, and exploring neat environments (like massive caves or huge tropical jungle-covered mountain ranges).

Observations:

I have found that social relations develop along radically different paths depending on whether the players on the server are strangers or part of a pre-existing community.

Pre-existing community case-study: the Shroomery Server

For a number of months, I played on a Minecraft server hosted by a respected member of the Shroomery, which is an online discussion forum pertaining to magic mushrooms and psychedelic drugs. Most of the players on the server I didn't really know before playing with them, but all were from the shroomery, so there was still a sense of shared identity, trust, and goodwill from the very beginning.

I witnessed 3 general stages in the evolution of this Minecraft server:

1. Nomadic survival

When first starting out on this server, players generally ventured around the map a bit, playing almost as if they were playing a single-player game on their own, gathering food, basic materials (like wood, stone), getting some basic tools (like swords, pickaxes, torches), and basically getting everything they would need for survival. Players at this stage did not tend to interact with other players very much.

2. Individual homesteads

After getting the bare essentials, a player's on-hand inventory would start to fill up with surplus items. Generally players would then scout around and find a spot to build a personal abode where they could store their items in chests and manufacture more advanced items. Note that, instead of building one communal smelting room or enchanting room or potion room in the middle of the map, players preferred to less-efficiently reproduce all of these things on their own personal estates.

The worry about theft was clearly a factor in this tendency. It was by no means rampant, but a few thefts did occur on the server while I was on during those few months, and each time there was an uproar. Players tended to like to build their homesteads about one or two Minecraft-day's journey from the other nearest homestead--far enough to dissuade theft, but close enough to still allow occasional traveling to and trading with other players.

Although basic survival was all-but assured for players at this stage, resources were still deemed scarce because some ambitions (such as getting the highest-level diamond tools and armor) remained unfulfilled. This stage was characterized by barter of goods with perceived equal amounts of time, effort, and risk needed to achieve them (for example, a stack of 64 cobblestone for a block of iron ore).

3. Post-scarcity sharing and communal megaprojects.

After players had gotten themselves up to the top-tier tools and had their personal abodes more or less finished, they tended to spend more time near the center of the map building big monuments or big machines, like an auto-wheat harvester or a monster "grinder" that would drop an endless stream of monster loot. At this point, people became willing to give each other all but the most scarce materails (cobble and even iron were freely shared and even put into communal chests, but diamonds were still guarded in personal chests).

On the other hand....

Public Minecraft Server of Random Strangers - case study:

Most players agree that these servers tend to be basically unplayable. Players who are already suited up with the best tools and armor tend to spawn camp and kill new players right upon spawn, or stalk them and waylay them to steal their stuff just for the lulz. Players routinely "grief" (sabotage) others' buildings, steal from their chests, etc. In order to build a safe abode, one must travel many many days out from spawn and probably build underwater--thus making it as if one were playing a single player game anyways and making the whole point of playing on a multiplayer server pointless.

There has never been any recorded instance of wage-labor sprouting up on these Minecraft servers, though...probably because there are so many Minecraft servers, that no person is going to stay committed to any one particularly unfun Minecraft server where they have to be a wage-slave, and so they can "commit suicide" on that server and "immigrate" to any other at the click of a mouse (or just stop playing the game altogether, or go back to single player).

Conclusions:

The key to having a fun, fulfilling, post-scarcity Minecraft world seems to be instilling some quasi-tribal shared sense of identity beforehand where people feel sensitive to social esteem, where people are not perfectly anonymous and strange to one another, and where these ties override Machiavellian calculations of advantage in some circumstances.

In general, Minecraft has suggested to me that, for democracy and equality to work, they must at this stage in our human evolution at least, be small scale and relatively face-to-face. Perhaps if we could retool human psychology, we could get people to treat anonymous working-class strangers on the other side of the world as the same sort of "comrades" that they treat those familiar to them as. But as of now, it would seem to me from Minecraft that small-scale anarchist collectives, loosely federated into larger units, is going to be the only really stable formula for lasting stateless communism.

With social units larger than, say, a small network or neighborhood, you'll need mechanisms like a market and a state to get strangers to cooperate with one another.

[M.Thrane]

Very interesting, Comrade-Z.

Minecraft is perhaps more interesting as a social evolutionary study, simply because its societies can be observed going through stages of social systems - In contrast to the rather static societies observed in a stabilized MMO.
It is also interesting in that its (relatively) short time-scope allows for scientific research based on the scientific method. The social experiment of a Minecraft community can be tried and retried as much as one wants.
There are, however, also obvious short-comings.

1. The size of the community
With a player limit of 32 (or 64?), any "society" in this world can never develop beyond what one would usually call a primal society. Although the evolution of resource-gathering and resource-refinement the game allows goes some way to emulate evolution of modes of production, the community itself never grows to such a size that a real state organization serves any good purpose. It is notable, however, how admin-dictatorships (and with it, admin worship/boot-licking) is able to flourish in some Minecraft worlds.

2. The time-span
Now, even though the swift evolution is what allows us to repeat the experiment, it can be seen as a problem: First of all, can we really study any evolution over so little time; Evolution which in reality always has happened gradually over millennias? Secondly, since the players in the final stages are often the same as the ones who started out playing, the factor of generations is removed. Tension between generations is often the reason for social evolution/revolution in our world. Lastly, we have to consider the way the players from the off-set live under post-scarcity. Hunger might have been added, but since material loss is the only effect of death, death only serves to hamper material growth. Players can't really suffer (unless you count social stigmata related to poverty) based on their material situation.
Minecraft can, perhaps, show us what could happen if we entered post-scarcity as anarchist mini-communes.