Paul Barnett of WAR fame said something in one interview that I rather liked: the determining factor for game decisions should be whether it’s fun. Or whether it draws people into the game, for other environments like SA (which isn’t really a “game”).

SA wasn’t always the way it is, as I’m sure you know. Lack of rules does not always lead to sex. But certain types of communities and memes tend to propagate, and unfortunately that’s what happened to SA; I guess its environment was just too vulnerable to that kind of thing and no effort was made to curtail it. Possibly SA’s… I don’t know if devs is quite the right word… had no financial incentive to want to stop the spread of porn and consumerism in their RMT world.

I was going to say something about sampling bias, but that’s just attacking the “libertarianism” generalization, and doesn’t have anything to do with whether lack of rules is good for a game or not. So. Compare WoW US/EU with WoW China. Totally different culture, with respect to RMT and the resulting change in value of different types of achievement. So less rules. And WoW China has, I think, as many players as WoW US and EU combined, if not more. So a culture with less rules can be just as successful.

But I think it’s not stable between those points. Certain rules and values will propagate and resist change. Having these social rules broken by other players when you expect them to be kept does make the game less fun. Bottom line, you can’t really generalize (example, WoW would have been less successful with less freedom in world PvP… back when there still was world PvP). Particular restrictions should just be evaluated individually; the bottom line is still whether or not it’s fun.

As real life societies become less restrictive about sex and people learn a more healthy and less repressive attitude about it, then the obsession with it online will fade. Come back in 20 to 50 years and there’ll be a much different dynamic in the virtual worlds of that time.

Sex.

Other online gamers would hardly care about “Second Life” if hadnt become a den of virtual kinky sex.

Most MMOs(both sand box and games with rules) satisfy a desire for something we cant have in real life. Killing dragons, meeting aliens, going into battle as a knight, even getting rich through good business sense. Through out all of history those are the type of ideas we tell stories of and dream about.

Kinky sex on the other hand through out all of history the partakers have generally hid their involvement, and society has frowned on it.
In a MMO however kinky sex is quite visible but the players are still anonomous.

The real issue is sex.

The old problem of ‘net annonymity makes a “spontaneous social order” unlikely to ever form online. There have to be repercussions (other than changing ISP’s and registering a new account) for social mores to “gel”.

That to me begs a question; are they actually doing something wrong? I don’t think anyone can doubt that should they actually do those crimes they should go to prison, but… they aren’t actually acting upon this bizarre urge of theres in any real sense because there is no victim, they’re both consenting adults, no matter how much in bad taste the act was.

I found that to be the most intriguing piece of information that I have so far read in that article, so I’d like to apologize now if I de-railed the topic

Also, Empty Filth Void would make a pretty good punk/industrial band name.

Moral code and purpose have existed in good single player games as well across several genres, I don’t think the are a MMO phenomenon, but they may be part of good RPG design.