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\"engrossing and engaging.\" Lots of people like to play the democracy game, whether by voting every four years or by moving to K Street and setting up a lobbying operation.

But video games aren\'t quite the same thing. Gameplay conventions like \"grinding\" (repeating a task), \"leveling up\" (attaining a higher level of accomplishment), \"questing\" and so on are functions of artificial scarcity. The difference between a character with 10,000,000 gold pieces and a giant, rare, terrifying crossbow and a newbie player is which pointers are associated with each character\'s database entry. If the elected representatives direct that every player should have the shiniest armor, best space-ships, and largest bank-balances possible (this sounds like a pretty good election platform to me!), then what\'s left to do?

Oh sure, in Second Life they have an interesting crafting economy based on creating and exchanging virtual objects. But these objects are *also* artificially scarce -- that is, the ability of these objects to propagate freely throughout the world is limited only by the software that supports them. It\'s basically the same economics of the music industry, but applied to every field of human endeavor in the entire (virtual) world.

Fun matters. Real world currencies rise and fall based, in part, by the economic might of the nations that issue them. Virtual world currencies are more strongly tied to whether there\'s any reason to spend the virtual currency on the objects that are denominated in it. 10,000 EverQuest golds might trade for $100 on a day when that same sum will buy you a magic EQ sword that enables you to play alongside the most interesting people online, running the most fun missions online. But if all those players out-migrate to World of Warcraft, and word gets around that Warlord\'s Command is way more fun than anything in poor old creaky EverQuest, your EverQuest gold turns into Weimar Deutschemarks, a devalued currency that you can\'t even give away.

This is where the plausibility of my democratic, co-operative, open source virtual world starts to break down. Elected governments can field armies, run schools, provide health care (I\'m a Canadian), and bring acid lakes back to health. But I\'ve never done anything run by a government agency that was a lot of *fun*. It\'s my sneaking suspicion that the only people who\'d enjoy playing World of Democracycraft would be the people running for office there. The players would soon find themselves playing IRSQuest, Second Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Life, and Caves of 27 Stroke B.

Maybe I\'m wrong. Maybe customership is enough of a rock to build a platform of sustainable industry upon. It\'s not like entrepreneurs in Dubai have a lot of recourse if they get on the wrong side of the Emir; or like Singaporeans get to appeal the decisions of President Nathan, and there\'s plenty of industry there.

And hell, maybe bureaucracies have hidden reserves of fun that have been lurking there, waiting for the chance to bust out and surprise us all.

I sure hope so. These online worlds are endlessly diverting places. It\'d be a shame if it turned out that cyberspace was a dictatorship -- benevolent or otherwise. 

$$$$

Snitchtown

(Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007)

The 12-story Hotel Torni was the tallest building in central Helsinki during the Soviet occupation of Finland, making it a natural choice to serve as KGB headquarters. Today, it bears a plaque testifying to its checkered past, and also noting the curious fact that the Finns pulled 40 kilometers of wiretap cable out of the walls after the KGB left. The wire was solid evidence of each operative\'s mistrustful surveillance of his fellow agents.

The East German Stasi also engaged in rampant surveillance, using a network of snitches to assemble secret files on every resident of East Berlin. They knew who was telling subversive jokes--but missed the fact
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