Terra Nova

The Four Worlds Theory

Here’s a broad theory for people to shoot holes in.

Communities of virtue

“The recent terrorist events were not committed by any community”

Trust Me, Baby

There has been some controversy in Blizzard’s official World of Warcraft forums lately over the concept of privacy.  After some players started asking some pointed questions in a now-locked message thread, an official Blizzard post from community rep Caydiem confirmed that the company scans players’ computers for hacking programs. He tried to address the issue of whether the scans are ethically appropriate, as well as being legal and allowed by the EULA, assuring the player base that Blizzard was collecting no personally identifiable information, just looking for the cheaters.

Of course, the controversy hasn’t stopped there. 

I Have Your Credit Card

So, suppose you're a virtual world developer. Your players have signed a contract with you, and you have their credit card on file. It's on file so that you can charge people their monthly subscription (or, for RMT worlds, so you can sell them stuff).

Is that all you can do with it, though?

Contradictions (2)

Here’s another contradiction about virtual worlds. This one is about character ownership.

Super scary

So I guess Marvel / DC own this too.

Shoot to kill

What would it feel like if with your very last hit it was not just the MOB that fell but a living breathing creature somewhere in the world died too?

Consoles and Virtual Property

Not being a console player, I'm probably the last to notice the introduction of virtual property into console gaming. But this morning I saw the article by BBC news entitled "Online gaming costs set to rise." Terrible headline, and the subbie should be shot, but the upshot of this is that console game devs like Microsoft and EA are introducing "downloadable content" into their games. Which content costs money, and which looks quite a lot like the sorts of virtual assets we've gnawed over for the last couple of years here at Terra Nova.

Here's the snip from the article that caught my eye:

Tepper on Law

ATITD's Andy Tepper on the construction of law in cyberspace. Thanks to IU MIME student Trip O'Dell for the tip.

I never touched her

A question that is probably as old as clay tablets is whether mediated-sex (be it via phone, email, IM, SMS or in a VW) really counts as cheating on ones partner. While some of us muse about the ethics of this, others have gone ahead and based business models on it.

Byte Murder

More evidence that 'virtual' as a prefix to 'property' has no modifying function: A guy sold another guy's virtual sword without his permission, so the second guy killed the first guy. Thanks Tobold for the head's up.

Does the word 'virtual' have any meaning now?

Edit: A longer description, from China Daily. Thanks [anonymous]. EC

Communities and MMOGs: Nations and States

A new article by Nicholas Gervassis of University of Edinburgh School of Law, from the Journal of Information Law and Technology.

Marvel: Loses Round 1 on Points

According to an NCSoft/BusinessWire release, the judge in the Marvel v NC Soft & Cryptic Studios case dismissed several key claims earlier this week.

In the World, But Not Of It

World of Warcraft forum-hounds have recently been chewing over the difficult case of one "Baxter", who has been desperately appealing his sentence of virtual execution for the apparent crime of levitating into forbidden places. The discussion (in one main thread and several other related ones) has mostly centered on various competing ideas about virtual jurisprudence and due process, which touch on my established interest in the "MMOG state".

But I think there's another issue here that takes us away from the official forum thrashing about Baxter's guilt or innocence to the theory and practice of MMOG design. Namely, what's the best way to implement the long-term addition of new geographies and content to a MMOG world?

Who’s Rulz?

Who gets to decide what’s good gaming and what is bad - player base, publisher, Microsoft !! ?

DRM and VWs

Danny Vogely sent us a query that follows on from a comment by Euphrosyne in an earlier post:

"[A] possibility this model brings up is DRM for game items. If you can only buy items from the developer, then it is relatively easy to make sure that you don't sell/give that item to others (via internal or external means). Avatars and possessions could be checked against each other for "proper authorization". Seems likely to infuriate players, but is still a possibility."

A Thought Experiment

Suppose a disgruntled programmer were to run some code that flipped the sex of every player character in EverQuest. Further suppose that this programmer did such a thorough job that it would take a week before all the characters could be flipped back.

