by Jia Ji
I recently began working at eGenesis, the developers of "A Tale in the Desert" (www.atitd.com), a massively multiplayer online game set in ancient Egypt that just went live about four months ago. It's a small company with a unique product, a MMPOG with no combat but an amazingly complex socioeconomic and legal system. Usually, I describe our game as a historical simulation, a mixture of the Sims and Civilization with real people thrown in to make it interesting.

In ATITD, one of the main goals is to overcome complex challenges called "the tests." We activated one of the tests last week, "The Test of the Demi-Pharaoh." At its core, the test is simple: the people of Egypt elect one player to be the Demi-Pharaoh (DP). The DP's sole impressive, but horrible, power is the ability to permanently exile up to seven player characters (but not accounts) from Egypt. It's really a test of the playerbase's ability to identify leaders who can resist the abuse of power. This is one of the tests in the discipline of leadership - there are also tests in six other disciplines: art, the human body, conflict, worship, architecture, and thought.

Our DP election system is quite similar to how leaders get elected in real life . Everyone who has passed the initiation test of Leadership (which requires one to get twenty signatures on a petition saying that one is fit to participate in the governing of Egypt), is entered into a game-worldwide election. For the first round, one is randomly placed into a group of seven other players. A new chat channel is created in game for your group and you have three real life days to decide who will advance to the next round of voting. Everyone has one vote and can vote for anyone (including themselves) and switch their vote at any time. Only one person out of every group can advance. If there is a tie, no one advances from that group. This process continues until there is only one group of seven left and the final round of voting starts, which lasts a week. In this final round, every subscribed player of the game gets one vote for who will become the true DP. This voting process occurs about once a month, meaning only around seven people will ever become DP before this telling of the game ends.

Now just like real world politics, getting elected isn't as easy as it sounds. In addition to the players' natural tendency to fight amongst themselves for influence and prestige, we have also given the Demi-Pharaoh the gameworld equivalent of a nuclear bomb. When a player's character is exiled, they lose all their possessions, buildings, guild affiliations, skills, statistics, etc…basically resetting a character back to zero. Though being exiled does not ban your game account, it is quite likely that if your character was exiled, you would quit the game since we only allow one character per game account. You would basically lose all the progress you've made in the game so far and have to begin entirely anew, which is very discouraging to say the least. Not surprisingly, some players are against the whole idea of the DP ever using the exile power. Some players have theorized that if the DP ever did use the power to exile an enemy, it would be a pyrrhic victory at best since doing so would immediately result in not only in revenge from that enemy's allies but also the general animosity of a playerbase fearful of exile. Thus, it would seem that brinksmanship would be the best strategy, to threaten one's enemies with exile but never quite actually do so.

Now that I've explained the theoretical aspects of the test, we can move on to the practical, what happened when we tried to implement the test during this last week. First of all, before the test even began, an intense debate began over the status of Game Masters (GMs) in the election process. The developers felt that GMs should not participate in the test since they would have an unfair advantage. Since the test is basically about who do you trust with an immense terrible power, GMs would likely become the default voting choice of the general public through their association as informal eGenesis game staff. Indeed, we already give GMs a lot of power, such as the ability to warp anywhere in the game, move buildings, and summon players. Thus if we, the game developers, already trust the GMs with so much power already, it seems logical that players would be quite willing to trust them with the position of DP. So that's why we asked the GMs to not participate in the test since they would have an unfair advantage due to their infamy and association with the administration of the game.

Though the majority of the GMs agreed with us, a few raised objections. The Test of the Demi-Pharaoh is well-known in the game as possibly the hardest, most challenging test of the game. Many players consider passing the test as the ultimate achievement of the game. Understandably, a few of the GMs were disappointed when we informed them that they could not participate. Additionally, many of our GMs were former testers of our game who had participated in DP elections during previous betas and had expected to once again when the game went live. Andrew Tepper, our lead developer, quickly made time in his schedule to have a long talk with the GMs about our reasoning and work out a compromise. Eventually, using his in game character, Pharaoh, he called an ingame Egypt-wide poll on whether GMs should be allowed to run for DP or not. After intense deliberation, a compromise was decided where GMs would not be allowed to run but they would be immune from the DP's exile power. However, by this time, the debate had already generated much discussion in the forums that even after this compromise was agreed upon, some players brought up the issue again through our ingame legal system. Within a day, one player had drafted up a new law called "GMs should be able to run for DP" and submitted it to the voting booths. Interestingly enough, this law failed by a sizable majority of votes, showing that players were perhaps annoyed that this issue was being brought up again after they considered it resolved.

An interesting side consequence of these debates is that players have started proposing new laws regarding the legal status of GMs ingame. Since our game attempts to simulate real life social interactions as accurately as possible, there are no "anti-griefing" policies. Players are free to interact with other players in whatever fashion they wish, whether they be a saint or a misanthrope. Thus, unlike others games, GMs are not obligated to respond to player complaints about other players who are behaving like "asshats." Instead, our ingame legal system is supposed to allow players to deal with such undesirable elements of society. Examples of such laws proposed by players are "Removal of Zombie's Last Message" which erased a rather rude word spelled out with chests constructed by a juvenile player and the "Departed Person Building Reclamation Act" which allows the salvage of abandoned buildings or those created by people "banished" from Egypt. Additionally, some clever players have formed a "Mediators Guild" which provides neutral third-party arbitration services to other players involved in a dispute.

Currently, we are now almost into the final round of DP elections. In days since the Test of the Demi-Pharaoh started, several interesting campaign strategies have emerged. Some players are bribing other players for their votes with ingame resources or favors. Others are forming political parties to used their combined voting power to sway the election process. One player even made an elaborate campaign poster which he posted on the forums to garner votes. Even real campaign platforms are starting to emerge. Several candidates favor establishing an ingame centralized government through the position of DP in order to coordinate player actions to advance Egypt as a whole. We even have the equivalent of a "Green Party" which believes that mining, heavy industrial production, and other activities that have a detrimental effect on the gameworld's environment should be limited and regulated.

While the political dealings and debates in ATITD are a far cry from the complexities of real life government, it is remarkable how quickly the players developed a dynamic system of structured interactions. In fact, one of the latest development is a player-run betting pool on who will advance in each round of voting and who will eventually become the true DP. Though some would argue that gambling cheapens the whole event, we prefer to let the players themselves decide which direction the game will take. Rather than step in and preach morals by setting arbitrary rules, we prefer to let the players police themselves.