ungrok.org: virtual citizen unkaned

via scott - virtual citizen unkaned is an article about a umich prof who seems to be flabbergasted by obvious censorship on the part of a corporation whose game environment he was researching. They decided to pull the plug on him, he is upset. I am being fascetious, but I think it might be time for researchers to pull away from the "holy grail" of research and peak out into the "real world" they actually sometimes affect with their antics (i sure hope i do too, damnit).

funny how people forget... forget that the days of the mud-community experiments are gone... forget how the mud-democracy experiments did not work and what always survived was an authoritative regime... forget that this is no longer a bunch of people with nothing better to do but maintaining a server and putting everything they got into a community that makes them feel like they belong too... this is harsh, I know, but there is a grain of truth in it. I used to be one of those geeks running a mud...

MMORPGs are the biggest money-making machines around, games with budgets larger than Hollywood movies... Do we really think they are worried about free speach? Corporations are notorious for all kinds of censorship - some silly researcher said something they did not like, they decided it disrupts the community as a whole and makes it more difficult to make money, they shut him down. Surprise? I think not.

Much of the MMORPG research even in universities is sponsored by gaming companies in one way or the other. Their purpose? Find out how to make these communities more compelling, to more people in order to enlarge a repeat customer base. They dip into social network research, online community research, others. Any time words comes around about addiction, they quickly move to shut that avenue of research down and focus on something different. Sort of similar to tobacco companies in an eery sort of way (with almost as much money at stake, if not now, then in the near future).

Amusing how these tycoons are not the only ones. Social science researchers are fascinated by online communities and recommender systems that live on participant contribution. Somehow they are unwilling to accept that a lurker used to be commonly known as simply a reader, they perceive this behavior as negative (not surprising, reading IS dangerous after all, they prevented women and poor from doing it for centuries...) Online community research seeks to understand what makes an online community both from behavioral and design points of view. The functional purpose of the research - increasing contributions to one site or another through design changes (sometimes completely cosmetic) that would convey belonging, suggest importance and uniqueness, elicitate response and contribution... playing a man like a fiddle... utterly fascinating... and then it gets bought by coroporate research... ooh boy, them social scientists might have to join computer professionals for social responsibility and start taking some responsibility for their work.... hheheh yeah right...