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Freedom of Expression in Virtual Worlds
PDHoss writes "NYTimes.com has a story on freedom of expression as it applies to virtual communities, specifically 'The Sims Online.' How should issues of free speech, community standards, and censorship be addressed in the virtual world (given that we can barely agree on those issues in meatspace)?" There's also a story in the Independent, and we've mentioned this guy before.
the bottom line is that people are still going to say whatever they please, regardless of how little jimmy will interpret it.
First of all, "Freedom of Speech" in America is a loaded phrase.
"Freedom of Speech" is a government thing. It deals with the relationship between people and their government. Likewise "Censorship". Properly used, the political term "censorship" refers to a relationship between a person or persons, and the government.
None of these have to do with the case at hand. This is not a "Freedom of Speech" issue or a "censorship" issue, but something else. This is the relationship between a services provider and a client, and the political concepts of censorship or free speech have nothing to do with it.
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The answer, or rather, question, may be simpler than expected. Should these be issues at all? The Internet has the potential to be the ultimate even ground for peoples of all race, color, and mentality to communicate and be heard just as loud as the proverbial next guy. The more regulation there is, the harder it becomes for such a vision to become reality. Yes, there are such things as t3h pr0n and abominations like goatse, but ideally a system would eventually arise that permits people to filter for themselves what they would see-this is to say that it would be automated somehow, as obviously anyone can filter what their own eyes see simply by choosing whether or not to hit Enter after typing a URL.
Censorship is something to be treated very, very carefully. And we're living in a world right now where all too many people are overeager to jump on the censorship train and start filtering everything under the sun. Be careful, or else you might wind up filtering the sun as well, and where would the light come from then?
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...in the real world, you have your government's charter/constitution which allows you rights, and hopefully, a good amount of legal interpretation to further define your rights. Your government (one hopes) doesn't revoke them.
In an online world, you have the TOS of the company that makes the game, and they are the ones that define your rights, and you have to agree, or they revoke your account, as happened in this case.
It would seem that unless a collective of people started an online world like the SIMS, that it will be the game company that decides what is acceptable speech and what is not.
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Simple -- censorship [shouldn't] exist in *either* world. Filtering for young people and such, fine, but not censorship. Virtual reality should be just that -- a representation of reality.
This is a very difficult thing to make general statements about. If virtual reality ever gets to the point(and I think it will) that it actually begins to mimic reality itself, and it is used as a replacement for normal reality, THEN the philosophies for censorship, whatever they are in the majority view, should carry over.
Until then, these online games do not constitute enough of a viable replacement for the real world to be considered in the same way in terms of censorship. The content providers who run these worlds should have complete control over their own content. For them not to have control over it would sort of be a strange form of censorship itself, would it not?
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Users should be able to form groups and communities within those worlds and those groups and communities should put into place their own cencorship policies. Or atleast rate their groups and other groups on self cencorship.
with every group or person with a rating on their cencorship and individuals with their self set (or parent enforced) tolarance levels the world would be self cencored.
Yes things would slip past, but when it does, that person (or group) would be censored by the users
either that or use slashcode and implement moderator and meta-moderator type cencorship level
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
Well, since the "virtual world" is privately owned, requires money to participate in, isn't tied to government in any way, etc...I'd say it's pretty clear cut; freedom of speech doesn't apply on private property.
Let's get real here folks- what's next, arrest for murder if I cut your Massively-Multiplayer-whatever-the-hell-it-is character's throat? Jeeeeeeezus...
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No one in these virtual worlds should be allowed to paint their dwellings the color of the YRO pages.
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The Sims Online, as a subscription service, has the rights to prevent anyone from using their service. It's kind of like private property in real life: not everyone has to be let in.
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in Alphaville, I'd form an angry lynch mob, and torch my perceived enemies virtual properties.
I would then nominate myself as Alphamale and rule the city with an iron fist.
On the other hand, I certainly have a reasonable expectation of not to have to wade through all that crap. I pretty much never browse at 0 or lower, and more and more often I have the filter set to +2.
There is a filtering mechanism here, but it is _voluntary_ to use. Anybody who wants to look at the stuff modded to -1 is perfectly free to do so. Anybody want to see +2 and above only is free to do that. A right to post/publish/whatever is _not_ a right to be read or seen.
That said, apart from discrimination laws, anybody with a server is of course free to treat its contents the way they want - as an owner, you can pretty much delete anything you want, for any reason (again, as long as you do not run afoul of discrimination issues - delete all posts by people of a certain race or gender will probably get you into well deserved trouble, for instance).
Freedom of speech does not give you any right to post whatever you want at another persons server; what it does is give you a right to post what you like (within the limits of the law) on your own server without being censored by your government. In the smae way, you have no right at all to write something and expect it to be published in your local paper. What you do have is the right to start your own, competing paper and publish whatever you want in it.
