Guest Article: The Political Economy of Diablo II: A Critique der=

[Flux]

Guest Article: The Political Economy of Diablo II: A Critique

http://diabloii.net/columnists/a-political-critique.shtml

This guest article by Micha Ghertner is a critique of an article from last month, The Political Economy of Diablo II, by Nathan Danylczuk. Micha's article is one of the longest, and definitely the most scholarly guest article we've ever posted, with quotes from classic literature, economic theory, and sociological analysis.

 

[Daral]

Interesting read. It seemed like a big chunk of that was a very didactic anecdote supporting capitalism, but interesting nonetheless.

 

[Richie Daggers Crime]

A good read. It echoed many of the criticisms I made in the thread about Nathan's article.

Although there are certainly debatable, yet largely subjective, points in both articles, I give the edge to Micha's... IMO, his ideas are better fleshed out (besides, I agree with Micha for the most part :uhhuh: ) Anyway, both are good food for thought.

 

[nelsonb18]

Just 1 thing...what allows these peaceful communities from happening is the restrictions put on by Blizzard...like passworded games and 8 player limit. If it weren't for these restrictions then the peaceful communites would be rushed by selfish ppl and it wouldnt work out because everything is being stolen and everyone killed by hostile strangers. So there has to be some kind of government power over the ppl to keep the kind of order that you talked about...otherwise is wouldnt work out.

I do agree that there are good people out there trying to created some kind of order but like the saying goes....nice people finish last

 

[rickcarson]

Comparison to Hobbes deeply flawed

Dude, the whole point about Thomas Hobbes nasty brutish state of nature was that *anyone* can kill *anyone* else.

Obviously he's not talking about a fair fight, he's saying that if you are asleep, and I bash you with a rock, or run you through with a spear while you are asleep, then you are stuffed.

Equally applicable would be an analogy of the great equaliser -> modern firearms - if I fill you full of bullets, you will die.

Whereas online this is definitely not true. The only time I would stand a chance against a PK would be if they lagged, and possibly not even then. Even amongst PK there is a hierarchy, with some stronger than others.

Online there is no great equaliser. Even if I went out and spent hundreds of dollars buying up uber-twinked-haxxored-to-the-max gear, and even if I found the person I specifically wanted to take vengeance on, all they need to do is play in private games - or switch to a different account.

Not only are the PKs not vulnerable to most other players, you can not even apply vigilante justice to them... its not the state of nature at all, its much much worse.

In response, I vote with my feet. 95% of the time I play passworded private games.

 

[LoD_Smurfan]

I read as far as Hobbes..

..and then I got bored with the whole thing :uhhuh: I found the article to be mildly interesting, but way too long to be easily digested on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Maybe I'll give it a try later on - if I do I'll reassess my opinion. Cross my heart and hope to lose my connection :lol:

 

[Spallenzani]

Nelson,

I agree with you that there are important differences between the world of real life and the world of video games. But even without passworded games and the 8 player limit, people are still able to join together with each other for mutual benefit. For example, cooperative clans are very popular in MMORPGs like Everquest and DAoC, neither of which has passworded games or an 8 player limit.

Rick,

I don't think Hobbes ever wrote that "anyone can kill anyone else." There would still be imbalances of power--women and men or adults and children, for example--but even strong people would never be completely immune, because weak people could band together and overpower them.

But I agree with you on your last point: because of the nature of Diablo II, vigilante justice is almost impossible, which reduces the disincentive of PKing at will.

- Micha Ghertner

 

[Salo]

I have a big book of hobbes on my shelf, something i read once when I thought people could be witty. I realize though that they arent witty, they are very dead and are governed not by natural law, not by nice thoughts beamed to them from young scholars, not by current states of affairs, not governed by people 'above' them, but by spiritual forces, things they have neglected to deal with before publishing and filling a plot of earth.

I have to say that I do agree that more government leads to a more father-mother aspect to life, which is the fall back for children. Also, children desire to do as they please, which is the current mentality of 2004+. So neither situation that might have transpired in either Diablo2 or in the world is 'adult' behavior. Both are childish and destructive.

The reliance on a self-ish state belies the understanding of people's personal aspect of their selfish self. Some desire to control others. Thats about it. Fear of being out of control, perverse desires to be rigid and self flagelating, etc. The current religious movement in america is that if my beliefs and "lifestyle" are not interupted and do they do offend my friends, then it is God given and whatever. There really is little thought to it, and thats the religious dictum, the whatever, the mantra of 'yeah um ok' (to be annoyingly 1960's if you will, but that is sexy nowadays as it was the origin point of the new selfishism cult that most worship with.)

The economist you mentioned is the person that just so happens to fit people's apathetic and selfish hearts. He was an illustrator and not a visionary. Visionary's are hitlers and Gandhi types, people like the skull and bones guys, Benjamin Franklins, the people that are supposed to have changed history. I really think that, besides these bizarre people, most people's selfishism has the tendency to enjoy growing fat with ideas, self love, perceived status and object accumulation and disolve into themselves and die in some self-fulfilling accordance with others. They realize that apathy leads to the grave as easily as being a benefactor does, picking whatever gets them off better.