The players would complain, obviously, but would they actually play for that week? Would they learn anything from the experience?

Feel free to partition the player base any way you like, if you feel that different groups would have different reactions. Note, though, that I'm not asking how you would react; I'm asking how you think players in general would react.

What Would Walt Do?

You're a game company and you're looking for lore. We've learned that even if you pick something obviously in the public domain, you still might get sued.  What to do? Do what Walt did! Take your lore from sources whose heritage is so ancient and obscure that no one can possibly claim ownership. (For extra credit, twist this ancient and revered lore around so that it suits some contemporary ideology. )

The WWWD Award for 2005 goes to ...
 

In da hood

TN readers will no doubt be aware that 404 games are working on a ‘hip-hop’ MMO. The list of collaborators is starting to read like a who’s who of rap and now includes DJ Pooh a.k.a Mark Jordan “writer” of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

I started to imagine role playing a character like the one that I play GTA:SA, this immediately started to make me wonder about the idea of what one might call “race-bending”.

Buy the Farm

Rich Thurman, at one time possibly the biggest gold farmer in Ultima Online, ICQ’d me the other day to let me know it’s all over. He’s moving on and – in the hallowed tradition of MMORPG liquidators everywhere – putting his famous automated gold farm (pictured left) up for auction on eBay. No, the machines don’t come bundled with the gold-harvesting uber-macros he wrote for them, so don’t go getting ideas. But if you want a piece of virtual-world history, make your bid. And if you want a rare first-person glimpse into the world of the hardcore farmer, check out Rich’s farewell confessional to the UO community, in which we learn of high-tech hacks for dodging GMs, mob wars between competing bot-runners, and the curiously ludic motivations of at least one unrepentant exploiter. It can now be revealed, as well, that virtual crime pays: Rich claims to have produced and sold over 9 billion gold pieces in two years, for a total rake of about $106,000, all while holding down a respectable day job as a software consultant and putting in quality time with his wife and three kids.

What then to say? As Brian Sutton-Smith and others have pointed out, the hard distinction drawn between work and play is a peculiarly Western and modern one. I would further argue that computer networks in particular and the drift of modern capitalism in general are working hard to collapse that distinction throughout our culture, and I’ve been trying for months to find the right words to make that case (for my latest effort, see this essaylet I just submitted for publication in the German art magazine Kunstforum). But for now, I think Rich’s story says it all a lot better than I’ve managed to.

Korean Consumer Protection

A small datapoint about the regulation of MMOGs:

Korean consumer protection authorities are expanding their investigation of MMOG companies poor consumer satisfaction levels and complaints of abusive terms of service, poor quality, etc. Ten companies are now involved. This comes on the back of complaints filed last year by consumer rights groups.

Extract from the Korean Herald below the fold.

One Lawsuit to Rule Them All

And so, it begins.

"This letter is to notify you that you are violating the World of Warcraft End User License Agreement (EULA) and Terms of Use (TOU), infringing Blizzard’s copyrights and trademarks, and contributing to the copyright infringement of others."

Missouri to Its Prisoners: No Frags For You

According to the Associated Press, prisoners in a Missouri jail had managed to get themselves some videogames. Those games have now been taken away. The reasoning: These violent criminals have already crossed a line, who knows what Grand Theft Auto might make them do.

Will there be a defense of the right to play?

SoP2: Avatar Rights, Virtual Liberty, etc

Panel number 2, and we have Eddan Katz chairing and Peter Ludlow, Jack Balkin, and Fred Schauer chatting about rights-related issues, and specifically the movement across the boundaries between the real and the virtual.

SoP II: Whose Law?

If the solution to a virtual world problem is a law we immediately get the question: Who’s?

Open Source Game Servers and the Forces of Evil

A federal court in St. Louis has ruled that open source programmers who created the BnetD game server violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Blizzard Entertainment's EULA.

