Nomic World: By the players, for the players
http://www.shirky.com/writings/nomic.html

[This is an edited version of the talk I gave last fall at the <a
href="http://www.nyls.edu/pages/777.asp">State of Play</a> conference.]

I'm sort of odd-man-out in a Games and Law conference, in that my primary area of inquiry isn't games but social software. Not only am I not a lawyer, I don't even spend most of my time thinking about game problems. I spend my time thinking about software that supports group interaction across a fairly wide range of social patterns. 

So, instead of working from case law out, which has been a theme here (and here's where I insert the "I am not a lawyer" disclaimer) I'm going to propose a thought experiment looking from the outside in.  And I want to pick up on something that Julian [Dibbell] said earlier about game worlds: 'users are the state.' The thought experiment I want to propose is to agree with that sentiment, and to ask "How far can we go in that direction?"

Instead of looking for the places where game users are currently suing or fighting one another, forcing the owners of various virtual worlds to deal with these things one crisis at a time, I want to ask the question "What would happen if we wanted to build a world where we maximized the amount of user control? What would that look like?"

I'm going to make that argument in three pieces. First, I'm going to do a little background on group structure and the tension between the individual and the group. Then I want to contrast briefly governance in real and virtual worlds. Finally I want to propose a thought experiment on placing control of online spaces in the hands of the users.