The Metaverse Republic is a new site that states its purpose clearly:
“The Metaverse Republic, currently work in progress, will be a legal system for Second Life, with real powers of enforcement originating in user-created tools, and a democratic parliament.
There are many disputes and potential disputes in Second Life that could benefit from formal resolution: disputes about broken agreements, land use, alleged griefing, extortion, etc. The Metaverse Republic aims to provide an effective and fair system for resolving such disputes.”
That’s one hell of a brief and it’s not an initiative likely to receive widespread support for two reason. First, there’ll be automatic scepticism toward one model of goverment put forward by one group. Secondly, apathy rules – a resounding majority of people in the real world find politics a boring, meaningless pastime with no direct relevance to their daily lives. This is unlikely to be any different in the virtual world context – our own reader survey conducted last year showed just that, a real lack of interest in the politics stories we run.
That said, such an experiment doesn’t deserve outright condemnation – at the very least it should be considered a useful experiment.
The Virtually Blind blog has an interesting discussion underway on the whole concept. What do you think – does Second Life need a government?
Bad idea. SL doesn’t need a republic, or even a government. SL is not RL, and not everything from RL needs to be dragged into SL.
This is nothing more than a bunch of power hungry people who can’t get attention or respect in RL, so their response is to try to “rule” SL. I vote NO. And I’m going to ignore them regardless of who else supports them.
Bad idea. SL doesn’t need a republic, or even a government. SL is not RL, and not everything from RL needs to be dragged into SL.
This is nothing more than a bunch of power hungry people who can’t get attention or respect in RL, so their response is to try to “rule” SL. I vote NO. And I’m going to ignore them regardless of who else supports them.