February 21, 2026
Pixels, politics, and popcorn
Choose Your Fictions Well (2010)
Choose Your Fictions Well: Fans say MMO wild west is dead—and the 'how' never shows
TLDR: A reflective essay on virtual-world politics rekindled old debates about play versus harm, but commenters say modern MMOs killed the chaos and user-made content—and the piece never explains “how” to choose our stories. It matters because it’s the blueprint for who sets the rules in our shared online playgrounds.
Virtual world veterans dove into Henry Jenkins and Peter Ludlow’s 2010 think-piece like it was a time capsule from The Sims Online and Second Life—complete with rigged elections, vigilante superheroes, and the eternal question: when does play become harassment? But the community’s mood wasn’t just nostalgic; it was spicy. One camp mourned the loss of the chaotic, anything-goes sandboxes, calling today’s MMOs “grown-up” in all the wrong ways. “Multiple fictions” (aka different player fantasies colliding) are out, and UGC—user-generated content—is “dead,” sighed one commenter, like someone at a funeral for the internet’s imagination.
Others got hooked by the opening drama—corrupt pixel politicians versus a teen challenger, caped ‘Justice’ guilds policing griefers—then felt the essay dropped the mic and walked off stage. The big critique: great setup, no how-to. “Choose your fictions well…” Okay, but how do we do that? Where are the rules, the lines, the map? The thread turned into a meme machine: “Choose your fighter: Student Council President vs. Crime Boss,” and “Press X to set boundaries.”
Still, the core fight lit up the comments: were those clashes roleplay or real harm? Fans say the wild west taught hard lessons—but they’re split on whether the law-and-order era saved MMOs or just sanitized the fun.
Key Points
- •The authors revisit the 2004 Alphaville elections in The Sims Online as a case of clashing player narratives within an open-ended virtual world.
- •They describe how one candidate treated the election as genuine representation while the other pursued a transgressive, crime-themed roleplay, leading to conflict.
- •The essay links open-ended game design to unmediated collisions of goals, citing James Paul Gee’s framework of multiple goals and paths in games.
- •It reflects on recent Second Life incidents involving a Justice League group to question progress in clarifying play frames and virtual-world governance.
- •Drawing on Yochai Benkler, the authors frame Second Life as a mixed-media ecology where diverse narratives coexist but ultimately collide, as documented by outlets like the Alphaville Herald.