Lecture: The Roleplay/Admin Divide

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Lecture: The Roleplay/Admin Divide; and the importance of maintaining it
Topic Started: Mon Dec 18, 2017 12:02 am (347 Views)
Malashaan	Mon Dec 18, 2017 12:02 am Post #1
Posts: 1 Group: Members Member #113 Joined: Dec 15, 2017	The Importance of Maintaining a Clear Divide between Administrators and Roleplay Government The last year has seen an increased focus on player safety in the NationStates community. NationStates moderation has updated its rules in response to a player petition and we’ve seen several high-profile bans, including some significant DOS orders. The early signs certainly point to an increased commitment to player safety from the game moderators, which is a great step forward. However, no matter how much NationStates moderator does, the first line of defense will always be at the regional level. For most of us, the majority of interactions occur through our regions. While it is great to see NationStates moderators paying increased attention to off-site evidence, they have no authority or ability to act on regional forums, discord, or other communications platforms.¹ There are over 300 regions with at least 50 nations in them. And well over 1500 with at least 10. The vast majority of those have some kind of communications platform beyond the NationStates site. So how can regions structure themselves to best provide a safe environment for their members? There are certainly many legal structures that work for regions: democracies, republics, monarchies, etc. But when it comes to player safety, there are certain best practices that should be adopted regardless of the particular legal structure chosen by a region. Probably the most important of these, and the focus of this lecture, is understanding and maintaining the divide between administrative jurisdiction and roleplay law. Administrators provide technical management for a region’s forum, but their role involves more than that. The root administrator has an obligation under the terms of service to ensure the forum does not include prohibited content, which includes a wide range of abusive, threatening, and otherwise undesirable behavior. Root administrators typically rely on their administrative team to fulfill this obligation. Furthermore, I would encourage any administrator to view it as a moral obligation to provide the safest environment they can for their members. The key point here is that administrative jurisdiction is about real life consequences. In contrast, I use the term roleplay law to refer to the wide arrange of political roles we create for our regions.² These are typically defined in a regional constitution or charter and assigned various roles. Once a region has a roleplay legal system in place, it is tempting to start defining things like harassment and embed how they are handled in that legal system. Our legal systems generally provide for some kind of transparency and due process. There is an inherent appeal to the idea of putting someone of trial and not excluding them from a community until they have been shown to be guilty of something. Such a process is an essential aspect of liberty in the real world. But a NationStates region is not the real world, and such an approach is fatally flawed. On a purely theoretical level, handling these issues within a roleplay legal system is logically inconsistent. The roleplay legal system is set up to manage the operations of a roleplay entity: the region that created it. However, while harassment and other undesirable behaviors certainly cause some secondary harm to the region, the primary harm exists outside of the roleplay in the real world. We are not talking about one person being elected over another, or one game play ideology winning out over another, we are talking about mental (and in serious cases even physical) harm to real people. A system that only has roleplay authority is fundamentally not suited to address real world issues. If the problem were purely theoretical, then a region might be justified in ignoring the theoretical inconsistency in favor of having a functional system. However, trying to address real life harms through a roleplay legal system rapidly leads to serious practical problems. From an administrator’s perspective, as mentioned previously, you have a real life obligation under the terms of service to act. If your roleplay system concludes someone is not guilty but you are confident that they have violated the terms of service, you may be faced with a choice between violating a roleplay law by acting outside of it and violating your real life obligation. As an administrator, I can say that I would always choose to honor my real life obligation, and I don’t want to be exposed to roleplay liability as a result. At an even more basic level, roleplay systems a fundamentally unsuited to dealing with these kinds of issues. Consider the following example: Player X accuses Player Y of sexual harassment. Let’s assume initially that there are forum PMs including clear harassment. They can be presented in court and the roleplay legal system can return a conviction. No problem. But real life situations are almost never that simple. Imagine that the above trial has played out and Player Y is banned. The next day, Player Z shows up in the region and has similar behavior patterns. People become suspicious that it is just Player Y using an alias. How does the roleplay legal system address that? If Player Y isn’t very smart, they might not be hiding their IP address meaning the forum administrators can verify that the two accounts are the same person. But how does that play out in court? Sharing someone’s IP address in public raises huge privacy concerns. In fact, doing so might itself be a violation of the terms of service of the forum. Now consider a more realistic scenario: Europeia’s recent investigation into Brunhilde.³ The investigation involved correlating IP addresses, email addresses, and social media profiles, among other things. Ultimately, we know a lot about him⁴ that would certainly be a terms of service violation to share on the forum. Furthermore, even someone as duplicitous does not deserve to be doxed. An investigation of that extent just could not play out in a roleplay courtroom. Nor should it. We all play this game for fun, and we should not ask or expect our roleplay officials to deal with issues that may have serious real life consequences. All that said, why do I stress the importance of the admin/roleplay divide? Couldn’t the roleplay system just recognize the administrators’ authority over these issues? To an extent the answer is yes. A good roleplay system should explicitly recognize that fact. For example, Europeia’s Constitution explicitly authorizes the administrators to act “as necessary and appropriate … regardless of the implications in in-game terms.” But there are practical reasons why regions should go further than a simple legal recognition of administrative authority. First, any legal recognition is subject to political change. It isn’t necessarily that hard to change a regional constitution. In Europeia, five people can make it happen if they hold the right positions. For all of the reasons outlined previously, the necessity of administrative authority over things that result in real life harm should not be the subject of regional politics. Second, administrators should not be thinking about regional politics when investigating these issues. It should not matter whether the individual accused is a multi-term President with ten years of history in the region or a brand new member who joined up a few days previously. The only question the administrators should be asking is whether there is sufficient evidence to believe the accused represents a threat to the real-life wellbeing of the community or any member of it. If they are concerned about political blowback, their ability to answer that question fairly and effectively is compromised. I would like to wrap up this lecture with some concrete suggestions about how regions can best structure themselves to provide the safest environment possible. No system is perfect, and there will always be risk, but having an effective administrative system can reduce the risks for members of the community. Officially recognize the authority of your administrative team over these matters. Whether that is done through a Constitution, statement of principles, or some other mechanism is less important than publicly recognizing that this is the case. This helps administrators and other community members alike to understand the role in player safety that the administrative team plays. Try to avoid overlap between administrators and political roles. I have been in regions where the President was automatically an administrator. This inherently politicizes the administrator role and can lead to problems. Even having a Monarch that is also an administrator can blur the line between roleplay and real life. That is not to say that administrators should never engage in regional politics, but they should be careful at all times to distinguish between their contributions as an administrator and as a member of the community. For example, when I am commenting on something as an administrator, I try to always include a phrase such as “in my role as an admin…” etc. Minimize references to real life outcomes and effects in regional laws. Roleplay governments are managed by real life actions. For example, recruiters send messages to other players who (hopefully) read them. However, laws regulating who does this and when, etc., are properly a matter for roleplay law because the intended effect is to encourage nations to move to your region. In other words, the intended effect is primarily a roleplay effect. In contrast, a law that made it a roleplay crime to send racial slurs in a recruitment telegram would likely infringe on the administrators jurisdiction, as the main problematic effect is the potential for real life distress. There may well be a roleplay outcome as well (e.g., harm to the region’s reputation), but that is a secondary effect that stems from the real life harm. Select your administrators carefully. Administrative investigations are necessarily less transparent than the typical roleplay court case. If the administrative team is not trusted by the community, that can quickly lead to questions about motivation. We are by no means perfect in Europeia, but I am proud of the fact that with our recent announcements of various bans, we have not seen push back from disgruntled individuals questioning the decisions or the motives behind them. There is no silver bullet that will solve the problem of harassment and other player safety issues. These are complicated issues for many reasons, and I certainly don’t claim to have all of the answers. However, bearing the points raised above in mind when making decisions about how to handle administrative matters in your region will help us all do a better job. We are one community, and these kinds of real life issues must come before in-game, political concerns. It has been heartening to see so many people come together and try to find answers. We don’t all agree, and there have been undoubted missteps, but we are moving in the right direction. I look forward to continued discussion on this and related topics. The discussions we have been having should be seen as the beginning, not the end. We can do better in 2018, and I believe we will. ¹For the rest of this lecture, I will refer to forum administration and, in particular, zetaboards forums, for convenience. This is a common platform for NationStates regions and the one with which I am most familiar. However, most of what I say in this context is applicable to any platform. ²Note that I do not use the term “roleplay” here to refer just to what many of us refer to as roleplay regions or activities (e.g., in-character wars). Rather, I use the term to collectively refer to the game of NationStates itself and all of the regional government activity that arises around it. ³As someone who was involved in this investigation, I have been careful to limit my discussion to what we previously released publicly, precisely because of the privacy concerns it raises. ⁴I still instinctively think of Brunhilde as “she” based on the character portrayed. However, I intentionally use the male pronoun when referring to him to highlight the deception. Edited by Malashaan, Mon Dec 18, 2017 12:04 am.
Posts: 1 Group: Members Member #113 Joined: Dec 15, 2017


