Find Online Game Worlds Where Players Vote on the Rules

Few online games let players change the rules by vote, and fewer still have kept it going for more than a decade. When people ask me where to find genuine player governance, as opposed to a feedback survey with a nicer name, my list is short. It starts in Reykjavik.

EVE Online and the Council of Stellar Management

CCP Games launched EVE Online in 2003, a single-shard space game where every player shares one universe. In 2008 the studio set up the Council of Stellar Management, an elected body of players who represent the community to the developers. The timing was not accidental. In 2007 the game had been hit by a scandal in which a CCP employee was found to have handed valuable items to his own in-game alliance, and the studio needed a way to rebuild trust with a player base that had good reason to doubt it.

The CSM, as everyone calls it, does not write code or set the roadmap. Its members sign non-disclosure agreements, see plans before they are public, and give feedback. Historically CCP flew council members to Iceland for in-person summits, and the minutes of those meetings were published for the wider player base to read. That combination of access and published records is what makes the CSM unusual. Players can see, at least in summary, what their representatives argued.

The elections themselves are serious affairs. Since 2013 the council has used a single transferable vote system, where players rank candidates and votes transfer as candidates are elected or eliminated. That change mattered because large alliances in EVE are effectively political parties. Under a simpler system, the biggest null-security blocs could sweep the seats. Ranked voting gave room for candidates representing high-security miners, wormhole dwellers, solo pilots and industrialists.

What campaigning for CSM looks like

Candidates post platforms on the official forums, appear on community podcasts and streams, and court endorsements from alliance leadership. Big blocs publish voting guides to their members, which looks a lot like a party slate. Independent candidates try to assemble cross-faction coalitions around specific issues, such as a mechanic that affects their playstyle.

Turnout is the perennial worry. Only a fraction of active accounts vote in a typical cycle, and the bloc vote of an organised alliance counts for far more than its share of the player base would suggest. Players who complain that the council only represents big alliances usually did not rank anyone. I have said this on comms more than once, and it is no more popular in a spaceship game than it is at a town meeting.

There is also a quieter skill involved: knowing how ranked ballots work. Candidates who understand transfers ask voters for second and third preferences rather than demanding a first, because a lot of seats are decided on lower preferences once the frontrunners are elected. That is a real piece of electoral literacy, and plenty of EVE pilots learned it before they ever saw a ranked ballot in a civic election.

When the council mattered most

The clearest test came in 2011. The Incarna expansion added avatar-based station interiors, and leaked internal documents plus an in-game store with expensive virtual items set off a revolt that players still call the "Summer of Rage." Protesters gathered in the trade hub of Jita and shot at a monument. CCP called an emergency CSM meeting in Iceland, and the studio later shifted its focus back toward spaceship gameplay. The council did not cause that change alone, but it gave angry players a recognised channel and gave the developers someone to negotiate with.

A Tale in the Desert: laws written by players

If the CSM is an advisory parliament, A Tale in the Desert is closer to direct democracy. eGenesis released it in 2003, set in ancient Egypt with no combat. The game runs in cycles called Tellings, and within each Telling players can propose laws, gather signatures from other players, and put them to a vote. Laws that pass are implemented by the developers and become part of how that Telling plays.

This is the purest example I know of players changing the actual rule set rather than advising on it. It also shows the costs. Laws can be poorly drafted, voting blocs form around crafting interests, and some proposals pass with consequences nobody anticipated. In other words, it behaves a lot like a real legislature.

Smaller and older experiments

Player governance did not start with EVE. LambdaMOO, a text-based virtual world, introduced a petition and ballot system in 1993 after its administrators announced they would step back from social decisions. Players could draft petitions, collect signatures and send them to a vote; successful ones were carried out by the wizards who ran the server. Much of what the system ran into, from turnout to drafting quality, foreshadowed problems later games hit.

In 2014, Twitch Plays Pokemon added a twist. Thousands of viewers controlled a single game through chat commands, and the organisers introduced a "democracy" mode, where the most popular command over a short window was executed, alongside the default "anarchy" mode, where every command went through. Viewers then voted in real time on which mode to use. It was a crude system, but it showed a mass audience debating the trade-off of speed versus coordination, which is a governance question at heart.

Many Minecraft servers also run elected councils or player-built governments, usually through plugins or simple community rules. Quality varies enormously, and most fade when the server's admin loses interest.

Comparing the models

The usual criticism, and why I think it is overstated

The standard complaint about the CSM, repeated on forums every election cycle, is that it is a rubber stamp: advisory bodies have no teeth, so voting is pointless. I understand the frustration, and some council terms have certainly felt toothless from the outside.

But I think the criticism misreads what the CSM is for. A body with binding power over a commercial game would never be granted by a studio, and if it were, it would be captured by the largest alliance within one cycle. The CSM's value is information flow in both directions and a public record of disagreements. Over nearly two decades, that has outlasted most player governance experiments that promised more. Direct power, as A Tale in the Desert shows, brings its own mess.

Where to look next

If you want to see player governance in action, follow an EVE CSM election from candidate announcements to results; the forums and community streams cover it in detail. For the studio side of the conversation, read our coverage of player polls and what studios build, which deals with a different, poll-based approach. For the meeting format, see virtual town halls inside online game worlds, and for how ordinary game elections work at guild scale, online game elections and campaign basics.