The ingame groups ended up creating structures that look quite like governments. It felt almost like a recapitulation of real frontier history. Which is something that always felt self-defeating about libertarian ideology to me - like, we know what happens when there are no rules and governments, people make them, and without a government you can't stop that.
It's a self defeating aspect of the specific rightist-style framing of libertarianism that many people end up buying into, including the drafters of the Bill of Rights. IMO this was Gödel's loophole he referenced but never elaborated upon, as it's right in line with his work in logical contradictions.
Defining freedoms as a bunch of basic primitives that merely "the government" is prevented from infringing, and narrowly defining coercion as something that only the government is capable of (legally) doing is a broken framing. Layered complexity will make it so that other entities apart from the bona fide "government" are able to exercise significant actual coercion, and then infringe upon individual freedoms. And then using the broken definitions you will be told you are not actually being coerced, but rather choosing to "voluntarily" interact, and so your rights aren't actually be infringed.
The only way libertarianism makes sense is to define rights in terms of ability to exercise individual freedoms with respect to coercion by anyone else. This looks messier, but only because it puts the inevitable conflict front and center to be immediately resolved by equitable judgement about the amounts of coercion. The broken framework just pushes this logical conflict into the background, leaving it to continue growing as societal complexity does.
I’m not sure these structures are exactly like governments, in the libertarian sense. Do they demand taxes from people in their area? Do they set arbitrary laws?