Chalk another one up to the bad guys. But hey, if you need cheering up, you only need to know that the House recently passed the only-slightly-dumb Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, and that Satan himself is meeting with the content industries prior to the markup of the INDUCE Act.

Sigh.

I know that it's not going to help, but can I suggest to anyone who has the ear of game devs (especially Blizzard execs) to talk with them about why locking up their systems is a bad idea. I leave the comments to others to explain/debate why this might be so.

Sigh.

GOM hacked

Nate Combs alerted me to the following announcement from Jamie Hale, head of Gaming Open Market (the folks who provide a virtual currency market and transfer operation for Second Life, and who used to do it for lots of worlds):

--START EMAIL EXTRACT--
"Well, it happened again. Someone took advantage of us and we have another mess to clean up. Linden Lab noticed the problem early and stepped in and froze all the funds in Zeppi's account so that the fraudster couldn't make off with any. But of course, that prevented a few of you from getting your withdrawals. Rest assured your money (USD and L$) are safe - we just have to sift through the records to figure out who owes what to whom. If you have "lost" any L$ in the past day, please reply to this email with the details (time and avatar name) and I'll add it to the list to correct.

Law is code

The rules of regular computer games are defined in code. If the game lets you do it, you can do it; if it doesn't, you can't. Want your RPG party members to fireball one another? Go ahead. Want to drive the wrong way round a racing circuit? If it lets you, sure, why not?

The rules of virtual worlds are also defined in code, but there are other rules beyond this that can't be coded: no profanity, no hate speech, no commodification, no [whatever]. These rules are defined in the EULA.

Because EULA rules aren't "part of the game", some players feel free to disregard them. The typical response to a violation is, "Hey, the program let me do it. If you didn't want me to do it, you should have coded it out".

Alternatively...

Avatar heal thy self

The medical profession seem to be taking quite an interest in all things virtual at the moment. The current edition of the prestigious British Medical Journal has a paper titled: Health related virtual communities and electronic support groups: systematic review of the effects of online peer to peer interactions. Similarly there is a long history of the use of Virtual Reality in medicine, especially in the treatment of pain.

While this research is not about virtual worlds it seems very likely that the potential therapeutic effects seen in other forms of virtually would be seen within VWs.

So does this add another angle to the general status of VWs argument? Forget eBay, forget free speech, what when closing or kicking someone out of a VW can be shown to impact a treatment regime and impact their health negatively?

Heinous, Atrocious, or Cruel...

The California legislature is currently debating a law forbidding violent video games. The bill seeks to control electronic games that "taken as a whole . . . appeal to minors' morbid interest in violence, that enable the player to virtually inflict serious injury upon human beings or characters with substantially human characteristics in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, and that, taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

This sort of regulation crops up often these days, and obviously implicates First Amendment principles. Over at Findlaw, Professor Vikram David Amar (UC Hastings Law School) and Professor Alan Brownstein (UC Davis Law School) discuss whether the First Amendment will forbid this sort of regulation, and they do a nice job of explaining why there is no clear answer. Their conclusion, isn't going to win them any friends in the game developer camp:

"In the end, the First Amendment doesn't necessarily foreclose sensible regulation in this area. For that reason, states like California should feel free to experiment in this realm if experimentation otherwise makes sense."

China & Virtual Property

Xinhuanet has the latest update in the "China Virtual Property Chronicles." Case number three has been filed against the operators of Mir3. A player bought a sword for about 1000 yuan (approx US$120) only to have it deleted by the devs because it had been duped by the guy he bought it from. Virtual property, duping, and fraud. Heaven.

What is it with China and virtual property? I thought they were supposed to be a communist state? What's with all this property talk?

(Oh, as an aside, the article mentions that an earlier case alleging theft (which we reported on some time ago) was rejected by the court on the basis that virtual property couldn't sustain a theft action. Would be worth a blog posting all of its own, were I not so lazy).

