World of Warcraft makes five million dollars each day. That means each year it will draw in almost 1.82 billion dollars for Activision-Blizzard, and they did it by doing everything that proponents of an organic, open and creative Internet would hate. They streamlined through manageralism the virtual world and made it a place where the actions of others rarely have any tangible effect on your actions unless you give them explicit permission.

Timothy Burke on Terra Nova wrote at the beginning of the year that Tron Legacy, far from being a movie worth hating on, actually provided a brilliant analogy to think about history of virtual worlds. This treatment actually revitalized the film for me – where I thought there was only incomprehensible nonsense of “movie magic” there is now an earnest, yet clever story. For Burke, Blizzard is CLU, the majordomo of Kevin Flynn, obsessed with destroying uncertainty through technocratic perfectionism. In his quest for this perfection, he destroys the unpredictable and organic lifeforms that begin to populate the world. Flynn's realization is that to create a perfect and closed system is folly – for it is in our imperfections that we find beauty and meaning in life.

In essence, the world's sublime is revealed through our own inability to perfect it.

If you play WoW, it is likely you will find yourself playing alongside many others, all united in a common goal. Yet there is very little that happens on the server that does not do so without the express permission of Blizzard. Through the trick of “phasing” (the ability of the server to display different results on screen to different people) when you change the game-world, others don't see it. Everything in an effort to minimize the impact of our peers' on personal experience. The game is “social”, in that the game enables a personalized sociality that can escape from the group at the click of a “block” button. In this sense our creative energy is channelled in directions that Blizzard wants, mainly to small group collaboration.

This isn't always a bad thing. Good games make us have fun when we have our actions channelled. Yet at the same time, our ability to “play” in environments, challenge and test the space is often one of the most rewarding. When the original Halo launched with the Xbox in 2001, players quickly began to experiment with the physics engine, engaging in an activity called “Warthog Jumping” - where people used explosives to place the infamously silly-looking (and indestructible) jeep on top of out of the way objects. People began to film this and an entire generative culture was born.

These imperfect spaces gave rise to machinima (using videogames to make original movies) – most famously embodied by the web-series Red vs. Blue, whose irreverent existential humour was enabled by bugs that allowed the Halo engine to be used as a camera.

It is in these holes in the facade of perfection that we find much of humanity's creativity: In the graffiti on the modernist apartment blocks in the banlieues of Paris; on the Internet with 4chan's generative popular culture.

Blizzard's strong social and aesthetic control of WoW can be directly attributed to its stunning growth – for sometimes we truly seek such stability in the face of such unstable non-digital lives and worlds. However, we must be wary that stability comes with a price on our ability to create and subvert, as evidenced by the recent revolutions in North Africa. It comes as no surprise that in the face of uncertainty many Egyptians (especially women that took part in the revolution) have said that for the first time they truly feel alive.

This is something to consider when we desire digital and hermetic and authoritarian spaces. The best stories I hear about digital worlds come not from WoW, but EVE Online – where intrigue and uncertainty reign in a generative and discursive game of piracy and private enterprise. In EVE hell is other people, and that's what makes it fun.

The same questions about command and control in the digital realm is just as applicable to the real world, defiantly speaking to Metaviews' larger project of interrogating the future of authority. I believe that we need to be wary of the utopian narratives of world-builders like Activision-Blizzard whose attempt to create a safe and inclusive space has come at the cost of counter-culture and experimentation. When we banish hell from the digital world, we seem to lose something very important to the human experience.