Message boards, forums, blogs, social sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us, to name just a few, have allowed users from all over the world to customize and exchange information in unprecedented ways. These sites allow the user to rate and filter data, giving them the power to control what they consume, and in the process, the tools of becoming producers. The middlemen, our media giants, take the back seat, as they watch on-line communities around the globe, defining the terms and the content of their exchange. This is a revolutionary and noble idea, but certainly not a new one.

The world-wide-web, as a virtual space where people gather to share, exchange and participate in shaping their culture, had its analog representation more than 3000 years ago in the Agora of Athens. The Agora, literally meaning, "a place of gathering," was the birthplace of what we now call "direct democracy." In the Agora, people from all walks of life would gather to conduct business, participate in the city's governance, decide and discuss judicial matters, express their opinions, and elect their city officials.

It is no surprise then that law professor and author Jacqueline Stevens invited a team of international net artists - Natalie Bookchin, Ana Carvalho, and Zeljko Blace - to create a forum where participants are inspired to work together on the rules, design, and code of a game. Aptly titled AgoraXchange, the forum invites users to discuss ways in which they can create a multi-player global politics game that would challenge the "violence and inequality of our present political system." Because of Stevens’ background, the forum's foundation is based on four legal decrees:

1. Citizenship should be by choice, and not a birthright. State borders should not restrict the movement of goods or people.
   
   
2. Upon death, a person loses all property rights and his or her wealth is redistributed by centralized agencies administered by something similar to the United Nations to provide education, health, clean water and meeting other basic needs throughout the world.
   
   
3. States own land, with long-term, including lifetime, leases to individuals, businesses, nonprofit organizations and so forth.
   
   
4. States cannot establish rules for kinship relations. Child rearing and other long-term interpersonal relations are established by individual contracts.

All forums in the Game Design Room, which is broken into four areas (Context, Rules, Player and State Representation and User Experience), have to abide, in one way or another, to these four decrees. These constraints have bothered some because they imply a certain form of control over the open development of the game’s play and its content. Some would prefer to see these precepts emerging from the discussions on the forums.

Although valid to a certain degree, these critics are failing to see the impetus behind the legal parameters of the game. The exchange that occurs in many social sites on the web gives us the illusion of control and participation, rather than a clear and open democratic flow of information. What we normally fail to see, even in these apparently open social sites and creative experiments, is the ways in which they are structured - by code, software and navigation - to template and determine our experiences and information.

MySpace and others, as hubs for social interaction, have become the defacto popular form of exchange, even rivaling e-mail as a way to contact and connect with others. With the purchase of MySpace by Murdoch and Co., it is difficult to see these popular trends as liberating. YouTube is another example. Although tons of videos populate this heavily visited site, the question of content remains... what is it that we are seeing, and why did this crap make it to the top ten? Even the creative Mod community is confronted with this same conundrum; although they modify the content of already existing games, their original foundation remains intact.

AgoraXchange’s four decrees, outrageous and utopic as they may be, are out in the open. What it’s difficult to understand, in this case, is their meaning, and the enormous impact that they would have in our society. That’s why this forum, I believe, has incited so much passion, frustration and resentment... by confronting users with a heavily pre-determined legal boundary, its process has become as utopian as its intended final product.