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<H1>Re: [MUD-Dev] Common Law [was: Declaration of the Rights of Avatars]</H1>
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<LI><em>To</em>: <<A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A>></LI>
<LI><em>Subject</em>: Re: [MUD-Dev] Common Law [was: Declaration of the Rights of Avatars]</LI>
<LI><em>From</em>: "Christopher Allen" <<A HREF="mailto:ChristopherA#skotos,net">ChristopherA#skotos,net</A>></LI>
<LI><em>Date</em>: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 01:03:17 -0700</LI>
<LI><em>Reply-To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A></LI>
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<PRE>
I looked around using Google for comments on Epstein's book "Simple Rules
for a Complex World". I found a number of interesting documents, but in
particular I was amused by Virginia Postel's article
<A HREF="http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3687f1775177.htm">http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3687f1775177.htm</A> where she uses
LucasArt's Habitat as a major example.
The recommend the complete text, but some excerpts follow, both so you'll be
intrigued enough to read, and for the MUD-Dev archives:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen Skotos Tech Inc. ..
.. 1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <<A HREF="http://www.Skotos.net">http://www.Skotos.net</A>> o510/649-4030 f510/649-4034 ..
Excerpt from:
<A HREF="http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3687f1775177.htm">http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3687f1775177.htm</A>
The Bonds of Life
Society depends on rules. But what sort of rules enliven our world -- and
what sort stifle it?
By Virginia Postrel
...(text deleted)
There are many dynamic systems in the world, many areas of life that evolve
and improve through trial-and-error learning, from "digital organisms" that
evolve better computer programs to global financial markets, from adaptable
architecture to international science. Looking across these various
processes, we can find patterns in their fundamental rules, though we can
fully apply those patterns to a specific case only when we understand that
particular system. Here we can only begin the exploration by laying out some
general principles. As an overview, dynamist rules:
* allow individuals (including groups of individuals) to act on their own
knowledge;
* apply to simple, generic units and allow them to combine in many different
ways;
* permit credible, understandable, enduring, and enforceable commitments;
* protect criticism, competition, and feedback;
* establish a framework within which people can create nested, competing
frameworks of more-specific rules.
...(text deleted)
Once upon a time, the prospect of a "new world" in the Americas inspired
political philosophers to think about the state of nature and how
civilization evolves out of it. From that philosophy, and inherited legal
traditions, came new constitutional regimes and experiments in
self-government. Settling new territory requires serious thought about
fundamental rules, thought that not only shapes the new world but can
reshape the old. This is a matter not simply of philosophy but of practice,
since pioneers must evolve new rules to govern the new landscape.
That is why cyberspace is more than a technological fad, why its governance
has become a contentious legal issue, and why it attracts enormous amounts
of comment. The "settlement" of this virtual world has forced its pioneers
to consider how and when rules work. Through trial and error,
experimentation and competition, they have evolved technical standards,
etiquette, and boundaries of various sorts. That computer programs are
themselves strings of rules, which in turn depend on more-fundamental rules
embedded in hardware or lower-level software languages, means that even a
nonphilosophical programmer has a practical knowledge of rule structures.
And for the more ambitious, developing the virtual frontier offers a chance
to explore and create rules that enable other people to generate rich,
dynamic systems of their own.
Back in 1985, when personal computers were strange and wondrous inventions
just filtering into American homes, Chip Morningstar and his colleagues
created an online world in which Commodore 64 owners could meet, play, and
communicate with each other. The computers were simple, the modems slow, but
the world--called Habitat--quickly became complex. Habitat provided its
users with an animated landscape, props, activities, and cartoon personas
called avatars. Users could send each other e-mail or converse through text
in word balloons. Working from this underlying structure, Habitat's virtual
citizens developed a wide variety of social activities and institutions.
They invented games and dance routines, went on treasure hunts and quests,
published a newspaper, threw parties, got "married" and divorced, founded
religions and businesses, wrote and sold poems and stories, and debated
weighty issues.
Watching Habitat develop made Morningstar think seriously about how rules
shape societies, and what the limits of rule making are. "It was a small but
more or less complete world, with hundreds and later thousands of
inhabitants," he recalls. "And I, along with my coworkers, was God." In
theory, the programmers made the rules, knew them thoroughly, and could
change them at a stroke. But their godlike powers weren't as limitless as
they seemed. Says Morningstar: "Again and again we found that activities
that we had planned based on often unconscious assumptions about user
behavior had completely unexpected outcomes....We could provide
opportunities for things to happen, but we could not predict or dictate the
outcome."
If there were chinks in the rules, the players found them. A few
enterprising souls spent hours shuffling between a "Vendroid" machine
selling dolls for 75 tokens and a pawn machine in another region buying them
for 100 tokens. When the arbitrageurs had enough profit to buy crystal balls
for 18,000 tokens, they repeated the same procedure with a pawn machine
paying 30,000 tokens, until the Habitat money supply had quintupled
overnight. When questioned about the source of their newfound wealth, they
replied, "We got it fair and square!"
"Unintended consequences really have to do with naive people believing that
there are no holes [in the rules]. It's very easy to seduce yourself into
thinking that you've got everything under control," says Morningstar. "And
the reality is, it's almost never true." Clever people will always come up
with ideas no central rule maker has conceived.