So if an entertainment company decides that some subject matter is out of bounds in their virtual world, they can do so. You are free to leave and start your own world. Similarily, if you really do not like the slashdot system, you are free to leave and start a competing system with the kind of policies you like. That is what freedom of speech (and, by and large, equivalent laws in other countries) means.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You do not have a right to free speech on games like "The Sims Online".
These games are a privledge, and if the communities are outraged about censorship, or anything else, well they should fight with their money.
Sidenote: This may not be the case with TSO, but i've noticed in many MMORPGS (think EQ), people are so addicted to it, despite the fact they hate the company that owns it, they continue to play it.
They still piss and moan about it but they never actally cancel the game.
Maybe thats what happened here.
Browse at -1, because trolls are often the most creative part of
This might seem like a minor distinction to many, but it's the difference between saying "Nothing in the Constution gives you the right to do X" and "Nothing in the Constitution grants the federal government the power to restrict X". Those are really, really major differences. Living under one model is vastly different than the other.
If we see government as the grantor of our rights, we have to go begging to the federal government every time we want to do something new and hope they'll take pity on us. If we see the Constitution as a contract between government and citizens where citizens grant a specific number of powers to government, no begging is required when something new comes up that government hasn't already restricted.
Specific to the /. crowd, it might be relevant that the federal government has no legal power to control personal communications, and that would apply to the internet, regardless of MIME type. The feds may think they have the power to impose restrictions, which they probably can exercize, but they have no legal authority to exercize a power like that. And they can't prevent you from becoming an ISP with a more reasonable (to you) TOS and running ISP's with silly TOS requirements out of business.
We are the collective of the people, or "We, the People", who have the rights (government only has powers), who can make this internet anything we want it to be, by becoming a part of it's infrastructure or paying to be members of this virtual community. Who's stopping you, unless you're a "subject" or citizen of a country where you've been fooled into believing that the source of your rights is some government?
Your making one mistake: these virtual worlds are supposed to be escapes from reality, not substitutes. If I want reality, I'll go outdoors or to work and get the real thing. I want an escape when I go online, a place were I can escape my normal responisbilities. A place were I can act as who I am and not who I am at work. If they make these virtual worlds mirrors of this one with all the restrictions and censorship as this one, how will it be an escape? It won't be. If these games becomes political where all that has to happen is one person out of 1,000,000 complains and we get instant censorship, then were will we escape too? A video game inside one of these virtual communities? And if these virtual worlds become too restrictive, they won't be fun anymore and who will be paying to play them then?
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Your[sic] making one mistake: these virtual worlds are supposed to be escapes from reality, not substitutes. If I want reality, I'll go outdoors or to work and get the real thing. I want an escape when I go online, a place were I can escape my normal responisbilities. A place were I can act as who I am and not who I am at work. If they make these virtual worlds mirrors of this one with all the restrictions and censorship as this one, how will it be an escape? It won't be. If these games becomes political where all that has to happen is one person out of 1,000,000 complains and we get instant censorship, then were will we escape too? A video game inside one of these virtual communities? And if these virtual worlds become too restrictive, they won't be fun anymore and who will be paying to play them then?
/..
Interesting perspective. I'd long held views similar to yours, until I ran across systems that had an immense amount of freedom for the users. Inevitably, flamebait and spammers pollute the virtual atmosphere enough to warrant, and in fact *demand* some form of censorship. If you don't think that's the case, simply look at
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Well, for those that understand the law, and rights, it's simple. When you are on someone elses property, wether it be their house, or their server.. you have no right to free anything. I can't walk into a store and start marching around with abortion protest signs. I will first be asked to leave, and then arrested for trespass. That's the way America works, for better or for worse. A lot of people think they should be given rights to so many things, but don't realize they forfeited those rights when they failed to read the small print on the "TOS."
You have to realize that every provider of goods, either real or electronic has rights of their own. In this case one really stands out: the right to refuse service.
Now, I could sue my employer for unfair termination, particularly if they had not detailed or educated me on their sexual harrassment policy.
But legislation has provided that operators of online forums have extensive safe harbor protections. For a while there, this was sketchy (see Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy , where an investment firm successfully sued Prodigy over a defamatory post and Prodigy lost because it was ruled they took such an active hand in controlling board content that they became lost Safe Harbor protection), but later legislation broadened safe harbor provisions to such an extent that EA/Maxis can boot anyone, clean things up as they see fit, or leave them messy, and they have little or no legal liability to the people who got booted or the people harmed/offended by content that stays. IANAL, but AFAIK, they've got a pretty free hand and the only thing to govern their actions is the free market.
Of course, it's quite possible they were just getting in over their heads when they created the online world they did.
A friend of mine was talking at work Friday about a friend of hers who would create new Sims Online characters just to bring them back to his primary character's residence, kill them, and bury them in the living room.