UO lawsuit settled

It looks like the Ultima Online Counselors lawsuit has reached some sort of settlement. While I can't track down any official info at EA, the main link everyone seems to be pointing to is over at Gamerifts (2 April entry) where they have an image of a purported check sent out to former counselors (if anyone finds other info, please do post it). The amount given to at least one volunteer - $1,267.21. Just a little background - a group of former UO volunteer helpers filed a class action lawsuit against EA in 2000 (they'd been previously hit with a suit about their quality of service but that was dismissed as far as I can tell). The main claim was for minimum wages and overtime compensation per the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). You can hit the Lum the Mad archives search for some additional background, an old Salon article for more past coverage, or an always entertaining Tweety Rant archive entry on the subject. The judge's order certifying the group as a class (issued 24 September 2002) is particularly interesting in the way they restate and consider the claimants case, trying to put into context the notion of wages and labor alongside stuff like shards.

I mentioned to Scott Moore (who has a lot of experience/hands-on knowledge with VEs) I was going to do a blurb about the matter here and he wisely suggested I try to pitch the discussion away from simple rehash to what this might mean for the future of volunteer usage in these kinds of spaces. I've certainly long thought the issue of "free labor" (be it via helper programs, content producers, or unpaid testers) remains one of most underexplored - but critically important - aspects facing games (and online communities more generally). So, is there anything new we can learn from this apparent settlement? Are there interesting related stories emerging in other places worth discussing? Are there good non-VE/game spaces who confront this same problem that we can learn something from?

(Thanks btw to Scott, Julian, and Dan's leads for this entry.)

Duck DNA

From the point of view of designers and developers of virtual worlds, one of the most unnerving points raised at the State of Play conference last year was that their views concerning virtual property might be irrelevant. As our own Dan Hunter described it, a judge might easily apply the "If it looks like a duck" argument to rule that virtual property is just another example of real property and should be treated as such.

I was wondering just how far this argument could be taken, though.

Free Culture for Free

Lawrence Lessig has a new book out. It’s called Free Culture and the really really really neat thing is that he has released it under a Creative Commons Licence, so it’s available for free all over the place, such as here. Physical copies can also be purchased.

For any TN readers not familiar with Lessig’s work, this promises to be another fascinating meditation / polemic on the nature of intellectual property generally and copyright specifically.

So are virtual items property?

Cricket lovely cricket

Some things are just more important than contract law. Cricket, it seems, is one of them – at least according to the Attorney-general and Solicitor-general of India (as reported by India’s The Telegraph and elsewhere)

Do cases like this point the legal route that Earth and Beyond’s users should take?

Sacred Spaces

At 12:00 CET on 15th March there was 3 minutes silence across the EU in memory of the victims of the Madrid bombing.

Did the citizens of Norrath or SWGs Naboo put down their swords or blasters for this brief period? Were EU game servers turned off?

Should they be?

Don’t pass it on

Belated a.k.a. Is cheating now a crime?

US Federal law may have taken one step closer to the regulation of Virtual Worlds.
How so?
By making it possible to consider the use of someone else’s password to access a protected system a Federal crime – that’s how.

now powered by stars

Pop Quiz: Why will the legal relationship between the individual and their representation in a virtual environment change?

a) Though the combined forces of player pressure, academics writing detailed papers and bloggers blogging?
or
b) Though A list stars and their A list entertainment lawyers trying to secure more control and more moolah?

I’m going with (b).

And on this theme MSNBC has a recent piece on stars seeking more control over of their digital doppelgangers.

This is not simply an issue of extracting cash from the new medium. It’s also one of control.

When an actor signs to do a film they get to see the script and can always refuse to perform acts that they feel don’t fit their profile. But as soon as they are digitised it’s a different game. LTORs Gollum is fine example of what can be done with CG and a big budget – but from the stars point of view, at least that’s in the hands of the director, with a video game the stars are in your hands – and that’s something they really might not want given some people's imagination.

