“Finally, we have come to believe that the most significant challenge for cyberspace developers is to come to grips with the problems of world creation and management. While we have only made the first inroads onto these problems, a few things have become clear. The most important of these is that managing a cyberspace world is not like managing the world inside a single-user application or even a conventional online service. Instead, it is more like governing an actual nation. Cyberspace architects will benefit from study of the principles of sociology and economics as much as from the principles of computer science. We advocate an agoric, evolutionary approach to world building rather than a centralized, socialistic one.“

--“The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat”, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer

Habitat was a computer game. It was also a virtual world. Anyone interested in virtual worlds should read this seminal essay. Even though Habitat was one of the earliest “massively multiplayer” game worlds, the lessons Morningstar and Farmer relate are still completely relevant today.

What strikes me about this quote, and why I’ve pulled it out of the dozens of great insights in this essay, is the basic idea that running a virtual world is not like running a game. Running a virtual world is like running, as they say, “an actual nation.”

You could take this to mean that politics is a game. But I see it as something else. Politics is most certainly not a game—at least not a game in the sense that we mean when we want to talk about videogames.

So, what governs the life of a MMORPG? Is it game rules—ludology—or is it political science?

Here is a very simple answer: You can play games in a virtual world, but virtual worlds are not games.

From that point of view, I see something interesting. There has been much discussion on the “ludology versus narratology” debate, about whether games are best considered theoretically as just games or as a type or literature or both. But in the context of the Farmer and Morningstar quote, the issue isn’t ludology versus narratology, it’s ludology versus society. Literature is just an aspect of society. Or, put it this way:

There are only two primary computer-based entertainment genre’s—games and computer-mediated life. Confusion occurs when we try to examine games as life or life as a game.