Online Video Games and Liberalism

I realized something in a discussion last night that may be old news to others - I don't know, I haven't researched this - but which struck me as interesting: the connection between virtual world video games and a central feature of the drive towards "neutrality" in liberal political thought.

It was recently announced that a virtual game-player became the first "online millionaire" in the game, Second Life. This struck me as interesting, not being a game-player myself, because of the apparent effort that went into becoming a millionaire - beginning with a $10 investment in the game, making small virtual real estate purchases, and gradually investing in larger projects with the profits over a period of two and a half years. It is also interesting in light of the apparent goals:

Above all, Anshe Chung stresses the importance of community in her vision of the virtual worlds and work spaces that she and others are pioneering together. Her goal is not merely to build a corporation, but to foster the development and growth of online communities, and to help make the entry of real world corporations into Second Life and other regions of the metaverse as frictionless as possible. It is her philosophy that Second Life is above all a social space, and that corporate entrants that respect the community will be the most successful.

Although there is a real-world offshoot of the game with apparent business benefits, it was nonetheless curious to me that one would spend one's time carrying out such a project in the first place. I suppose this is also a psychological question at some point, but we'll leave this to the side.

Now this is obviously nothing new either - I would imagine that there now exist virtual-world anthropologists studying these phenomena - but it occurred to me that there is a parallel in liberal political theory that plays out in a more pristine way in the virtual world than it does the non-virtual world.

The idea behind the quest for "neutral" political structures that has underwritten the liberal-democratic project is a response to time-slice situations of inequity and injustice. Take Rawls, for example, in his construction of the hypothetical veil of ignorance from which he argues for a set of universal principles of justice. The veil is a position from which deliberators about justice know nothing of their social status, income, race, gender, etc. and thus have no basis for selecting principles of justice that will organize society from such real-world positions of bias. Rather, as rational, self-interested agents, they select operative principles of justice by "maximining." That is, given their ignorance under the veil, they individually realize - in typical contract-theory style - that each of them could very well be in the position of the worst-off in their society once the veil is lifted. Not wanting to give up on liberties to act in their own interests (which could entail slavery), but not wanting to start from the worst-off position, they basically derive two main principles (Rawls calls these the Liberty Principle and the Difference Principle). First, is that each agent ought to share a roughly equal amount or capacity of liberty. The second, however, is that any agent's free actions that affect others by increasingly inequality (of distributive goods) in the society ought to benefit the worst-off position. The basic idea is that, under conditions of distributive equality (or, more precisely ignorance about actual distributions), self-interested agents would choose a more equitable system of justice in terms of the distribution of goods. This is not flat egalitarianism, since we are not talking about maintaining an equal society in terms of goods. The point is that any adjustment benefits the worst-off. This set of principles then serves as a basis for critiquing actually existing practices and arrangements of distributive justice in actually existing societies.

But note one other feature of the veil of ignorance. The point is not simply to conceal actual distributions but, rather, to ensure that those distributions are not based on accidental features of individual status. That is, to base a system of justice on whether one was born into wealth or a certain race or of a certain gender, and so on, is to base the system on cosmic accidents. In such cases, the individual has done nothing to deserve their position, whether advantaged or disadvantaged. These positions, on the other hand, are also the basis of ongoing biases and prejudices in actual societies, which any approach to distributive justice attempts to tackle by its very nature.

Now, consider the online world. One starts from a position analogous to the veil of ignorance. One starts with an operative Liberty Principle. Whether this works towards some kind of enactment of the features of the Difference Principle is a different story here. The Liberty Principle, through analogy to the veil, however, is the basic starting point. And, significantly, the veil continues throughout the construction of the virtual world in the sense of not being based on those features of actually-existing societies which are the bases of prejudice and unfair distribution.

In other words (and I know that this isn't an original claim), isn't the virtual world in this kind of case a world in which that first dilemma for the liberal theorist is wiped away from the outset? While remembering that the contours of the game are largely designed from the outset, within a game that can evolve through the actions of its players, hasn't liberal neutrality been achieved to the extent that the point of liberal neutrality is to seek a fair starting position for constructing principles of justice and their ensuing institutions?