Slashdot Mirror
Law and Virtual Worlds
Greg Lastowka writes "In light of yesterday's spirited discussion of the Shadowbane hack, I thought folks might be interested in this forthcoming article about the laws of virtual worlds. The article has three parts: 1) a history of virtual worlds (e.g. Space War --> MMORPGs), 2) a theoretical analysis of whether virtual world "property" can/should be treated as legal property, and 3) an analysis of whether virtual worlds can/should give rise to any other legal rights, i.e. rights of avatars -- an idea first floated by Raph Koster. I realize there are plenty of strongly-held and divergent opinions on this, so hopefully this might add to the ongoing conversation. Also, we're revising this for publication over the summer, so we will be reading the comments for any corrections/insights/humor that we can incorporate into our revisions."
money can be found on people selling their DAOC, EverQuest, and even Ultima Online characters.
Sometimes I wonder... why not just buy a character and spend the rest of your time doing something more productive. After all, if you take your salary at an hourly rate, you're really losing money by playing games all day/night/forever.
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Free your mind.
For those who don't know...
A bit of relevant history! Social justice, if you will.
DISCUSS!
-Professor B.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
If something malicious done in-game causes damages in the outside world, then that should be treated as any other crime would and punished accordingly. This really only applies to server and software hacks, not duping the new guy into giving you all his gold. If you use a hack to alter the gamestate to say give yourself an item or take an item from someone else, this should be prosecuted because it is deriving other players the game that they are most likely paying for.
kc
Would you like be sitting on the chair for being a PK? Or even fragging an opponent? It's intentional murder, after all (well, that's what some lawyers say at least).
Now, do you still want physical laws applying in MMORPG or other games?
These are only virtual realities. They are not, and shouldn't be protected in the same way as physical properties.
However, if you view the value of things as how many man-hours go into it, then yes, there is some kind of value, and right associated with these characters, and products. However, just because there is time involved, does not inherently imply value, or even many rights.
The company has a say in this more than the Gov't, or the gamer. The company runs the server, the company saves your profiles. If this company were to go under, they have no reason to hold onto those profiles, as they are simply another part of their business, which they own. You have no say, no matter what you think. However, a nice company may do something like transfer their servers, code, or other necessary info to open source, and thus preserving the environment. This does not mean individual properties are saved, which is what people would want to save, most of all.
Really, if your life is so consumed by the internet as to make it a pseudo-physical part of your life, then you need to think about something else for a while. Go into a rehab facillity, something. Please get some sunshine and a tan, we all need it (me especially...).
So true...I play Asheron's Call and found that the worst parts of the game were the tedious things like shopping for magic supplies and running from place to place (commuting). Over time the game designers have eased the pain of shopping and added more portals and other ways to jump quickly from place to place, allowing players to spend more time killing stuff. :-)
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
If you let kill-joy technocrats put laws around your games. Although it would be funny if you kill another player's character and your superbadass wizard in Diablo and a little virtual cop car rolls up and gives him life in prison.
Even the story of this game being hacked. It's really cheap... bad sportsmanship... but in the end you've gotta laugh that someone was able to do that. If this game was a subscription service I think the company in charge should have a backup policy in place to prevent this from ruining what you've really paid for... Otherwise... it's a game, lighten up.
imagine, you create some kind of Ueber-universal Avatar, that you use everywhere: in games, but also in places like /., other forums...
Some people build up quite a reputation in several fields, through hard work, searching studying,...teaching things online.
Let's imagine, I'm using this avatar 'Mr. Smith' (Yea...,) widely recognized in certain semi-pro forums, et.c. If somebody hacked into my ueber-avatar-account and start posting spurious things in my name, or go on a rampage in some games, using hacks,... my Avatar would lose a lot of it's 'worth,' however virtual it may seem, but i would be really pissed off, for the so-called virtual money-worth-karma-acceptance et.c. is, or could be, in fact very important to me for my work, research, et.c.