However, this might be "the current state of affairs" but I say these current affairs stink. Diablo II cannot parallel current society. I can turn it off, I can buy for 20-40 dollars what I want to be decent. I can make friends with people who I normally one would think are repulsive after a thorough, in person, observation, and this list goes on and on making it far and away from real life (although i applaud doctoral candidates trying to make a buck and win over their mentors, yeah). Diablo II has the same people who believe in self ish things, like person power, aquiring items that you cannot take with you when you die, gaining fame over others when really it has no weight in the afterlife and so on. Benjamin Franklin will be more famous than a Blizzard Programmer, yet both of them arent too concerned about such legacy when they are turning out tulips from a cold earth.

there are many religioius tracks one can drudge that help to offer remedies to this sort of state, however, non are palatable as selfishism, and none work as well in soothing and feeding the stubborn heart.

 

[PsychoticEwok1]

its true... bliz gave us just enough control to keep things from going down the tubes by hackers and pkers.

i was just thinking - has anyone ever heard of the game Guild Wars - its coming out at the end of the summer, and its a MMORPG. but guilds (clans) can compete to control areas of the game. the game is being designed by some ex blizzard employees, who worked on warcraft and diablo, so the gameplay looks like itl be alot alike. but the politics will be interesting - with high power clans controlling the best areas of the game. i thought that would be cool.

but this new article... maybe it will be chaos. do a google search for Guild Wars if ur interested. it was in PCgamer mag a few months ago

 

[Spallenzani]

The economist you mentioned is the person that just so happens to fit people's apathetic and selfish hearts. He was an illustrator and not a visionary. Visionary's are hitlers and Gandhi types, people like the skull and bones guys, Benjamin Franklins, the people that are supposed to have changed history.

Solo,

That economist I mentioned--Adam Smith--was far from apathetic or selfish. From the following bibliographic entry in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

Today Smith's reputation rests on his explanation of how rational self-interest in a free-market economy leads to economic well-being. It may surprise those who would discount Smith as an advocate of ruthless individualism that his first major work concentrated on ethics and charity. In fact, while chair at the University of Glasgow, Smith's lecture subjects, in order of preference, were natural theology, ethics, jurisprudence, and economics, according to John Millar, Smith's pupil at the time. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."​

Further, as the above link mentions, Adam Smith had a profound influence on all of the greatest economists who followed him, from David Ricardo to Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman.

I'm sure you've heard of Karl Marx and the impact he has had on the world. Keynes was equally important this century, if not more so. If you lend much authority to popular magazines, Time Magazine voted Keynes one of the 100 most important people of this century. One particularly relevant quote by Keynes from the aforementioned article is

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

All five of these thinkers--Ricardo, Marx, Keynes, Friedman and especially Smith--were not merely illustrators but visionaries in the grandest sense of the word. These men changed modern history more so than nearly anyone else. Hitler, Ghandi and Benjamin Franklin pale in comparison.

 

[Salo]

Humans do lie to themselves most ingeniously.

Selfishism is loving your friends but not your enemies, being first in concern with one's own needs and plight moreso than another's.

 

[HBeachBabe]

Humans do lie to themselves most ingeniously.

Selfishism is loving your friends but not your enemies, being first in concern with one's own needs and plight moreso than another's.

I'm not seeing the downside here... :scratch:

 

[Unmoved]

I'm not seeing the downside here... :scratch:

:winner: *rimshot*

 

[joepublic]

The fact that a community, even one made up mostly of young, testosterone-filled teenaged males can remain so enjoyable after all these years is good evidence that

I can't believe your going to genralize from this. We are talking about the real world, right? I mean, your observations of a computer game will lead you to conclude something about the "real world"?!?!?

even the most aggressive society does not need a government to control it.

The N_AZI's apparently found government to be a usefull tool for their aggresions. Those who have no liking for the N_AZI's find it unavoidably necessary that the N_AZI's be made ineffective. The U.S. government eventually did so with relative effectiveness.

People can control themselves, by cooperating with others when it is in their interests to do so, and by voluntarily joining peaceful communities like the Amazon Basin if they are interested in the kind of peace and security such a community provides. People, when left to their own devices, will cause more good than harm, and the competition and cooperation of the free market alone can adequately take care of nearly everyone.

People, left to their own devices, created a country that made an awful lot of noise about freedom yet legalized and heartily maintained slavery. They falliciously decided that certain humans were animals and as such they were no more free than farm animals. Yet, they gave these "animals" voting "rights", but, gave none to their farm animals. The market did nothing to stop and everything to maintain this situation.

Order can come from below, from the invisible hand of the market and from the common interests of the people themselves. Order does not need to be imposed from above, by an uncontrollable, unaccountable, unnecessary authority. Trust the people to play by the rules, or make their own rules, and watch as they play the game of life.

