Massively multiplayer online government

Wired has a really interesting article up about the problem of dispute-resolution within MMOGs (massively mutiplayer online games).

Basically, some of these are growing incredibly fast (~20% as quoted in the article), and when you get that many people together... they're going to have clashes with each other, and they're all coming to the game's developer to solve them. I've never actually played any of the newer MMOGs, although I try to follow what's going on with them. Pretty much my entire exposure to them as been through reading up, or seeing them over someone's shoulder.

It's not as though I have some disdain, I just don't trust myself around them in any way. Years ago there was a young teenage summer almost completely lost due to telneting into the EOTL (multi-user dungeon, basically the same as MMOG except text-based), and I learned a valuable lesson there: these things are freakishly addicting. This was back when my internet connection was going out over Delphi, which was all text, and you paid by the hour. I racked up way, way too many hours playing EOTL...

Going back to the article - since the elections are on my mind and lunch is finally in my stomach, I got to thinking, "So, they need to settle lots of disputes, and they have a virtual world with tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of users. Why not just have a government?". Have actual elections online, with users running for office and if they win, they get to do the role. Court systems, whereby the 'Supreme Court' is the equivalent of the employees taking appeals petitions from the lower courts of users. Maybe even juries. Give officials actual power, so that you can breed corruption.

I happen to be a big fan of the Electoral College, because I understand it's the way it is not to express the feelings of the majority but to protect the minority. But I do respect the people who think it's broken, even if they scare the hell out of me. There are all kinds of ideas to 'fix' it: everything from dividing Electoral votes to moving to a straight popular vote.

Some don't really care about the Electoral College, and just want to see new methods of voting inacted, like the condorcet method. Some want to get rid of the Electoral College and move to condorcet.

MMOGs would seem to be great guinea pigs to try out all of these things with real emotions and real people involved, both to see where they break down and where they excel as well as what happens over accelerated generations. Then again, people log into games to get away from the dean scream.