In early 2003, meanwhile, performance artist Tony Walsh organized a protest to call attention to Electronic Arts’ decision to insert a McDonalds kiosk into Sims On-line, and a year later philosophy professor Peter Ludlow was permanently banned from the game for running the on-line newspaper Alphaville Herald, in which he reported on illicit activities (such as virtual prostitution and organized crime) taking place within the virtual space of the Sims game.
As these examples illustrate, there is a fluid continuum within MMORPG protests ranging from dissatisfaction with issues internal to the games itself (e.g., the relative power of the warrior class) to issues which are situated almost entirely outside of the virtual space of the games (e.g., the 9/11 vigils), to protests which straddle the boundaries between the two (e.g., whether or not game groups can be identified based on sexual orientation, and whether it is appropriate for games to incorporate corporate branding into the fabric of the games themselves).
In an interesting discussion about a year and a half ago, Edward Castronova argued that the virtual space of these sorts of on-line games is itself inherently political, and consequently
the nature of these political events [virtual protests within MMORPG’s] and their replication under different circumstances in different worlds suggests that they reveal something fundamental. Running a virtual world is a service, as we are often reminded, but it is more than running a BBS or a shopping mall or an amusement. There's a nascent politics. There's policy. There's speech and assembly. There's terror and reaction. If destroying the world and banishing people are not terror and reaction, respectively, I don't know what would be.The question that is posed here, therefore, concerns the position of the these protests vis-à-vis the “communities” which the game designers themselves attempt to create and maintain (occasionally resorting to such extreme tactics as banishment and “world destruction”), on the one hand, and the “communities” which the players create within the virtual space of the game itself (occasionally in conflict with the wishes of the game owners).
Jean-Luc Nancy addresses very similar issues in his influential 1982 book The Inoperative Community, where he argues that communities cannot be dictated from above by outside authority, nor can it be grounded on a sense of “immanence and intimacy of communion,” nor is it a “project of fusion, or in some general way a productive or operative project.” Rather than being grounded on any concrete ideal of immanence or communion, Nancy argues instead that it is precisely the necessary loss or absence of these ideals which becomes “constitutive of ‘community’ itself”:
Community therefore occupies a singular place: it assumes the impossibility of its own immanence, the impossibility of a communitarian being in the form of a subject. In a certain sense community acknowledges and inscribes—this is its peculiar gesture—the impossibility of community. A community is not a project of fusion, or in some general way a productive or operative project—nor is it a project at all….
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