To Kill An Avatar

Thanks to Legalaffairs.org for their new article called 'To Kill An Avatar', discussing lawmaking in online worlds. Although this is an often-explored subject, some interesting examples come up, such as a case in which "..an avatar [in virtual world There] put up a 'For Sale' sign in front of a house that he didn't own.. the scam artist collected some serious Therebucks (the currency of There) before the creators of the world discovered what was afoot and took corrective action." The article concludes without much hope of resolution: "You could make a virtual world without the possibility of crime - but it would probably be about as dynamic as Pong or Tetris.. by creating virtual lives, investments, and freedoms, we create the conditions for virtual crime."

Comments

Some online games almost have a system

[PapaSMURFFS]

I used to MUD every now and then (years ago) and reading this article kind of reminded why I stoped. When the MUD was still relitivly small player-wise it was easy to police things. Usually the wizards would do most of their work, except in a situation where a person pk-ed another person who had an anti-pk (they shouldn't be attacked nor were they to attack anyone else) flag set, which then allowed everyone (pk or otherwise) to attack them free of penalty. A kind of hard system, esp if you were a low level, but it sort of balanced out, and you could always appeal to one of the wizards for help.

The problem with these new MMRPGs is their sheer size, there is no really easy way for the few 'wizards' to police them, and having players police themselfs can lead to gang type situations. As well, even if you were to use players as police officers, there is no means to protect against police corruption. The problem with some of these games is they end up almost too 'read world' in many ways.