Slashdot Mirror
Virtual Muggings in Lineage II
electro-donkey writes "A man has been arrested in Japan after on suspicion using a bot to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash, according to this report from NewScienist.com.
"I regularly say that every form of theft and fraud in the real world will eventually be duplicated in cyberspace," says Bruce Schneier."
Wow... I come into this discussion and only 1 post is here, which is the parent. I agree on every point. If it is possible to become 'invincible' in the game, its not the fault of the person who used it, its the fault of the gaming company for allowing it to happen.
The game involves real money and looting, this should be expected and the players know the risk coming into the game. No crime, IMHO, was committed.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
If he was allowed to steal from the characters, as it was part of the game, and then other people gave a value to the item, doesn't that cloud the issue? The items have no intrinsic value, yes they represent hard work and dedication, but really they can just be created out of thin air by the game designers. The items are not supposed to have real world value, and that is why they can be stolen in the game. It's an interesting collision of worlds, and might eventually leave a precedent for the value of goods in an MMORPG. Law is coming to the New Wild West.
http://www.pterrys.com
What exactly was the crime here? The article is slim on details. Was it the fact that he was using a bot? Is that against the TOS (would be my guess)? Surely, it can't be the fact that the bot "beat and robbed" a player character. If it's something you can do in the game, then how can you be arrested for that? Or was it the selling of the items online? Was that illegal? It just seems to me the article doesn't say much to perpetuate discussion.
--------
This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
I don't know if this falls under civil or criminal code. On one hand, its just a game. On the other hand, so is blackjack, but its a crime to cheat someone out of money.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
What doe sthis say about how advanced a country is when even their police departments understand cyber life well enough to grasp the thought of an MMPORG mugging . Can you imagine calling the Police in say Kansas City and explaining to them how Zoltare the Unmerciful is repeatedly muggin your character Meri the Fancy . I'm sure you get a few laughs or maybe just complete silence . Whats next ?
On point 1, yes, he broke the EULA by using a bot.
On point 2, NO, he did NOT break in-game rules, it's part of the game.
On the last point, agreed, if he broke the EULA, he should be banned and items returned, but that's it.
No, now you're talking about the real world. Not a fake game. In a game, the programmers have complete control over how people interact with each other because they define the world in which they interact.
Beating up an on-line character and taking away its on-line money in a game is not at al analogous to robbing somebody.
It's more like beating somebody at poker.
Lineage II is a game in which characters are allowed to compete with each other for assets that have real-world value, just as with an on-line poker match. Taking somebody's money in Lineage II is no worse (or better) than slow-playing a hand of Texas Hold 'Em until some poor sap goes "all in" against you, and then cleaning them out.
That said, there are two obvious conclusions you can draw from my analogy:
1. If you cheat at poker, even on-line poker, you are a theif and should be arrested. Likewise, they were right to arrest this guy.
2. Lineage II is not just a recreational game. It's a means of gambling, and therefore should be regulated as such by any country which chooses to regulate gambling.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Now, it is up to the government to decide if an in-game crime is a real crime or not, and THEN they need to decide if the company that built the game can be held responsible for using a rule-system that allowed for the crime to happen. Remember, these are suddenly real-world tax dollars fighting a problem that could be solved through changing the rules of the game. As a taxpayer, I vote for that option.
First we start with the idea that even if something is not "physical" or "material", it can still have a monetary value (see "proprietary software", a "patented idea" or even "money" which is nothing more than a number).
Then you have a definition of fraud that goes something like "using unethical means to deprive someone of something of value".
Then you have a rule (in the form of an EULA) that explicitely says bots are not allowed.
Put the three together : He used a bot (thus breaking the rules) in an unethical fashion with the purpose of depriving other players from articles that have monetary value.