Of course this does not apply to me and my avatar because:

(i) It does not look like me
(ii) I’m not famous

Er, but hold on:

(i’) With VW’s like 2L and SWG my avatar could look like me if I chose, more to the point it could look like you

(ii’) I am famous ! You’ve heard of me, your reading my stuff right now, look look there’s my name – see fame. Or take the case TNs very own Julian - the reputation that he holds in a VW is directly related his profession as a broker – and that’s the kind of reputation courts respect

So does this trend start to add weight to the claims made by us Z-listers in respect of control of our digital selves?

Ren

Who Owns My Ownership?

How naive must one be, in this day and age, to spend months debating the question of virtual property without once wondering whether the question itself (or at any rate the phenomenon underlying it) wasn't already somebody's intellectual property?

Speaking only for myself, I confess the thought never crossed my mind. Not until last week, that is, when I received a friendly email from veteran game designer Ron Martinez, who alerted me to U.S. patent 6,119,229, "Virtual Property System," filed April 1997, granted September 2000, and jointly held by Martinez, Greg Guerin, and the famous cryptographer Bruce Schneier.

Here's the abstract. Game designers, read it and weep:

"A digital object ownership system is disclosed. The system includes a plurality of user terminals, where each terminal is accessible by at least one individual user. The system also includes at least one central computer system that is capable of communicating with each of the user terminals. A plurality of digital objects are provided, where each of the digital objects has a unique object identification code. Each of the digital objects are assigned to an owner. The digital objects are persistent, such that each of the digital objects is accessible by a particular user both when the user's terminal is in communication with the central computer system and also when the user's terminal is not in communication with the central computer system. The digital objects have utility in connection with communication over a network in that the object requires both the presence of the object identification code and proof of ownership."

It's hard for this layperson to see how the patent doesn't cover every MMORPG with an economy, but Martinez assures me not all games with property in them infringe. In particular, he notes, "[t]here is a distinction between [traditional multiplayer inventory systems] and a limited edition, ownable object, particularly one that can be exchanged for cash value." To the extent that that's a distinction with a difference, my guess is it means that the deeper designers build transaction systems into their games, the harder they step on this patent's toes.

IP lawyers and other masochists will want to read through the details of the claim and judge for themselves.

TN + CC?

The question of whether or not the Terra Nova blog should be licensed under the Creative Commons has been raised. While some have worried that this might appear to be pimping for Professor Lessig, it is certainly an intriguing idea.

I was elected to post because Second Life will soon be working with the helpful people at CC.org to figure out how to best apply the various CC licenses within a virtual space. Many of the CC licenses directly map onto existing SL permissions, but some permissions don't have CC analogs. For example, there is no real world CC license for the Second Life permission "Buyer may copy, but not transfer, this texture" which is used to protect the seller of repeating textures, like bricks, without forcing the customer to buy one copy of the texture for each geometric object she wants to texture. Julian and Lawrence have also proposed the very interesting idea of allowing SL users to search and view the world based on whether the objects allow copying/reuse.

So far, the following licenses have been proposed:

The Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License, which means that any use of TN postings must be attributed, may not be used commercially, and may not be used for derived works.
The Attribution-NoDerivs License, which is the is the same but allows commerial use if attributed.
Attribution-ShareAlike License, which allows commercial work and derived works, but any derived works need to be shared with the same license.

For an example of this at work, you can check out Julian's website, which is now licensed under CC.

So what do you think?

VWs, Data Mining, Advertising and Privacy

Tal Zarsky, an Information Society Fellow at Yale Law School is doing a dissertation and paper on data mining and data privacy, and part of this project involves virtual worlds/MMOGs. An initial discussion of his work is available here.

He wanted to follow up on the comments and asked the following about datamining in VWs:

"First I want to thank you all for taking interest in my project.

