Sociology is, of course, an intensely interesting field to those in the business of making MMOs. One of the most interesting social theories of recent years is called ‘Broken Windows’, a theory based on an Atlantic Monthly article.:

The strategy being implemented in New York is based on an idea called the “Broken Windows Theory.” First expressed by political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling in an article for The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, the theory holds that if someone breaks a window in a building and it is not quickly repaired, others will be emboldened to break more windows. Eventually, the broken windows create a sense of disorder that attracts criminals, who thrive in conditions of public apathy and neglect.
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Former Commissioner Bratton first tested this strategy while he was commanding the New York Transit Police. Because subway police did not focus on “low-level crimes,” Bratton wrote in an article for the Journal of Law and Policy, “subway disorder and subway crime exploded in the late 1980s. Chronic fare evaders, violators of transit regulations, aggressive panhandlers, homeless substance abusers and illegal vendors hawking goods on station platforms all contributed to an atmosphere of disorder, even chaos, in the subways. I was convinced that disorder was a key ingredient in the steeply rising robbery rate, as criminals of opportunity, including many youthful offenders, looked upon the subway as a place where they could get away with anything.”

Bratton responded by calling on all transit cops to enforce “quality of life” laws and by targeting fare-beaters-people who jump subway turnstiles without paying. It turned out that the people who broke the law by jumping turnstiles were often the same people who broke the law by robbing subway riders. The result: a dramatic drop in crime. Today the infamous graffiti is gone and you can ride subways at virtually any hour without fear. In other words, you could stop the major offenses by nabbing minor offenders.

Due to Rudy Guiliani’s enthusiastic endorsement, broken windows is considered a conservative social philosophy even though, typically, citing ‘environment’ as a factor in crime has always been a staple of the liberal stance on law enforcement. It’s also a philosophy which has caught the attention of many in the software field: Mac advocates claim the philosophy of broken windows explains why Macs have no spyware whereas windows machines are inundated by it. It’s also been cited as a common sense approach to keeping a maintainable codebase, lest despair strike your programming team.

The philosophy is big enough to have its detractors, and there’s no doubt some truth to that (for example, the lack of spyware on Macs probably has a lot more to do with their relatively miniscule install base). Similar arguments have been brought out against the Broken Windows theory working in New York crime:

Yes, he’s heard the rebuttals. Crime began to decline several years before Mr. Bratton’s innovations — but not, he says, at an annual rate in double digits. Violent crime declined just as drastically in San Diego, which never used Brattonesque policies, and almost as quickly in many other cities. But that’s because police departments in all those places have gotten smarter.

“The real revolution has been in policing. Police departments are better at learning from each other than ever before,” he says. “They all have in common one thing: more intelligent policing.”

But Andrew Karmen, a sociologist at John Jay, thinks that’s giving police tactics too much credit. “N.Y.P.D. or not N.Y.P.D.? That is the question,” he writes in New York Murder Mystery: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990’s (New York University Press) just published in January.

In his view, the two-thirds drop in the number of homicides during the decade was due to many factors, including the end of murderous turf wars among crack dealers. And even the evidence for effective policing is riddled with caveats and exceptions. Crime rates in New York City peaked around 1990, before most significant innovations in policing. Crackdowns on gun possession generally cut the murder rate — except when they don’t, as New York discovered in the midst of the crack wars of the mid-1980’s.

In the online gaming world, I’m very willing to vouch for the Broken Windows philosophy. It only takes a comparison of various game forums to see it in action: an unmoderated forum will degenerate into chaos very quickly. A risque name will invite bolder, more offensive name attempts. Lawlessness invites lawlessness, and those who appreciate order will quickly decide to go someplace where they can find it. I actually attribute a large part of EQ’s success to their firm, harsh CSR policies in the early days, which stood in sharp contrast to UO’s reputation as a place of utter chaos and disorder. I also attribute UO’s rise from 100K to 250K as partially the result of them realizing the error of their ways.The problem online is compounded by the fact that attention from other players is addictive. Players emulate what gets results, and if you want attention, being an ass is a remarkably effective to achieve those results. Thus, if people can be an ass without getting bounced by the people running the game, they’ll do it.

All of this stuff was going through my mind over the weekend, as I pondered Sony’s Station Exchange initiative, and the hullabaloo that resulted (and kudos to Nerfbat for joining me in my devil’s advocacy). The Station Exchange comes from a different philosophical bent, that which believes that Legalization is Good. The top arguments for legalization of drugs like marijuana:

  1. If people want to smoke pot, we really can’t stop them.
  2. We spend an inordinate amount of money attempting to stop an unstoppable problem.
  3. If we legalized marijuana, we could tax it, turning this money pit into something that could fund greater public works.

Sounds extremely similar to the rationale given by Smedley about Station Exchange, doesn’t it?

The problem is that the players see eBaying characters as a broken window. They see it as cheating. The ones that don’t think that buying a character on eBay is cheating believe firmly that the ones selling the characters are exploiting and duping in order to stock their virtual inventory. It doesn’t matter if Sony thinks it’s cheating, or if such rampant exploiting to sell exists -as long as people believe that this is the case, the Station Exchange will be a lingering Broken Window, a reminder that Sony not only can’t stop the cheaters, but in some cases actively condones and profits from it.

Does that mean that it’s a bad idea? No, I still think that Station Exchange is an idea whose time has come. However, I think it would have been better if it was built into the launch of a game (no one complains, for example, that Magic the Gathering Online is a ‘money’ game). That being said, I think that if this is going to work, SOE’s top priority has to center on changing the perception that eBay sales are cheating. Just like people don’t want to shop in a mall with broken windows, burnt out lights and unmopped floors, they don’t want to spend their social time in a place where they percieve that the Powers That Be don’t care about cheaters.

Original comments thread is here.