Tölvumál - 01.10.2012, Síða 27

27
a law or two and it is often very difficult to see the social benefits
that activists usually refer to as justification for their actions.
When users of a particular web service, be that a website, virtual
world or something else, organize protests and/or decide to take
actions that they know will get the attention of the company that
is running that service. Doing things that the users know causes a
high loads on the services, increased volume of messages being
sent to the operator of the service via their customer support (or
other venues) and even in some cases direct attacks (such as
denial of service or hacking).
Social media activism – using any of the social media tools (Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube, etc.) to bring attention to or discuss matters that the
users believe should be known. However, most of the content on
these sites is ‘noise’; people simply describing their day or bringing
attention to their hobbies – perhaps an unfair, but accurate description
of this would be to compare this to a ‘how was your day’ conversation
between yourself and your spouse. These social media sites have
garnered the attention they have because of how powerful they are in
terms of distributing content to many users. Instead of subscribing to
a radical newsletter that you receive via (snail)mail once a week, users
can now subscribe via various methods to such newsletters that are
delivered instantly and allow for an instant reaction on behalf of the
reader if he or she is so inclined.
It is necessary to mention the fact that it is not only individuals or
organizations that use activism on the Internet. We witnessed
large corporations such as Google, Wikimedia Foundation (that
runs, amongst other, the Wikipedia.org), Twitter and Mozilla
Foundation (the makers of the Firefox browser) altering their
websites in order to protest the SOPA and PIPA law proposals [4].
This move was considered by many politicians a hostile action
taken by these corporations, which means that in part this piece
of activism did at least fulfill the goal of bringing attention to the
subject matter. I will not offer any moral judgments about these
actions, but when such powerful entities start to move outside the
‘accepted’ (by the politicians) lobbyist position and start to employ
methods used by activists, they could easily be described as
being too forceful.
tHe inteRnet as an instRument FoR
CommuniCations
There have been claims made that the Arab Spring wouldn’t have
happened if it wasn’t for the social media [5]. I will not offer any
judgment on that but it is clear that the Internet allows for super-
fast communications, organization and coordination. It is clear
that activists need to have the flexibility to do those things in a fast
and a reliable manner and the Internet offers that in abundance. It
also allows for secure communications that can be very difficult to
intercept and/or decode – a very important thing if you wish to do
something that is illegal.
What makes the Internet such a powerful tool? In terms of
communications the most powerful characteristic is the
‘redundancy’ of the Internet, meaning that if one path is blocked
(or monitored) it is usually relatively easy to simply use another
path. The best example of this is the censorship practiced in the
People’s Republic of China (The Golden Shield project [6]) and
how that is being circumvented by the users on a daily basis.
eve online and pRotests
Leading up to June 2011 CCP had been designing and developing
a full-body avatar addition to EVE Online, where previously players
had only seen the spaceship they were flying at any given moment.
Furthermore a micro-transaction business model was implemented
alongside the full-body avatars, allowing players to buy, for real
money, clothes for their characters – a purely cosmetic addition
with no ingame advantage. As such, this addition was anticipated
even though many from the EVE Online community had doubts
about putting resources into adding ‘dollies’ into a spaceship
game. Once the expansion, named EVE Online: Incarna, went live
peoples’ doubts escalated to hostility.
Players took up protests to have CCP change the course they were
headed; away from micro-transactions and away from developing
fully-body avatars at the expense of the space part of the game.
When viewed objectively these concerns were fully justified – EVE
Online has always been a subscription based game where the
mantra was ‘all or nothing’, either the user had access to all aspects
of the game or none of it. Adding micro-transactions, i.e. charging
subscribers specifically for cosmetic things, was viewed as a money
grabbing move on CCP’s behalf. Secondly, the space part of the
game had suffered because the avatar development – less content
had been introduced and less iteration on existing systems had
been done in the time leading up to EVE Online: Incarna.
The protest can be described as being twofold. One was a
drastically increased activity on the official EVE forums (from 5000-
8000 posts per day to 20.000 – 28.000 posts per day). The other
was protests within the virtual world of EVE where players gathered
in large numbers (up to 3000 people at the same location, in
several locations) with the intent of overloading the servers running
EVE and thus causing inconvenience for the players who were just
going about their business and also catching the attention of CCP,
as unresponsive servers are bane of online services. Fortunately
EVE Online is designed specifically to handle large amounts of
players in the same locations so the servers in question did not go
offline, but the load was very noticeable.
To make a long story short this activism, as it was performed by
the EVE players, worked. After a few weeks of pressure CCP saw
the error and changed its heading. The commitment to strengthen
the game-systems already present in EVE Online and to not
develop full-body avatars at the expense of the space part of the
game was made. Furthermore, while the micro-transaction system
that was introduced with EVE Online: Incarna is still there, all
further development was slowed down and any additions to that
will be done in a very careful manner.
As a conclusion, this story of activism in EVE Online is a very good
example of how users can get a company to change its business
plan. The actions taken by the users were not done for malicious
reasons but because of concerns that the virtual world they love
was being altered beyond what they were comfortable with. The
methods used, increased communications and intentionally
causing load on the servers, could be described as being as
benign as activism can be – the intention was to catch the
attention of the maker of the virtual world in order to save it, not to
try and ruin it.
ReFeRenCes
[1] Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activism accessed May 14, 2012
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience accessed August
31, 2012
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA
accessed September 3, 2012.
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Effect_of_Social_Media_
on_the_Arab_Spring accessed September 4, 2012.
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield accessed September 4,
2012.