Also, I want you all to perhaps think of the following scenario: The “gods” do not share the information with others – nor do they try and connect the virtual identities to the real ones. Nevertheless, they still can gain from their omnipresence and constant surveillance of the virtual identities. Here are some ideas:

(1) The “gods” provide specially tailored ads to every player (Adaboy strikes back?) – thus taking the practices of DoubleClick to another level. Here we have to think what the possible detriments are: providing advertisers with greater powers of persuasion? Being put in a “virtual Skinner box”? Having others decide for you what you should consume?

(2) The “gods” use the information they collect and data mining analysis (data mining is a personal favorite of mine, and the main theme in my dissertation) to provide different goods to different players at different prices. These goods could be game related (different playing plans) or non-game related.

What do you think? Am I too pessimistic here? I was wondering if you think the commercial entities will have the ability to muscle their way into the virtual worlds - perhaps by providing 2 pricing schemes for every game - one that will be "ad free" and the other with ads. Since it is clear that we all have a myopia problem when it comes to privacy rights - such a strategy should be fruitful for commercial entities."

Virtual Property Redux

Another datapoint follows for those tracking the rise of virtual property. A court has ordered the transfer of stolen virtual property back to the original player. Most interesting here is (1) it's a Chinese court which is leading the way, and (2) the court ordered the developer to transfer the property. This latter point merits attention that I don't have time for now, since I'm knee-deep in spackle. Will say some stuff in a bit.

[Edit: Go here for more stories. Original Reuters story that I included has been deleted from the post, since copyright is a blunt weapon and copyright plaintiffs have no sense of humor these days]

Real v. Virtual Worlds

There has been a lot of writing about the real world intruding into the virtual world of late. The majority of writers on the subject, including James' State of Play write up, Richard's many comments about wanting different rules and laws in "play" spaces, and Ted's State of Play paper take, to varying degrees, the positions that real-world intrusion into online games/worlds is a Bad Thing, that the developers have a choice about allowing it, and that players generally don't want it.

I disagree with those positions.

Appropriately, my State of Play paper is an extensive look at these issues. Its focus is on the requirements for creating Stephenson's Metaverse and it uses examples and data from Second Life and other products. I've been referencing small pieces of it in various comments but comments are often lost, plus the paper as a whole provides a far better look at the issues than a short post possibly could. But, briefly, my thoughts on those positions are as follows.

"Players don't want their worlds commodified"

While there are clearly some who don't, including Richard, Ted, Sony Online Entertainment's General Counsel, and most game developers, the volume of transactions on eBay and the popularity of alternate options that appeared after the EverQuest ban, like PlayerAuctions, indicate that tremendous numbers of the players of MMORPGs have decided that they want to be able to short circuit leveling. There are a lot of them and they are voting with their feet.

"Developers have a choice about this"

I don't think they do -- see the above paragraph. Now, I can think of games that do not have marketable items (Quake and Scrabble come to mind) but the nature of RPGs is that time == more fun. Since not everyone has time, those who are able will change it to money == more fun. Without biometrics (and even with, as Kevin points out) I see this as an extremely difficult problem and a waste of good development resources.

"Letting real-world laws into the virtual world is a Bad Thing"

No it isn't. In fact, the burden of proof lies with those who believe it to be true. Play and fun clearly exist within the place with the most complete implementation of real world laws possible: the real world itself. In Lacrosse you can beat the tar out of someone with a stick -- but if you murder someone you'll still be meeting Officer Loink. This "intrusion" of real world laws doesn't make Lacrosse less fun. It seems to me that online worlds aren't getting enough credit if the application of real world laws somehow ruins them.

In fact, letting real-world laws into virtual worlds is the critical step if online worlds are going to become the Metaverses that many of us want them to be (sorry, but you'll need to read the paper on this one!)

The State of Play: Warriors Revolt

The State of Play Conference was too rich with new concepts and directions to be usefully summarized in a blog. One thread that caught my mind's eye, though: users of virtual worlds and the owners seem destined to a long and bitter struggle for control. Tellingly, we return from the conference to news that the Warriors of EverQuest are on the verge of open rebellion.

