Rule-Creating Activity of EVE Online Players
Abstract
Massive multiplayer online games are, in principle, constantly filled with new content created by their players. One type of contribution is the creation of complex normative orders which purpose is to coordinate the actions of in-game, player-made organizations, sometimes consisting of even a few thousand players. The goal of this paper is to show that MMO games have an extraordinary ability to facilitate the creation of complex social normative orders that resemble real-world legal orders in many aspects. The central claim of the paper is that MMO communities can create complex normative orders that are close to achieving the circumstances of legality set in Shapiro’s planning theory of law situations so complex, contentious, or arbitrary that only the law can effectively solve them. Data used for the analysis were taken from public sources of EVE University, a corporation within EVE Online, a science fiction MMOG that stands out due to three factors: its enormous scale and open worldness, giving players many opportunities for social interactions; an unregulated free market, on which most of the goods available in the game are produced, and ruthless ‘piratical’ gameplay that puts pressure on players, motivating them to find new strategies to achieve success. EVE University, as an organization that focuses on educating new players about how to manage the different elements of the game, faces various complex, contentious, or arbitrary situations that can only be solved by applying an advanced set of plans. Among those plans, it is possible to identify those described by Shapiro as being used to deal with the most challenging situations. The EVE University rules constitute a massively shared plan with a moral objective, are institutional, and have their own officials. However, there are still some serious doubts as to whether it is compulsory and self-certifying in terms of planning theory of law.