[extropy-chat] A Libertarian experiment?

Dirk Bruere dirk at neopax.com
Wed Dec 24 13:27:40 UTC 2003


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3334923.stm
The dark side of digital utopia
Dot.life - Where tech meets life, every Monday
By Mark Ward
BBC News Online technology correspondent

How would people act if they were freed from real life laws and social
constraints? A new, interactive computer game offers just such a scenario -
with some disturbing results.
Imagine you could move to a city where you could swap yourself for a
younger, slimmer version that never ages and never gets tired.

In this city you could choose which job to pursue, build your dream home and
do all the things you did not have the courage to do in your other life.

It sounds great but soon after you arrive, the gloss begins to fade.

One of the first people you meet is a kindly looking granny who greets you
with a slap round the face and a barrage of abuse.

Escaping to one of the "safe" homes you find a den of thieves who trick you
into handing over all your cash.

The local newspapers are full of investigations into child prostitution,
rampant crime, mafia-controlled neighbourhoods, shadowy self-declared
governments struggling to maintain order and runaway inflation.

Welcome to Alphaville.

Dark history

Alphaville is the biggest city in The Sims Online, a spin-off of the highly
successful Sims computer game. As its name implies, players can control
virtual people in an online world.

The Sims Online can be likened to a chatroom with moving pictures in which
people are represented by an avatar rather than text.

But to the chatting it adds a rich virtual world in which every player has a
home. There are places to socialise, to work and visit, shops and services,
even virtual pets.

Alphaville and its sister cities in The Sims Online were supposed to be
benign utopias that allowed people to discover who they could be when freed
from the economic and social restraints that shackle them in real life.

But it has not turned out like that at all.

The dark side of Alphaville has been documented by one of its former
"residents", Peter Ludlow, who in real life is a philosophy professor at the
University of Michigan.


Urizenus, one of the avatars controlled by Prof Ludlow, was chief reporter
on a newspaper called The Alphaville Herald which featured interviews with
Alphaville's child prostitutes, sadomasochists, Sims Mafioso, thieves and
members of its shadow government.
"The Alphaville Herald was not supposed to document dodgy things," he says.
"It was done to document the emergence of economic, social and political
structures in the game."

Like increasing numbers of academics Mr Ludlow is interested in virtual game
worlds like The Sims Online because they act as live, accelerated
laboratories for studying the ways people interact, get on and fall out.

But as the problems of The Sims Online mounted The Alphaville Herald - which
exists as a separate website - became a guidebook to the goings-on in this
dystopia.

Action and reaction

Mr Ludlow thought the people behind the game should know what was going on
inside Alphaville, not least because some things - child prostitution, for
example - are morally and legally troubling.


But when they found out, Maxis, the game's developers, and Electronic Arts,
the distributors, banned all in-game mention of The Alphaville Herald, says
Mr Ludlow.
Then, says Mr Ludlow, he was thrown out of the game and his accounts closed
down, cutting him off from his Sims.

EA and Maxis say they are aware of Prof Ludlow's comments, that they are
dealing with customer queries collectively and cannot talk about individual
accounts.

They will "continue to monitor external issues as appropriate". They
declined to comment further. "


Dirk

The Consensus:-
The political party for the new millennium
http://www.theconsensus.org




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