When the world devolves to a place where a man can find a willing victim for cannibalization online, it's hard for weirdness not to filter into online worlds. When a search for "grief players" on Google turns up 1,800 results, you know that this is no limited phenomenon.
Perhaps the question is not whether there should be freedom within alternate worlds (or as absolute as you can get within the bounds of the program), but how you have to balance freedom against other needs and wants.
How much freedom is necessary to not only complete the objectives of the game, but make the game a fun place to hang out? Should you limit interaction between avatars to only that which is needed to complete game objectives and otherwise phase out community aspects? Can you take out the elements that grief players exploit and yet leave the game with enough oomph to make it popular with a big enough mass of people for it to be profitable?
It's too easy to just lash out at EA and Maxis for booting this guy. Given, it may be a knee-jerk reaction and probably wrong on a moral or ethical level, but virtual worlds are pretty new and the optimal construction and management of them for maximum player enjoyment with minimum grief player exploitation is not a set formula by any stretch of the imagination.
Honestly, a smart move would be to create a virtual world based on that "Manhunt" game they've been advertising on TV or based on GTA. Make a world of pimps, whores, seedy strip joints, dominatrixes, S&M clubs... Make a world where giving grief to others without getting grief is the challenge, and throw in a bunch of sex and sleaze to boot.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a big commercial draw (though it probably would be), but it would probably be a great way to siphon away grief players from other games.
No city ever completely cleans up its red light district or skid row necause they need them. People are going to sell and buy drugs. People are going to sell and buy sex. People are going to fall into the gutter and be more interested in staying there than getting out. These districts serve a purpose... keeping that stuff out of the suburbs and better urban neighborhoods.
That's the sociology of the games. If you conside
Start a happiness pandemic
When I was beta testing TSO, I started to get a few ideas about what might be possible with this sort of game. Obviously, the sexual deviance mentioned in the article occured to me (not in any vivid detail, I assure you). I thought the more interesting possibilities lied in more normal, healthy human relationships, however. For example, I was then (and am still now) involved in a long-distance romantic relationship. I began to contemplate the idea of a virtual date with my girlfriend. We could eat out, go see a show, take a romantic walk in the park. Of course, it doesn't compare to any of these activities in real life, but a virtual date, or "proxy intimacy", as I'll call it, is light-years beyond AIM as a communication medium for lovers. Of course, for single sims, nothing says you can't meet someone actractive at the club and begin a whole online relationship (once again, much more interesting than the lurid creepiness of singles chatrooms).
Unfortunately, my dreams for this sort of interaction never panned out. TSO, while trumpeted as being freeform and open-ended in the extreme, wound up digging itself into a rut pretty quickly. Some of its problems lie in the fact that it ranks users on ladders, and introduces systems of competition which are entirely artificial to a game which attempts to emulate "real life". Case in point: statistics on the richest and most popular sims. In the former case, you have a bunch of hyper-capitalists trying to outpace eachother in the generation of a hyperinflating virtual currency (more on the economic problems in TSO later). In the latter, you see an even more bizarre and surreal sort of competition, wherein online characters do whatever they can to get a "friend" designation from other players and then, for the most part, ignore those characters (what an odd definition of friendship).
Another difficulty is introduced in the zoning system used for property. On a basic level, there is none. This sounds good enough, as it should theoretically enable the construction of any sort of enterprise. The unfortunate result of this, however, is that most places just look more or less like houses. There's no concept of shared or leased property, either, as every property has a distinct owner or owners (thus, there are no apartment buildings, no malls, no office parks, nothing). And, although the game lays out properties with physical locations on a map of your chosen city, these locations have no real meaning whatsoever. Properties are not connected to adjacent properties in any special way, and thus the concept of a neighborhood is utterly nonexistent (the lack of anything approximating geography in-game is a very significant barrier to the formation of actual communities). Travelling anywhere in the game is a point-and-click affair, so there's nothing like walking down the street to the drugstore, or taking the subway cross-town to the nightclub. Similarly, you can't walk over to Bob's for the barbeque.
To be sure, people do hold many social events in the game world, but conducting them with friends (in the traditional sense, no the wierd in-game definition) can be difficult. There is very little consistency to online relationships, as the only people you're likely to run into with any frequency in a particular establishment (without having made prior plans) are the owners. Locations are no help, due to the fact that each is a node unto itself (I actually never met any of my neighbors in Alphaville. I doubt many people have). The chance of repeatedly encountering someone by chance then becomes exceedingly small. This, I think, contributes to some of the romantic and sexual wierdness of the game. In TSO, you can't see that cute girl at the Deli a few times during lunch and then work up the nerve to strike up a conversation with her. Better ask if she wants to do the make out action now while you can! Now, if TSO behaved like a more realistic analogue of life, there wouldn't be such a market for prostitution in the gameworld, as people would probably be dating and even
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