It is my belief that more laws (in any world) do more damage to the rights of people than good. By looking to a higher authority to settle dispute, we as individuals and communities thereby abdicate our right to settle the dispute ourselves. Now, I will couch this by saying that I believe there are certain laws that are universaly recognized, but they can be summed up rather succinctly in "Do no harm". What I am talking about is morally based law, and the idea that we can own things. If you dismiss the underlying assumption that we can own things (which is truly a large debate unto itself), and do away with morally based laws, and simply abide by "To each his own", then does the nature of conflict change within a society? I believe this is the true value of virtual worlds, as a testing ground for how societies behave and operate.
Of course there are worldly societies that have taken these questions to heart and seem to prove that the nature of conflict does indeed change, and that the quality of life in general goes up. We here in the US (mostly) have not allowed this level of enlightenment to take hold, and indeed seem to want to constrain the way people live according to some kind of repressed morality. So lawyers are thriving, prisons are huge moneymakers, and we end up worshipping material wealth because there is no true happiness or comfort.
Just as elegance in technology is accomplished through simplicity in design, elegance in society is accomplished through simplicity in governance. The technological revolution (so called) has seen repeatedly a development cycle where the first few generations of a technology are complex and inefficient. As the technology matures, it is optomized and made simpler, until the sheer simplicity of the widget is truly awe inspiring. Our energy generating technology is still in the infant stages where we are using complex and inefficient means to generate energy, but we are starting to see impressive, simple, elegant solutions in this arena and the next century should see a really nice change in how well we meet our power needs. So to, I think, is the fate of the legal codes. We will see that as people are more spiritually and emotionally cared for and supported in communities, their need for accumulating property will dissipate. Poor people already understand the meaningless nature of stuff, and are inherantly more generous than the rich. As a wise man once said, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to [live a happy life]. The argument over legal codes and property only serves to create a class of rich parasites like lawyers, insurance salesmen, etc at everyone elses expense. There is no inalienable right to own an SUV, a cloak of indifference, or a plasma tv. We should be more concerned with the right to pursue happiness, which should not require money but only good health, nutrition, and access to nature with that special someone. What can be better than walking to a secluded hot spring, and boning your honey for the afternoon?
If I build a house online, would you deny it has value? If so, why?
If you built the house yourself - as in, wrote the code or designed this virtual house with HTML or whathaveyou, using your own tools (or tools you've bought) on your own servers, then it may have value to you.
However, in this case, you didn't build the house. You interacted with a game engine which flipped bits on EA's servers. You didn't write the code that did it, you don't own the hardware it is stored on. You're merely playing a game on someone else's machine/network, and paying money for the privilege.
A key point here - if EA shuts down those servers tomorrow, they don't owe you anything, except perhaps a partial credit for any pre-paid game time. They won't and should not compensate you for the virtual house and the virtual pizza oven, because you never owned them. They won't (and also shouldn't) compensate you for the money you spent playing the game to try and build that house, either, because you were only paying to play the game.
While I admit, that I'd be upset if I spent time building a character only to have it destroyed by another player. However, if this is "outlawed", there will be no bad guys, and no fun. Who wants to play against the computer all the time -- that defeats the purpose of online gaming.
These laws aren't meant to restrict the way the game works itself, but rather the consequences from out-of-game actions.
For example, if I killed your character and stole your stuff according to the rules of the game, I'd be fine. If, however, I used some exploit or hacked into the game server, or committed some fraud to destroy that character and your items, then you'd be talking about a crime.
At least, that's how I read the originating articles.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
In the real world, you can spend a lot of money and time producing something that is worth much less (if anything at all) than the resources you put into it.
Why do people continue to believe that the things they arguably "create" online have a value equivalent to the amount of time and money they put into producing them?
When OU was initially released, it had a realistic economic engine that ruined the game play. With todays economic engines, nearly everything you do betters your standing in the game. While this is good for promoting people doing things in the game, it has no bearing on the real world.
So if you spend months building up the character on your game of choice and a you have a contract indicating that someone is willing to buy your character at a price, you should have a case (under the normal pre-existing laws), but you shouldn't expect compensation for voluntary work should you find it worthless (lost, erased, destroyed) after-the-fact.
