Digital Dystopia: Player Control and Strategic Innovation

Introduction Around New Year 2004, a quiet year after the official launch, The Sims Online hit the global headlines. Disappointingly, the topic was not a celebration of how this " new virtual frontier, " this " daring collective social experiment, " had succeeded in bringing " our divided nation " together, as Time magazine had blithely prophesied [1]. Instead, the media reported that the online game had turned into a Biblical den of iniquity, a Sin City, a virtual Gomorrah – and that the whistleblower who bore witness to this had his account terminated [2,3,4,5]. Rivaling mafia organizations were practicing extortion and intimidation, pimps running brothels where underage girls provided sex for money, and con artists scamming newbies out of their start capital. Maxis, the company that designed and operated the game, maintained a relaxed laissez-fair policy of light and somewhat haphazard intervention. The first mafias and in-game brothels had been established already in the early days of beta-testing; they continued to operate unchecked. Pretend crime paid well and recruitment was good, leading to a rapidly mutating series of inventive scams targeting the inexperienced and the unwary. It wasn't meant to be like this. Gordon Walton, one of the chief designers, had spoken in glowing terms of the game's potential to provide opportunities for better relations between Steen, Davies, Tynes, & Greenfield – Digital Dystopia-2 of 40 people. While "all of our mass media positions us to believe our neighbors are psychopaths, cheating husbands, and just bad people," The Sims Online would short circuit our distrustful negative stereotypes [6]. Echoing McKenna & Bargh [7], who had found that relationships initiated online benefited from transcending the limitations of spatial proximity and physical appearance, leaving more room for a creative identity construction that might act as a guide to a real self, Walton envisioned a game where people would "interact with others anonymously, have physical distance, and not be judged on your outward appearance. You interact with people on a pure intellectual and emotional level, devoid of all those filters." If his team did their job right, The Sims Online would feel like Disneyland [6]. Careful steps were taken to forestall " griefers " , gamers who derive enjoyment from antisocial behavior. In line with the vision of a privately run amusement park as the contemporary image of the good society, The Sims Online would have no common areas or public property …