Terra Nova

MDY v. Blizzard Opinion

Legal commentators in the blogosphere (e.g. Nic Suzor, Technollama, Rebecca Tushnet, Venkat & Eric) have already offered some initial thoughts on the Ninth Circuit decision in MDY v. Blizzard. Since I talked about the district court opinion in this case in Chapter 9 of my book, I thought I'd post a few reactions too.

This post is going to be a bit on the long side, but that's only because the issues raised on this appeal are a bit tricky, meaning that I feel the need to lay a little doctrinal groundwork before getting to my thoughts about the case.

Though there was an interesting tortious interference decision in the appeal, I'm going to focus on the two copyright issues that were decided by the Ninth Circuit, one involving a claim that users of MDY's Glider program breached World of Warcraft (WoW)'s software license and the other claiming that users of MDY's Glider program violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)'s prohibitions on circumventing technological protection measures that limit access to copyrighted works. This second claim focused on the operation of Blizzard's Warden program, which monitors a player's computer to see if it is running any unauthorized software.

The appellate court essentially found in favor of MDY on the licensing issue, reversing the lower court, and in favor of Blizzard on the DMCA-Warden issue, affirming the lower court. That adds up to a win for Blizzard. That win could be reversed, in theory, if MDY pursues further appeals.  An en banc review of the Ninth Circuit is possible and there's always the slim chance of getting the case reviewed by the United States Supreme Court.

This Christmas, Protect Your Loved One From Games

Brett Arends of the Wall Street Journal offers ten reasons why he does NOT want an iPad for Christmas. Reason number 7: The games. Writes Arends:

"Yes, they're great. But that's the problem. Computer games are as addictive as cigarettes. And this is a habit everyone is taking up, not quitting. This is why I dumped my iPod Touch. Am I alone? Maybe. But I don't think so. I know lots of people with horror stories about addiction to immersive games. Someone I know—now, as it happens, a British member of parliament—once sat down to play Civilization, a role-playing game, on a PC one Saturday evening and didn't finish until three o'clock ... Thursday morning. (He stopped when he ran out of cigarettes.) And that was on an old PC. Games on the iPad are more intense than ever. A friend recently showed me some of the serious news apps on his iPad. I noticed that to get to them he first had to "wave" us past several screens of games. Is he really using his iPad to read that article about the Indonesian economy, or is he playing Angry Birds? Hmmm. You make the call."

Separating Recession From Trend

Blizzard's Cataclysm broke a single-day sales record for PC games: 3.3m copies in a day. At $40 each, that's $132m revenue in a day.

The weekend box office for the latest Narnia move this past weekend was $24m. The other fantasy releases like Tangled and Harry Potter, came to $24m in their second or third week. I took my two kids and three neighbor kids to Tangled last weekend. It cost me $90, you know, $10 for $1 worth of popcorn. I'm asking myself, what's the value proposition here? Why are we doing this?

Music sales numbers continue to slide. Michael Jackson sold 8.2m albums for Sony in 2009. If an album still costs $15 (does anyone buy albums?), that's $123m over a year. But after that blip, Sony's sales growth is in negative territory again.

TV ad revenue is down, though still in the billions and billions.

Activision says that Call of Duty Black Ops sold $650m over five days.

I'm seeing a really healthy interactive / fantasy media environment living in homes. Growing robustly despite the blah economy. But I wouldn't put money into music, TV, or going to the movies. TV can be soaked for a few more years yet, but the prospects are dimming. When the economy turns around, these things won't.

Violent Video Games...oh wait, no...Demand Characteristics Have Long-Term Influences

This study came out back in September but, in my opinion, it's nearly a classic for how not to do experimental video game research.  Very briefly, as is typical, the study authors randomly assigned college students to play either a violent (e.g. Mortal Kombat...which got me wondering if anyone even still plays that anymore) or non-violent (e.g. Grand Turismo 5, Guitar Hero) game.  Some of the participants (again randomly assigned) were then told to think about the game they had played for the next 24 hours.  They then returned to the lab the next day to be tested on their "aggression" using the commonly used "noise burst" TCRTT that has come under increasingly fire for poor validity recently (Kutner & Olson, 2008; Ritter & Eslea, 2005; Tedeschi & Quigley, 1996).  The authors claim results indicated that college students (the males at least, not the women) intructed by the experimenters to think about the video games over the intervening 24 hours were more "aggressive" whereas college students not so instructed were not.

Ignoring the repetition of old problems (the poorly validated aggression measure, the poorly matched video games, the sub-adequate exposure time) I was left wondering how the very obvious demand characteristics of this study evaded the peer reviewers.  The experimenters TOLD participants to think about video games for 24 hours.  It seems to me they might as well have written down the study hypotheses and told participants to expect to write an essay on the General Aggression Model the next day.

As noted in the original article "Thus, violent video game effects can cause an increase in aggression at least 24 hr after the game has been turned off, at least among men who ruminate about the game. It is reasonable to assume that our lab results will generalize to the ‘‘real world.’’ Violent gamers usually play longer than 20 min and probably ruminate about their game play in a habitual manner."

This generalization to the real world is only possible if in the real world experimenters come into your home and instruct you to think about your video games for the next 24 hours.  I'm left wondering what it means that video game players "...probably ruminate about their game play in a habitual manner."  Seems a pretty broad stroke to paint with. 

This has been a problem with a lot of the video game research, particularly on the experimental side.  Much of the research is done with college students and are probably quite used to hypothesis guessing psychological research (once someone has learned about Milgram's studies, I almost think they should never be allowed to participate in psychological research again).  But very often the participants are given some instructions which are clearly related to the study hypotheses and also odd enough to set hypothesis guessing in motion.  It's disappointing to see such research as this received uncritically when such flaws are evident. 

While I'm on this study, John Sherry's work very early on (2001) suggested such short exposure times (20 minutes) are sub-standard.  Longer exposure times in video game violence research are associated with smaller effects, not larger ones.  For awhile this finding was puzzling (and ignored due to its inconvenience I suspect).

More recently Przybylski, Rigby and Ryan (2010) seem to have figured out why.  It turns out violent video games often have more difficult controls than non-violent games.  When exposure times are short, violent game players are cut off before they've even figured out the controls.  Imagine trying to master Modern Warfare 2 while people randomized to the non-violent condition are humming away at Tetris (and I've seen just those kinds of parings in research more than once, I wish I were exaggerating).  Any "aggression" appears to be due to being frustrated at being cut off at such a short interval.  At longer intervals players have mastered the controls and fewer differences between randomized groups are seen.

Apparently we should go ahead and play violent video games, as long as its not for only 20 minutes at a time...

[Edited for format]

 

 

 

 

Avatar Experimentation: Human Subjects Research in Virtual Worlds

I have just posted a (rough) draft of my latest paper, entitled Avatar Experimentation: Human Subjects Research in Virtual Worlds to SSRN.  Virtual worlds make such great research testbeds precisely because people act in a lot of ways (especially economic ways) as if the virtual world were real.  But that complicates ethical research design: you can't engage in activities that threaten the subject's digital property or community, for example.  This raises human subjects research issues that a lot of Institutional Review Boards may not immediately take into consideration.  Here's the abstract -- but the important part is that this is still a work-in-progress (it's coming out in a symposium issue of the U.C. Irvine Law Review next year), and I would love comments or suggestions.  Abstract after the leap.