Corporate Conduct

In an interesting article about the online game, Alphaville by Maxis, the Independent details what online gamers already know - absent rather rigid policing or restrictions on player activity, some virtual players turn into virtual criminals.

Alphaville could have become a socialist utopia, a grand experiment in free-market capitalism or simply a reflection of the allure and the pitfalls of any real Western city.

As it was, Alphaville quickly turned into a hellhole of scam-artists, crime syndicates, mafia extortion artists and teenage girls turning tricks to make ends meet. It became a breeding ground for the very worst in human nature - a benign-sounding granny, for example, who specialised in taking new players into her confidence, then showered them in abuse. Then there was the scam-artist known as Evangeline, who started out equally friendly and then stole new players' money.

An attempt to crack down on player misconduct has been of limited success, with many banned players attempting to sneak back into the game.

That, in turn, presents a thorny set of philosophical problems. How do you seek to curb the baser instincts of a community of autonomous players? Is repression the answer? Or do you have to give people incentives to behave better all by themselves? Such questions have been pondered even within the august confines of Yale Law School, where one student, James Grimmelmann, wrote recently: "On the one hand, Maxis is close to losing control over their game world. TSO is a positively Brechtian world of violence, flim-flammery, and low-down dirty tricks.

"On the other hand, Maxis acts like a classic despot, using its powers to single out individual critics for the dungeons and the firing squads. The usual real-world justification for this kind of arbitrary action is the need for a strong central hand to protect public safety and common welfare. But since Maxis isn't all that good at those aspects, the Herald censorship [the closing of a virtual "newspaper" which documented player excesses] smacks more of tyranny for its own sake."

Which brings us to the corporation. Stripped of normal social mores, and instructed to maximize shareholder profit at the expense of most other values, is there a significant distinction between the way executives direct their companies and the antisocial fantasies of teenaged gamers in Alphaville? Do multinational corporations see people as something more than blips in a computer program? If you were to apply DSM-IV criteria to a corporation's conduct, would you diagnose it as psychopathic?

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