I think this is the best written part of your conclusion. I find your article interesting. I find your conclusion questionable. I'm not sure what purpose it serves to compare your conclusion with Nathan's and what all this has to do with Hobbes. I'm not sure Hobbes, Nathan, or you have the same definition of government. Is this a discussion over "Leviathan"? Is Democracy "natural"? Are free market and government mutually exclusive? What did Hobbes say about the free market. What did Adam Smith say about government or "Leviathan"? I'm not sure, but, Adam Smith thought corporations dangerous and in need of restraint if not abolition. How free can a market be if you don't allow people to freely form "partnerships", even corporate ones, or sell their business on a continually peicemeal fashion. And, how exactly did he expect corporations to be restrained or prevented?

 

[Spallenzani]

I can't believe your going to genralize from this. We are talking about the real world, right? I mean, your observations of a computer game will lead you to conclude something about the "real world"?!?!?

Joe,

My article was in response to Nathan's article which already took for granted the claim that valid comparisons can be made between social interactions in a computer game and social interactions in real life. I also mentioned a number of other academics and writers who made this same analogy. I also included two introductory paragraphs warning about the dangers of making such comparisons. You are certainly free to reject their validity, but I don't think it is too outlandish to assume that people will respond to the same incentives in video games that they do in real life, and thus, that we may be extrapolate what we learn in one realm to another.

The N_AZI's apparently found government to be a usefull tool for their aggresions. Those who have no liking for the N_AZI's find it unavoidably necessary that the N_AZI's be made ineffective. The U.S. government eventually did so with relative effectiveness.

This is a pretty bad argument for the necessity of government. **** Germany was itself a government, and a democratically elected one at that. One way to make governments like **** Germany ineffective is to build even stronger governments and hope that their leaders are a bit less power hungry than the **** leaders. A better method, in my opinion, for making **** Germany ineffective is to weaken the power of all governments (and democracy, in turn) so that no such government can come to power in the first place.

People, left to their own devices, created a country that made an awful lot of noise about freedom yet legalized and heartily maintained slavery. They falliciously decided that certain humans were animals and as such they were no more free than farm animals. Yet, they gave these "animals" voting "rights", but, gave none to their farm animals. The market did nothing to stop and everything to maintain this situation.

Again, this is a pretty bad argument for the necessity or desirability of government. One of the factors which kept slavery in existence for so long was a federal law which forced non-slave states to return fugitive slaves who escaped from slave states. Without this government law, slavery would have been much more difficult to uphold, as the slaves would have an opportunity to escape and the costs of enforcement would be that much greater. And the market indeed did do much to stop this situation--not in the U.S., but in nearly every other country in the world which had maintained an institution of slavery. Notice that no other country devolved into a civil war to resolve this issue -- by the late 1800's, with technological advances in agriculture, slavery was already becoming non-profitable.

Interestingly, one of the reasons why economics is called the "dismal science" is not because it is boring or depressing (although some certainly see it this way), but as a result of a label placed upon it by a pro-slavery writer named Thomas Carlyle who used the term as an epithet in response to anti-slavery arguments made by one of the progenators of modern economics, utilitarianism, and classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill. Mill argued on economic grounds why slavery was inefficient and bad for aggregate social welfare.

I think this is the best written part of your conclusion. I find your article interesting. I find your conclusion questionable. I'm not sure what purpose it serves to compare your conclusion with Nathan's and what all this has to do with Hobbes. I'm not sure Hobbes, Nathan, or you have the same definition of government. Is this a discussion over "Leviathan"? Is Democracy "natural"? Are free market and government mutually exclusive? What did Hobbes say about the free market. What did Adam Smith say about government or "Leviathan"? I'm not sure, but, Adam Smith thought corporations dangerous and in need of restraint if not abolition. How free can a market be if you don't allow people to freely form "partnerships", even corporate ones, or sell their business on a continually peicemeal fashion. And, how exactly did he expect corporations to be restrained or prevented?

I brought up Hobbes because Nathan's description of the society of Diablo II sounded very much like Hobbes' description of the state of nature. My definition of government is synonomous with state, and can be expressed in the terms used by Max Weber: an organization which holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within its territory. I believe that a purely free market and government are mutually exclusive, although I did not explicitly argue for that position in my article. I don't think Hobbes had much to say about the free market as he was writing a century before Adam Smith and thus had no knowledge of modern economics. (The free market itself was just beginning to develop in Smith's lifetime.) Adam Smith supported a small government to provide public goods like police, military defense and a legal system. I'd be very curious to see any Smith quotes (in context) which show he believed that corporations are "dangerous and in need of restraint if not abolition." Large corporations as we understand them today did not exist in Smith's time.

 

[Shadoway]

There is a major logic flaw in the original writer's discussion about Leviathan. The author overlooked the impact of the real world to the D2 world. In other words, D2 players do not behave their worst is possiblely due to the fact they got too used to the ordered real world. Supposed the real world is a total anarchy also, then the D2 world would be closer to Nathan and Hobbes' description.