Over and over again, Habitat's designers ran into the limits of their own
knowledge. The range of tastes and knowledge its many users brought to
Habitat quickly overwhelmed the ability of designers to foresee how users
would react. A treasure hunt that took weeks to build lasted less than a
day, after a single Habitat resident quickly discovered a critical clue; the
winner had a great time, but most of the other players barely got started.
The system's operators soon realized the value of letting users create their
own games. "It's not that they could necessarily do things that were as good
as some of the things that we had the facilities to do," says Morningstar.
"But the things which they did were much more directly in tune with what
people immediately wanted--because they were much more directly in contact
with themselves."
This, then, is the first characteristic of dynamist rules: They allow
individuals (including groups of individuals) to act on their own knowledge.
They recognize that people are "more directly in contact with themselves"
than any rule maker can be. Rules must be simple and general, a foundation
on which people can build, not a detailed blueprint for exactly what they
must construct. The rules must respect the "knowledge problem," the limits
of what any authority can know.
...(text deleted)
A dynamic society, then, depends not only on preserving fluidity but on
permitting permanence. To learn, we must experiment. But to experiment, we
must commit ourselves. And we must find ways to cooperate with others, to
extend trust. Here, then, is the third characteristic of dynamist rules, a
complement to the second: The rules permit credible, understandable,
enduring, and enforceable commitments. That means not only that the rules
are clear and predictable, but that people can be held to their promises (or
penalized for breaking them). This security is essential not only to
individual happiness but to growth, learning, and progress.
The great weakness of Habitat, says Chip Morningstar, was that its residents
could not themselves create new places or objects within its virtual world.
Nor could they build "their own little pockets of the universe," with their
own rules. Allowing participants to add new objects or places meant letting
them create software code that would then enter other participants'
computers. That, says Morningstar, would require "inviting people inside
trust boundaries that you just generally couldn't trust strangers in."
Today, Morningstar and some of his former Habitat colleagues are involved
with a new venture, called Electric Communities, that is designing software
to get around this problem. The goal is to allow "cooperation without
vulnerability," to build in security and flexibility so that online worlds
can evolve through the experiments and invention of their participants. The
model is contract--a security system based on transferable "capabilities"
rather than the static identity of passwords and "authorized user" lists.
_______________________________________________
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MUD-Dev#kanga,nu
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</PRE>
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<ul><li>Thread context:
<BLOCKQUOTE><UL>
<LI><STRONG>Re[2]: [MUD-Dev] Alignment</STRONG>, <EM>(continued)</EM>
<ul compact>
<ul compact>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00444" HREF="msg00444.html">Re[2]: [MUD-Dev] Alignment</A></strong>,
Travis Casey <a href="mailto:efindel@io.com">efindel@io.com</a>, Wed 19 Apr 2000, 01:07 GMT
</LI>
</ul>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00450" HREF="msg00450.html">Re: Re[2]: [MUD-Dev] Alignment</A></strong>,
Travis Nixon <a href="mailto:tnixon@avalanchesoftware.com">tnixon@avalanchesoftware.com</a>, Wed 19 Apr 2000, 01:56 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00516" HREF="msg00516.html">RE: Re[2]: [MUD-Dev] Alignment</A></strong>,
Lee Sheldon <a href="mailto:linearno@gte.net">linearno@gte.net</a>, Sat 22 Apr 2000, 18:11 GMT
</LI>
</UL>
</LI>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00555" HREF="msg00555.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Alignment</A></strong>,
Paul Schwanz - Enterprise Services <a href="mailto:Paul.Schwanz@east.sun.com">Paul.Schwanz@east.sun.com</a>, Mon 24 Apr 2000, 21:32 GMT
</LI>
</ul>
</LI>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00346" HREF="msg00346.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Common Law [was: Declaration of the Rights of Avatars]</A></strong>,
Christopher Allen <a href="mailto:ChristopherA@skotos.net">ChristopherA@skotos.net</a>, Mon 17 Apr 2000, 16:22 GMT
<UL>
<li><Possible follow-up(s)><br>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00365" HREF="msg00365.html">[MUD-Dev] Common Law [was: Declaration of the Rights of Avatars]</A></strong>,
Christopher Allen <a href="mailto:ChristopherA@skotos.net">ChristopherA@skotos.net</a>, Mon 17 Apr 2000, 16:23 GMT
</LI>
</UL>
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<LI><strong><A NAME="00348" HREF="msg00348.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Quests - allocative efficiency</A></strong>,
Lovecraft <a href="mailto:dave@darkages.com">dave@darkages.com</a>, Mon 17 Apr 2000, 16:22 GMT
<LI><strong><A NAME="00323" HREF="msg00323.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Quests</A></strong>,
Lovecraft <a href="mailto:dave@darkages.com">dave@darkages.com</a>, Mon 17 Apr 2000, 04:52 GMT
<UL>
<li><Possible follow-up(s)><br>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00341" HREF="msg00341.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Quests</A></strong>,
Jon Lambert <a href="mailto:jlsysinc@ix.netcom.com">jlsysinc@ix.netcom.com</a>, Mon 17 Apr 2000, 06:41 GMT
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</UL>
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</UL></BLOCKQUOTE>
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