Game Governance - A Summary of Purpose and Structures
Governance structures used in previous games and their purposes
If you haven’t yet, check out the primer to this series:
My initial plans were to write a series of posts on the history of player-facing feedback aggregation and filtering structures, tracing their lineage from letters to Richard Garriott on the Ultima series, BBS/Usenet forums for Doom, to player polling on Old School Runescape. Only after the series was I going to provide a full summary.
But considering that there are many people who’re not as interested in the stories and want to read about implementable structures, pitfalls, and other considerations in-game governance, I decided to write the summary upfront where I hope to also pre-emptively address criticism and concerns about “institutionalizing noise”.
I based a lot of this on Lehdonvirta and Castronova’s “Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis”, so if you haven’t read that, check out what is the most prescient piece of writing on crypto-game economies and governance from 2002 (!!!!!!???).
For those who want to learn more about game governance, I would generally suggest Castronova, Koster, and Dibbell’s work. A thread on good reads here:
Governance Objectives in Games
Governance as content → retention
Just as how social, and market elements serve as retention mechanisms and core content for certain player types, governance participation, politics can serve as core content for a new cohort of players. High agency/ownership, infinite time to mastery for politics and organization, and shared purpose through political factions retain long-tail interest in the game over time.
There is already a marginally relevant degree of validation that this is something players want. See OSRS poling, Top 5 Runescape Riots, Forum activity, CSM voter participation…etc.
There is already thinking that meta governance systems improve retention and serve as endgame content in a contrast to the content model:
Governance → monetization
I hypothesize that creating a degree of trust among users and if relevant, those building on your game (mods, player creations…etc), via governance significantly reduces platform risk and allows players and creators to invest more resources into your game.
Governance → ethos
Decentralization aligns with the ethos of web3. Allowing creators and players to minimize platform risk is “can’t do evil”.
Structures summarized
Iterative Communication
Dev notes, journals, blog posts about upcoming updates throughout the ideation process. Observe player input, excitement, suggestions, and iterate based on filtering, perception of the efficacy of those solutions.
Forums
Whether on native forum or on Reddit/elsewhere, perform iterative communication on these forums but also periodically read through the most popular, emergent posts
Can be extremely noisy and can over-represent voices of vocal minorities at the expense of the larger general player base
Councils
Create a criteria with which to pick a council - this can be voted on by the players (Eve CSM), an objective criteria of participation (Albion Roundtable), picked by the core team (WoW Community Council)
See Castronova’s downsides and upsides of the council system below.
Direct Voting
All or select proposals in designated areas arrive at the polls after going through iteration, forums…etc. Players vote on which are then implemented in the game. Players can originate proposals as well but this is a degree of freedom up to the game/community.
See OSRS polling.
Possible Systems in the Future
Weighed voting, Contribution/Participation based Voting
Certain players, demographics can have boosted voting power in direct voting or council voting. This can be those who’ve created UGC, reached certain in-game milestones…etc. In some fields it’s likely important to overweigh certain opinions over others.
The key difficulty is to design a mapping system of the best demographic to govern a surface area without governance capture over time. This is likely an extremely hard problem.
Modding and Forkability
Given enough time all loved games get their codebase reverse engineered. Private servers and modded forks proliferate.
If you’re a baselayer game that provides assets and monetizes over controlling liquidity or key infrastructure (Dex, creator tools, staking rewards..etc) then being open source provides players “ease of exit” from game updates that they disagree while still contributing to monetization. Private server players will still be incentivized to use your core infrastructure and assets. See WoW private servers.
Hence there’s a case for being open source as a web3 game as a means of governance. This is uniquely enabled by web3 game monetization and an aspect I am very excited about.
For as long as the game state is non-opensource/on-chain developers still have to act as “gods” in deciding what and how to implement game-state changes and are only bound by social contract.
Noise?
A lot of player feedback is noise from minority special interest groups that will end up harming the core player base ie) hardcore players who want advanced PVP whereas the majority of the player base is casual.
A weak attempt at aggregation and filtering will likely focus group the game to death - minor improvements that satisfy fringe groups that will, in the long run, lose the core player base. See
Castronova and Lehdonvitra have a couple of prescriptions to address these concerns.
Listen to the whole potential user base - or the target group
Listen to existing users but overweight the kinds of users that the develop wants to attract
Use designer intuition which largely depends on how in-tune they are with the target group - FromSoftware move.
Test new policy decisions in simulated instances and gather user satisfaction data, both qualitative (satisfaction, surveys) and qualitative (retention rates, number of interactions delta…etc). Play-test groups to help with AB testing.
Caveat
These observations arise from my time reading, researching, playing, and watching for the purpose of aggregating good information on this subject. I myself have never worked on a title and therefore will miss a ton of things. If there’s something you think I ought to learn, let me know at any time, and would love to chat.
