Cairns Blog

State of Play Book Published

THE STATE OF PLAY

Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds

Edited by Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck

In the 1980s, people played Atari; in the ‘90s, it was PlayStation.  Although the game industry has driven the development of increasingly sophisticated online spaces, “virtual worlds” are about much more than play.  An estimated 15 million people spend time inside these synthetic, online universes and the number is growing.  They use them for everything from running global businesses to conducting distance education to socializing with friends from around the world.  The technology that began as a place for play is giving rise to diverse online societies.

As ever-increasing social activity takes place inside virtual worlds, however, the question of which laws should apply becomes urgent and obvious.  The second volume in NYU Press’s Ex Machina: Law, Technology and Society series, THE STATE OF PLAY: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds (November 28, 2006; $24.00 paper / 0-8147-9972-8; $70.00 cloth / 0-8147-9971-X), seeks to address the role of law in videogames and virtual worlds.

Jack Balkin and Beth Noveck bring together the leading voices on virtual worlds to address how the law will both promote as well as hinder the evolution of online life.  Should virtual worlds be fully integrated into our current, “real world” legal system or do virtual worlds need their own laws, if any at all?  How should online economies, currencies and trading systems be classified?  If these are global online spaces, whose rules should apply?  What kinds of torts and crimes will the law recognize in virtual worlds?  Do virtual world participants have rights?  Or are game operators entitled to censor speech and confiscate virtual property?

How do we distinguish among different kinds of virtual worlds, some of which are games and intended for fun and not commerce?  This path-breaking collection on law and virtual worlds explores how new online societies are challenging our traditional assumptions about the rule of law.

Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, where he directs Yale’s Information Society Project.  His books include What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said (2001) and What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said (2005), both published by NYU Press.

Beth Simone Noveck is Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School, where she directs the Institute for Information Law and Policy and the Democracy Design Workshop.  She is the creator of the State of Play conferences on law, games, and virtual worlds.

THE STATE OF PLAY
Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds
Edited by Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck
November 28, 2006
$24.00 paper / 0-8147-9972-8
$70.00 cloth / 0-8147-9971-X

For more information, please contact Sarah Rosenbloom
at 212-992-9991 or [email protected]

Power Laws Are Everywhere

From PhysicsWeb by way of Slashdot:

"If you think you're reading the news, be warned that this story -- and any other on the web -- will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted. That's the message from a team of statistical physicists who have analysed how people access information online. Albert-László Barabási of the University of Notre Dame in the US and colleagues in Hungary have calculated that the number of people who read news stories on the web decays with time in a power law, and not exponentially as commonly thought. Most news becomes old hat within a day and a half of being posted -- a finding that could help website designers or people trying to understand how information gets transferred in biological cells and social networks (Phys. Rev. E 73 066132)."

Would be interesting to know how they define news and whether this takes into account that people may not be reading the CNN or NYTimes site but getting the same story distributed to them via email.  Also - how do news consumption patterns compare to, say, watching AskANinja videos on YouTube or Lazy Sunday.

Crashing the Gate

The New York Review of Books had a front-page review by Bill McKibben of Jerome Armstrong and Markos Zuniga's (aka Daily Kos), Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics.

The review focuses more (as essays in the NYRB are wont to do) on the dailykos blog itself rather than on its creator's new book and tells the story of the blog's impact on democratic party politics, including the spectacular rise, fall and resurrection of Howard Dean. "The reason the Dean campaign collapsed in Iowa, the authors argue persuasively, was largely that the new kind of campaign he was assembling threatened so many powerful people, from rich donors used to the kingmaking power their money gave them to "media advisers" unhappy at seeing their conventional wisdom ignored."

The book, according to the review, concentrates on setting out new strategies for the Democratic Party, including "shifting power away from single-issue advocacy groups" and eschewing ideological consistency in favor of greater inclusion and collaboration. Not surprisingly, they want to do in professional political consultants and traditional advertising and polling techniques in favor of the use of new technologies and grass-roots strategies. And they want to help set forth the much-talked-about and ever-elusive new "message" for the Democratic Party.

The review, in my opinion, is right to place less emphasis on the authors' political prognosticating and punditry and more on the "Web community they've helped to inspire and build." The review is clearly so little about the book because the real story is the book's authors and the work they do everyday to mobilize, engage and draw in millions of readers. DailyKos "because of its particular architecture, and the open spirit of its founder, has become an experiment in Web-style democracy." The DailyKos blog has a series of technological features designed to let users, not only read, but write and participate and become influential voices in their own right whether through posting comments, writing diaries or recommending and voting up or down other people's postings.

"When we consider Kos's own Web site and its numerous links to other blogs, we see something like an expanding hive of communication, a collective intelligence. And the results can be impressive. A writer with the pen name (mouse name) Jerome a Paris, for instance, organized dozens of other Kossacks interested in energy policy to write an energy plan that I find far more comprehensive and throughtful than anything the think tanks have produced."

This is important, not only because such blogs are creating gathering-spaces where political interest is concentrated, making them useful tools for organizing party politics but they are helping to create activists who, themselves, make a difference, exert power and replace the need for parties altogether.

Benkler on Peer Production of Educational Materials

The Center for Open and Sustainable learning publishes Benkler whitepaper on "Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials." Available from Lulu Press for free download here.

How Great Is That?!

Wow! The Elements of Style is available and searchable on-line. This is not exactly a posting about e-democracy except insofar as fomenting revolution necessitates wielding the pen as well as the sword. My students are going to know this URL by heart.

Law, Pragmatism and Democracy

“With half the population having an IQ below 100…with the issues confronting modern government highly complex, with ordinary people having as little interest in complex policy issues as they have aptitude for them, and with the officials whom the people elect buffeted by interest groups and the pressures of competitive elections, it would be unrealistic to expect good ideas and sensible policies to emerge from the intellectual disorder that is democratic politics by a process aptly termed deliberative" (Richard Posner, Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, p. 107).

I took Posner to the Peloponnese where I had a chance to read his persuasive paean to representative democracy. Despite his pragmatic adherence to an "unillusioned understanding of human nature" and a belief in practical decisionmaking that takes greater account of the real-world ends than procedural means,

Commitment and Community

Picked up Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Harvard University Press, 1972), a short volume that examines the sociology of American utopian communities, which had their heydey in 1840-1860. Am interested in this earlier form of "virtual" community, where people came together to create an alternative social grouping to the mainstream and, through group life, to improve on the religious, familial, economic or social ordering of the larger society. There may be something to learn about what makes groups function by looking at the historical case of the utopian movement. My suspicion is bolstered by the fact that Moss Kanter went on after this, her first book, to write and teach about corporations at Harvard Business School.

The Wisdom of Crowds, Part II

Notes on The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (Doubleday, 2004)

There is a fascination at the turn of this century with the group as the integral unit of social life. This is in marked contrast to the biological positivism of the last fin-de-siecle when, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the individual was the central focus of everything from the Bildungsroman to political liberalism to the eugenics and the Social Darwinism in vogue at the time.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Just picked up James Surowiecki's new book, The Wisdom of Crowds (half-price at the Strand). Times review here. Amazon reviews here. Community Intelligence Blog has something about it here. Looks promising, relevant and like a fast read.