More on that below. First, the conference. Energized. I was shocked both at the number of people and the fact that there were many standing in back of the room through entire panels. I've never been at a conference where the subject matter was discussed continuously from 7AM until midnight every day. And one thing we all agreed on: virtual worlds matter. It was not necessary to haul out the arguments for significance that most of us have been using over and over and over: "Virtual worlds are growing in importance and people spend their whole lives there and it's richer than Bulgaria and avatars are better than bodies for some purposes and and and yada yada yada." How nice to be able to spend our time actually talking about the subject.

At one point the discussion began to focus on raw political questions. If the users don't like the owners, and vice versa, what happens? The old-school answer, from the days of MUDs, is pretty simple: Press the 'Off' switch. However, we heard from several of the lawyers (Jack Balkin in particular) that if the assets in the world were big enough to matter (as we all believe they will be, someday), a bankruptcy court might seize the servers and press the 'On' switch. At that point the question arises: who is going to run the world then? The court? The users?

Imagine the following power transition: Conflict between owners and users gets ugly. User protests make such a mess of the world that the owners no longer find it profitable. They turn the world off. Courts or legislatures turn it back on again and hand it to the users. Or instead: owners, anticipating the final node of the decision tree, respond to user protests by giving them what they want.

Far-fetched? Well, it seems that quality of life and fairness issues involving EverQuest's Warrior profession have driven the Warriors to the brink of mass protest. Players with warrior characters will log in at fixed times, in large numbers, and spam all major chat channels in the world with canned statements of grievances. It would be, to say the least, incredibly annoying and disruptive to other users.

The protest was announced on November 7 and originally scheduled for Tuesday, November 18. On November 14, Alan VanCouvering, EQ's Community Manager, announced in an interview a major overhaul of melee combat systems (read: warrior issues). The overhaul will be described in detail on November 24. After polling their constituents, the warrior leaders have now postponed the protest until December 2. Whether it happens will depend on the policy announcement on the 24th.

This looks like Autumn 1989 in a glass bottle. Evidently, the State of Play is itself in play.

"I challenge thee to a duel"

The State of Play Conference is coming up shortly, and I've been reviewing some of the draft papers. Ethan Katsh's paper on dispute resolution is interesting, because he connects his research on eBay's dispute resolution mechanisms to the virtual property issue.

eBay has a semi-automated dispute resolution mechanism which is provided by SquareTrade. It handles literally thousands of eBay disputes per day, and some of these, according to Ethan K, involve assets from the virtual world. Julian, of course, had little help from eBay when he was defrauded in-world, because of their clearly stated indifference to virtual assets for fraud claims. But eBay's dispute resolution system provides some advantages: (1) it's quick and cheap, (2) it is tied to real world reputation and is relatively robust at attempts to game, and (3) it's backed up by the might of an important player in the online space.

Of course, it's not the only way to resolve disputes. You can have sabers at dawn, or matched duelling pistols with seconds, if you want. But is that what we want? How should we resolve disputes and conflict that occurs in-world? Ethan's paper presents a number of models, but there must be others.

Patent nonsense

Enthusiastic wannabe developers of virtual worlds who are currently putting together their business plan might be surprised to discover that there's a 1986 patent that covers video game networks. Which ones? Well, pretty well all of them - except those created prior to the patent's application date of September 1981, of course, which are neatly excised from the equation.

This patent really is as wide-ranging as it sounds. Its mid-80s language is no handicap: it was successfully employed against Nintendo for networked Game Boys despite describing itself in terms of coin-ops. It's also been applied to virtual worlds.

OK, perhaps it would be more precise to say a virtual world, given that I only know of one instance where a virtual world company has gone public over it. This was Electronic Arts in defence of Ultima Online. Despite acting as an expert witness for EA, I was never told how the case ended. According to a brief summary buried deep in the lawyers' web site, however it transpires that the case was "resolved through settlement".

