Play’s Republic

This past weekend, Prof. Ted Castronova hosted the Second Ludium, this one on “videogames and public policy.” It was an extraordinarily interesting experience for various reasons, not the least of which was the outcome: A Synthetic Worlds Initiative-sponsored Declaration of Virtual Worlds Policy, comprising 10 planks relating to the future of virtual space. It is, in all senses of the word, a political document.

In addition to the inimitable Prof. Castronova, there were all sorts of extraordinary persons in attendance, including Randy Farmer (now of Yahoo!, but a pioneer in multi-user graphical games), Richard Bartle (co-author of the first MUD), Mia Consalvo (author of a new MIT text on Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames), Sarah Robbins (the ubiquitous Intellagirl), and so on. For the most part, I kept my mouth shut and listened, which seems, at least, not to have caused any harm: Prof. Thomas Malaby, the amiable and erudite UW-M anthropologist with whom I was initially teamed, went on to be elected spokesperson for the Virtual Worlds Policy. Prof. Malaby is currently at work on an ethnography of Linden Lab, and is interested in issues of online governance; his first book was on gambling and contingency in ancient Greece (by now, if you were in CCTP-688 last semester, as I rambled on interminably about Plato and Heraclitus, Ajax and Achilles, Homer and Odysseus, agon and agora, you understand why I was so pleased to be part of his little retinue). He blogs for TerraNova, and is a voice from which you’ll be hearing more in the future.

I’ve written several pages of thoughts on the experience, which (if I can get through a particularly sticky part of my dissertation) I’ll share with you presently. In the end, though, it was a thoroughly enlightening, satisfying experience.