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STOP BUILDING BEAUTIFUL STATIC WORLDS (a rant from #LostLevels 2019)
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STOP BUILDING BEAUTIFUL STATIC WORLDS | |
have you ever been in a nominally communal space | |
patrolled by corporate security guards | |
who'll yell at you if you dare to customize the space in any way | |
or do anything that isn't officially sanctioned by the company in charge of the space? | |
well I was thinking about shopping malls but ok | |
but no seriously | |
I think we've currently got a huge problem with third places in general | |
who here has heard of third places before? | |
basically they're sort of informal community meeting places separate from both the home and the workplace | |
and we have fewer and fewer of them, especially spaces that are open to all | |
and even fewer that the community is allowed to modify to suit its own needs! | |
third places are vital to community health | |
and they NEED TO BE OWNED BY THE COMMUNITY | |
otherwise they'll remain permanently inhumane, because people aren't free to use them in the ways they need to | |
and you'll get awful fragmentation all throughout your society | |
Facebook and twitter are trying to be third places | |
but they are the shopping malls of social media | |
you are not allowed to take action to customize or improve them at a structural level | |
they're owned by mega corporations that decide what you need FOR YOU, without ASKING YOU | |
and games have the potential to be an alternative to that! | |
so games - social games like minecraft and fortnite - are becoming our NEW DIGITAL THIRD PLACES | |
they are the community gathering spaces for a whole generation of kids who are growing up online | |
and critically, these games work as third places in part because they enable players to change their environment! | |
right now the level of customization is more superficial than it could be | |
and the rules are still set from the top down by the corporations that own the game platforms | |
but imagine a digital social game where players can script simple behaviors in-game | |
can create their own mods in-game | |
where there's some sort of community governance structure in place for each server, so the inhabitants of that server can customize the space however they see fit | |
digital third places that are OWNED BY THE COMMUNITY | |
and that THE COMMUNITY IS ALLOWED TO IMPROVE | |
people are DESPERATE for communal spaces that they're actually allowed to improve | |
and as game designers, we're uniquely well equipped to give them these spaces, at least in the digital realm | |
we've done this before, with MUDs! | |
but no one talks about that anymore! | |
and the ideas are worth revisiting, maybe more so now than ever! | |
and so I implore you | |
STOP BUILDING BEAUTIFUL STATIC WORLDS | |
and start building CONSTRUCTION TOOLS FOR DIGITAL COMMUNITY GARDENS | |
thank you! |
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