Disclaimer: Never played Ultima OnLine, but read interesting articles about online economic systems. Nor am I a lawyer, but if you think this is legal advice, I doubt a real lawyer could help in any way.
That's why there are pretend worlds and crap online, so you don't risk losing actual assetts. You play a car-racing GAME because you don't want to trash your ACTUAL car. If you crash your car in the game, do you cry and try to find someone to sue? No, because it's fairly obvious that it's PRETEND. You will not suffer REAL financial hardships because of this; you won't have to buy a new car. You won't have to shell out REAL money for repairs. You spend time in imaginary places to avoid real consequences. Now you want to get real compensation for imaginary losses? Okay, but how about if we then make a law that if your imaginary character dies, you must be killed too?
Sure, you want the good of reality, and the good of imaginary. You want to have your cake and eat it too. And you want to waste our time on this. Go blow a dog.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I read the entire near 100 page abstract (yeah, it's a boring day at work) and found it very interesting.
He seems to base his thesis on two decent arguments: first, investing time into making something, even if this investment is in a virtual world, gives something inherent value. secondly, that because in game properties are being sold via ebay that there is some sort of real-world value to these objects. He even points out that people have made 'us dollar to everquest platinum' currency conversions, and you can pretty easily earn around 3.24$ US dollars an hour 'working' on everquest.
I think given this base, his entirely abstract was pretty worthless other than a very good history on the evolution from the start of gaming to MUDs (which I used to frequent and appreciated the reminiscing) all the way to the everquest (graphical MUD) phenomenon.
The premise that investing time and effort into something, even virtual, makes it valuable?? seems ridiculous to me when the end result of such efforts is (realistically) changes in 0's to 1's and vice versa on a remote computer system. It seems like the author is taking the psychological effect of these games as having some sort of value. Who should really care if someone becomes emotionally invested in what really isn't more than a series of pixels on a screen.
The selling of items is merely a fluke, and I think it's partially companies like Sony's fault for letting it happen --shouldn't they have the power to just randomly delete the objects from the characters doing the selling (with some checking for fairness) ? And I'm sorry but that reference to the company hiring poor mexicans to play dark ages full time just to sell items is a hilarious(?) abuse of mythic's systems.
I played MUDs for a couple years, racked up a character with 3000 hours. I know how addicting and psychologically investing these games can be. Yet on the same note, I always understood deep down that it was just a file on a remote system, and were it to be erased then it would just be "too bad."
The phrase "it's just a game" is very overused (esp on slashdot) and I think is inappropriate because that implies that just because some people view these games as trivial that we all should. The author mentioned that a large number of people (many 80+hr/wk players) have been recorded as saying they feel their 'real life' is just a meaningless support to their lives in everquest.
I think the author hits that psychological impact right on the money, but on the same note, this shouldn't have any real world meaning except maybe feeling sorry for those who are hurt and lose property in 'virtual worlds.'
Can/should virtual world "property" be treated as legal property?
Lets look at "intellectual property". (almost an oxymoron in itself)
To say that an idea could be treated as property has always amazed me.
Property can be destroyed - an idea cannot.
Property can be stolen - and idea cannot (although it can be copied)
Upon transferal of property, the original owner loses possession - not so with an idea
And so on.........
Seem more likely that lawyers got together and realized that the only way for them to "sell" the absurd notion that an intangible "intellectual item" was "entitled" to legal rights and protection similar to real possessions, was to make those items seem "tangible" to the common public. And to that end, the term "Intelectual Property" seems to have been born.
But I digress...
Seems like virtual world property might actually be more "tangible" than "intellectual property".
Virtual world "property" exists (albeit in a virtual world), and its existence is governed by the programming/rules of that virtual world.
As such, that "property" (in the context of that virtual world) can:
Be stolen
Be destroyed
Be transferred (whereby the previous owner loses possession)
And so on...
(provided that the programming/rules permit these things).
And as such, it makes the prospect of virtual world "property" being treated as legal property even less ridiculous than "Intellectual Property"