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are some examples of the difference between being a citizen and a customer:

In January, 2006 a World of Warcraft moderator shut down an advertisement for a \"GBLT-friendly\" guild. This was a virtual club that players could join, whose mission was to be \"friendly\" to \"Gay/Bi/Lesbian/Transgendered\" players. The WoW moderator -- and Blizzard management -- cited a bizarre reason for the shut-down:

\"While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that the advertisement of a \'GLBT friendly\' guild is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you will look at our policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for violating the Sexual Orientation Harassment Policy is to \'be temporarily suspended from the game.\' However, as there was clearly no malicious intent on your part, this penalty was reduced to a warning.\"

Sara Andrews, the guild\'s creator, made a stink and embarrassed Blizzard (the game\'s parent company) into reversing the decision.

In 2004, a player in the MMO EVE Online declared that the game\'s creators had stacked the deck against him, called EVE, \"a poorly designed game which rewards the greedy and violent, and punishes the hardworking and honest.\" He was upset over a change in the game dynamics which made it easier to play a pirate and harder to play a merchant.

The player, \"Dentara Rask,\" wrote those words in the preamble to a tell-all memoir detailing an elaborate Ponzi scheme that he and an accomplice had perpetrated in EVE. The two of them had bilked EVE\'s merchants out of a substantial fraction of the game\'s total GDP and then resigned their accounts. The objective was to punish the game\'s owners for their gameplay decisions by crashing the game\'s economy.

In both of these instances, players -- residents of virtual worlds -- resolved their conflicts with game management through customer activism. That works in the real world, too, but when it fails, we have the rule of law. We can sue. We can elect new leaders. When all else fails, we can withdraw all our money from the bank, sell our houses, and move to a different country.

But in virtual worlds, these recourses are off-limits. Virtual worlds can and do freeze players\' wealth for \"cheating\" (amassing gold by exploiting loopholes in the system), for participating in real-world gold-for-cash exchanges (eBay recently put an end to this practice on its service), or for violating some other rule. The rules of virtual worlds are embodied in EULAs, not Constitutions, and are always \"subject to change without notice.\"

So what does it mean to be \"rich\" in Second Life? Sure, you can have a thriving virtual penis business in game, one that returns a healthy sum of cash every month. You can even protect your profits by regularly converting them to real money. But if you lose an argument with Second Life\'s parent company, your business vanishes. In other worlds, the only stable in-game wealth is the wealth you take out of the game. Your virtual capital investments are totally contingent. Piss off the wrong exec at Linden Labs, Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, or Sularke and your little in-world business could disappear for good.

Well, what of it? Why not just create a \"democratic\" game that has a constitution, full citizenship for players, and all the prerequisites for stable wealth? Such a game would be open source (so that other, interoperable \"nations\" could be established for you to emigrate to if you don\'t like the will of the majority in one game-world), and run by elected representatives who would instruct the administrators and programmers as to how to run the virtual world. In the real world, the TSA sets the rules for aviation -- in a virtual world, the equivalent agency would determine the physics of flight.

The question is, would this game be any *fun*? Well, democracy itself is pretty fun -- where \"fun\" means
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