Lethen	Mon Dec 18, 2017 2:06 am Post #2
Posts: 4 Group: Members Member #157 Joined: Dec 17, 2017	Good read, Mal!
Posts: 4 Group: Members Member #157 Joined: Dec 17, 2017


HEM	Mon Dec 18, 2017 2:57 am Post #3
Posts: 9 Group: Members Member #130 Joined: Dec 16, 2017	This essay should be a must-read for all admins in newly created regions. A great primer on how to organize an admin team.
Posts: 9 Group: Members Member #130 Joined: Dec 16, 2017


Rach	Mon Dec 18, 2017 1:35 pm Post #4
Posts: 2 Group: Members Member #93 Joined: Dec 15, 2017	Great essay Malashaan :)
Posts: 2 Group: Members Member #93 Joined: Dec 15, 2017


Vac Mercer	Tue Dec 19, 2017 6:09 am Post #5
Posts: 2 Group: Members Member #59 Joined: Dec 14, 2017	HEM Mon Dec 18, 2017 2:57 am This essay should be a must-read for all admins in newly created regions. A great primer on how to organize an admin team. A must read for administrations period, as well as for members of regional legislatures. This was a great read.
Posts: 2 Group: Members Member #59 Joined: Dec 14, 2017


Volaworand	Fri Dec 22, 2017 11:01 am Post #6
TSP SPIT dealer Posts: 239 Group: Members Member #61 Joined: Dec 14, 2017	very though provoking lecture, thank-you


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