The guy commited fraud. Fraud is a (real-world) crime. Therefore the guy commited a crime.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Why exactly? I'm not supporting his actions but lets look at this realistically. Video games for there entire existence have been carefully created environments. We as players have always assumed that if a game allows you to do something you should because its a "feature".If it turned out that an ability was not intentionally created then it was determined to be a bug and fixed.
Does anyone play GTA and not carjack random drivers or mug passerbys etc? No, because that a feature of the game, thats why people play it. There might be consequences but they've always been gamespace consequences for gamespace actions.
To make a game where its possible to mug someone and then politely ask people not to do it or you'll arrest them (in meatspace) flys in the face of 30 years of game design. It might make sense at some point but we're not there yet.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Exactly.
If the game allows stealing, then they should implement an in-game way of handling theft. If they do not or people find a way of working around that and every attempt (patch) at fixing the backdoor/loop-hole, they still have the option of applying the virtual 'death penalty' in the form of account bans.
Games are only that, games. If this continues, online gamers will need a hotline to their lawyer(s) before signing on.
Okay, I agree with you up to a point. PVP means PVP, hack and slash, loot and plunder. I have no issue with that. Just like a poker game is PVP, and a good poker player can take my money without it being a crime.
That said, the bot was cheating. He cheated at a game to take things that had real world money value. If somebody cheated at poker to take things of value, that would be a crime. I don't see why this game would be handled differently from a card game. He didn't win the things, he cheated them. He sold the things he got by cheating, and made money.
I don't care about the "theft" angle. I care about the bot. That is what made it fraud. Online or card game, it should be handled all the same, IMHO.
When you perform unethical actions in a game, and these things are considered bad by the people controlling and playing the game, negateve in-game consequences can ensue, to discourage such actions For example, in L2, when you PK, your karma goes negative and you turn red. (Until your karma goes to -INT_MAX, at which point it wraps to INT_MAX, until they fixed that.) Thus, other players are warned, and as a result of the coded rules of the game, they can PK you without consequence. And if you run a bot, you are in violation of the terms of service, which specify a remedy - you are kicked from the game.
When you sign up for a game, you are agreeing, implicity and also probably explicitly in the terms of service, that you will sometiese virtually 'possess' virtual objects, which you might be able to buy and sell on eBay, but that at any time, you can be PK'd, there can be a server error, the admins can decide they don't like you - and your 'possessions' will fall to someone else or disappear, and there's nothing you can do about it. You agreed to this. There's no reason for meatspace governments to start protecting people who have made this kind of agreement from the possible consequences of such an agreement.
Played with little rectangular bits of cardboard imprinted with color images, each unit cost well under a cent to make.
Can you see where I'm going here. . ?
As it happened, these little bits of cardboard proved to be immensely popular. People were willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for single cards at the height of Magic's half-decade rule of high popularity. --Thing is, you couldn't eat 'em. You couldn't build much of a shelter with them. In fact, they were pretty much useless. . , except as a means of holding a little bit of information by way of printed text.
As printed text is worthless to anybody who hasn't got a functioning and integrated human brain, all the value contained on those bits of cardboard existed entirely because everybody agreed at the same time that those little bits of cardboard were valuable. It was an huge act of group imagination filling a dead artifact with pretend value. --But that by itself is interesting, because it creates the reality in which people were willing to shell out hundreds of dollars, (more printed bits of paper, BTW).
So what gives?
Simple. Imagined value is just as powerful as any other kind when everybody agrees to participate in the illusion. Heck, it has been said that the health of the economy is entirely, (100%) dictated by people's belief in what the health of the economy happens to be.
Thus, Cybercrime, if enough people agree that matter-less bits of coded data, (which you can't eat or build a shelter out of), are worth something, then yeah, people are going to go to dramatic extremes to acquire said bits of imagined 'property'.
Physical property is usually just a place-holder for imagined value. In the digital world, the place holder for the illusionary value just happens to be made of the same stuff as the illusionary value itself. Thin air and the spark of imagination.
-FL