I mention this not because I'm wondering how many virtual world companies are quietly paying licence fees to stop themselves being taken to court (although I do wonder that). Rather, it's because of late I've seen an increasing trend for new virtual world developers to stress their "patent pending" technology in an effort to raise the financing necessary to write and operate the fruits of their labour. By the time these patents are granted, other people will be using the same ideas (arrived at independently) and may suddenly find themselves facing a stiff licence fee or being forced to stop using the technology altogether.

Better jump on that bandwagon before it runs you over.

Richard

No, seriously...

Yesterday I gave a presentation on virtual worlds to a group I'd never pitched to before, the parents of kids at my university. It was interesting because most of them (mean age ~45-50) hadn't heard much about this field and none of them had begun to consider the social/economic/legal implications.

One of the most interesting things for me was how neatly the audience divided, into (a) those who just didn't see this as anything interesting and (b) those who thought that this was the precursor to the most serious change in human relations since the invention of the wheel. And I recognized in those two different positions how I feel about this area (Mon, Wed, Fri I choose option (a), Tues, Thurs and weekends I'm convinced of (b)).

In looking over the comments from some other discussions we've had, I recognized the same positions. For example, the discussion about content, the property interests of players, and whether End User License Agreements (EULAs) give all rights to developers is, on one level, about whether you think these spaces are just games which the developers should have all rights in (since they built them) or whether they are new social spaces where the actions of the participants need to be recognized as (somehow) important. The discussion from TL's post (and, of course, the analysis in her papers) about whether players are part of a community seems to me to be about the same thing. I suspect that there are many other examples.

So, what's it to be: games or something different? Is there any reason why we should take these "playspaces" as seriously as we here at TerraNova do?

Virtual Crime 101

Greg and I are doing a paper for the State of Play conference and our contribution is on Virtual Crime. It picks up on ideas from our thing in Legal Affairs. Anyway, I'm working on it today--the paper is late, as usual--and I thought it would be worthwhile to get your thoughts as I was writing. (Blog hosting: $149.50 per annum. Broadband connection: $49 per month. Having other people write your papers for you: Priceless)

Rather than try to explain all of the paper in one hit, let me divide it up into bits, this being Bit 1. In this Bit want to examine the idea of purely in-world criminal activity. Crimes that cross over into the real world will be the subject of tomorrow's posting.

So, main thrust of this Bit is on the nature of the crimes, and the nature of the regulatory responses that emerge to combat crime. First, what sorts of "crimes" emerge within the virtual world? My initial response was that, well, there's killing, and stealing, and maiming, and... But, as Greg patiently explained, these are perfectly permissible, and so within the limited realm of the world these are not crimes at all. Turns out that the main type of in-world crime (we think) is griefing. Of course this can take many forms, depending on the nature of the world. But in general it seems that crime=griefing within world. Or are we wrong here?

The next section is on what regulatory responses emerge to combat crime. Here, again, we're only talking about the in-world response. I'm interested in people's experience of these responses. As Larry Lessig has famously said, "Code is Law" and nowhere is this more true than in virtual worlds. What examples of coding-to-remove-crime-or-grieving can you think of? The much-used example is the UO reputation flag, but there are others. Perhaps more interesting, are there examples of non-developer (ie community) regulatory responses to the griefer problem? We have a few candidate examples (posses typically) but your mileage may vary.

Privacy and VWs

Tal Zarsky, a doctoral student at Columbia and one of the people involved in running the Yale/NYLS State of Play Conference, is doing a paper on privacy issues in VWs and MMORPGs. He is going to be looking at gamers' privacy policies and stories of abuse by the players and those running the game. He asked me whether I had any thoughts on the topic.

Turns out I do. But I suspect the TerraNova hivemind does too. Thoughts? Should we worry about participant privacy in these worlds? If so, under what conditions? What data is sensitive/problematic? Are MMORPGs different than VWs? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?

Avatar Rights

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?