James Grimmelman's ongoing discussion over at Lawmeme about democracy within virtual worlds, together with the comments on an earlier post has got me thinking about a related issue, the nature of avatar rights. Yes, yes, I know, Greg and I sank ignominiously last time we pushed this boat out, but we didn't have the benefit of the TerraNova hivemind back then. So, at the risk of having to start baling again...
To begin, let's bracket property rights for the moment (of course you can take a look over here, here, or here if you want to check out the skinny on this topic) and concentrate on other human (or constitutional) rights. And let's accept that an avatar doesn't have any rights; it's clearly the human being controlling the avatar which has the rights, if any exist. (I was going to call this "Typist's Rights" but this is too dull, and we'd get waaaaay too many hits from people interested in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Repititive Strain Injury).
Of the many ways one can attack this problem, a productive one is to look at the rights within the world and the rights without (ie outside) the world. The rights that inhere within the world are comprised of those granted by the developers or which emerge as a consequence of the society which emerges. And of course this will differ depending on the context of the world: Dave Rickey at Mutable Realms is building Wish to conform with pre-Charlemagnian feudalism and so expectations of inalienable human rights which were codified 1000 years later have little purchase here.
Which is not to say that rights will never exist or emerge within the world. Some worlds are built to facilitate this: LambdaMOO and A Tale In The Desert are, at one level, all about politics as gameplay. The LambdaMOO experience is well known, and ATITD seems to be following it with the combination of law built into the code (and indeed, a commitment that the wizards will code the political decisions of the populace.)
But the existence, in-world, of rights, politics, and democratic expectations, while of interest to sociologists isn't gonna cut much ice with a judge. So what about the rights out of the virtual, and in the real? Here it gets trickier. It's clear that the rights don't map cleanly, especially in RPGs. I'm allowed -- on PvP shards at least -- to frag, waste, and dismember other avatars, and no-one's civil rights are trampled on. But what of a claim that, say, the developers of ATITD failed to code the collective will of the populace?
Outside RPGs, especially in the new metaverses of There and Second Life, the question is a little harder. Where there is no obvious role to play, I'm fairly confident not only that the typists will feel the pain of "rights infringements" more seriously (has anyone else noticed how 2L and T avatars look just like better versions of our real life selves?) but also that judges are not going to be so quick to say that it's just a game. These worlds will, I suspect, be dealt with like other content carriers and will have to negotiate real life claims of rights fairly soon. The most obvious will be the usual sorts of communications problems that ISPs had to deal with -- defamation, porn, etc -- but it's not a stretch to re-imagine the Rape in Cyberspace into these sorts of worlds.
Ted C tentatively suggests that we should divide worlds into "gaming" and "not gaming." As Ted knows this sort of bright line rule pretty much never works, and in this case I wonder whether the sorts of claims at stake here are different in RPGs or metaverses. Maybe they're less likely in RPGs as an empirical observation, because everyone is too busy camping on mobs and signing up for raids, but should we treat EQ any differently (as a matter of law) from There? If EQ engages, say, in race-based discrimination or content censorship, should we cut them a break because it's all just a game?
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