Happiness is Mandatory: Emergent Ethics in Massive Online Environments

Erin Hoffman

Wed., June 10, 3:30–4:30, Browsing Library (2nd floor, West Central)

The massive online environment provides a format for variants of play and social behavior not seen in any other game system. With social and economic patterns that more closely mimic real-life societies, governments, and economies, these environments, defined by average concurrent use of 1000 players or above, represent a new frontier for the study of all kinds of human behavior, but most notably economic, social, and ethical varieties.

This presentation will continue the study of massive environments and how we might expect their social strata and behavior models to change in the future. In its current overall youthful state, the online world has not yet developed its own emergent ideas, ethics, or structures, though the seeds for such development seem present.

Specifically, “Happiness is Mandatory” focuses on a pattern of emergent ethical behavior that manifested in the online world GoPets, a virtual pet-focused environment with over 1.2 million registered players worldwide. Still currently growing at a rate of approximately 10,000 users per month, GoPets is a stable online world first opened in 2004. In an environment developed to be as open and boundary-free as possible, a surprisingly rigid ethical structure emerged from the players who came to call the online community their own. Without imposing rules of behavior from the outset beyond those legally required by US law, the operators, of which the presenter was one, observed the fast adaptation of a series of community “rules” desired and expressed by democratic vote among the player community.

Many other online worlds historically have not developed such stringent behavioral guidelines voluntarily, being generally more libertarian and rules-averse, as witnessed in the notable Mr. Bungle incident that galvanized and forever changed the field of online ethics. This presentation will explore the degree to which the physical “laws” of the online universe — the rules and game mechanics of the online environment itself — seem to give rise to corresponding predictable community climates. This connection between world design and social community design is intended to shed light on patterns in human behavior and how game play-oriented social incentivization structures can actually gently modify human ethical behavior.