How Are We Governed? The Rise of Computer Game Architecture and the Increasing Irrelevance of Rules and Conventions

Thomas Malaby

Wed., June 09, 2:00–3:00, Beefeater

Second Life (SL hereafter) has demonstrated a substantial capacity for creating opportunities for learning, and saw a great amount of growth in both educational use and sociality more generally since its appearance in 2003. That is, SL’s users have accumulated both social capital within the world through the reciprocal cultivation of social ties, and cultural capital in the form of competencies as a result of learning within the world, whether formally or informally.

Such success makes it perhaps too easy to assume that SL’s design — its architecture — presupposed such use and supported it in a thoroughgoing manner. Remarkably, however, the rise of social and cultural capital within SL has happened in many respects despite SL’s architecture. In this presentation I suggest that SL was built in fundamental ways on an anti-social imagining of the human, one grounded in a “technoliberal” sensibility. On this view, human beings are resolutely individuals, at root motivated by the challenge to act within and gain mastery of a complex system (not coincidentally, this is also a construction of a specific kind of gamer). The imagined user of SL was in many respects not supposed to be social, and this has a number of important implications for governance in games on and offline. To what extent do we recognize architecture itself, with such assumptions so easily built into it, as a form of governance? Do we instead see rule-based governance (such as legal systems) as the essential mode of governance, such that all other kinds of constraint are recognized only to the extent that they are rule-like? In what ways may the open-endedness of games lead us to assume they grant more freedom than they do?

To explore these issues I begin by tracing the early conceptual history of SL and how it was ideologically grounded in the technoliberal ideology of Silicon Valley and practically grounded in the techniques of game design. I then discuss how these assumptions found their way into SL’s architecture. I go on to suggest that while we intently study the distinctive trees of user experience within these domains we may thereby miss how the forest of each is governed implicitly, through architecture, to support some kinds of human activity, including some kinds of learning, and not others.