Terra Nova

A reasonable remedy

One of the issues that has come up in the discussions around the UK Government's consultation on consumer rights in digital stuff is the notion of a reasonable remedy. In the case of online games - what's reasonable?

UK Consumers have rights over you

 

The UK is considering a set of laws that give consumers rights over the providers of digital stuff. These new consumer rights will blow a hole through EULAs and side step a whole mess of intellectual property law. All UK consumers of ‘digital content’ would have these rights irrespective of where it’s provided from, the rights cannot be contracted out of, and the remedies apply to content providers where ever they are.

In short, if you are a game company based anywhere selling to the UK - you need to pay attention.

Still selective bombing of RMT in S. Korea. But this time, Magic Circle missile loaded

Since 2007, by Game Industry Promotion Act and its implementing decree, S. Koreans should not  do business for exchanging or mediating exchanges of, and repurchasing  in-game money or data like in-game items that are produced or obtained by copying, adapting, and hacking the game program or by way of abnormal game-play.

The word of  'by way of abnormal game-play' has been generally understood as 'using Bots in game', and many sweatshop owners and RMT dealers who broke the law were punished.

On the other hand, Supreme Court of  S. Korea  ruled that RMT itself is not totally  banned by this act  in the sphere of MMORPGs where in-game items are basically obtained by sweat, not by luck. So, RMT dealers can buy and sell in-game items as far as those are produced and obtained by normal play.

In summary - human play : normal(OK) vs.  Bot play : abnormal(banned).

But, practically, it's not that easy to tell Bot play from human play. Korean government have been worrying about the growth of  the grey market of RMT and the crime related to this. Government agency assumes that 60% of RMT in korea were unhealthy one. 

To cope with this matter, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism just now amended the implementing decree. Next july, the revised implementing decree will be effective. This time, Korean government enlarges the scope/depth of the word 'abnormal'.

Using the others personal information & Doing for a business also belong to the scope of 'abnormal'.

In summary -  amateur play : normal vs.  pro play : abnormal

(Probably the first 21th century law that is Johan Huizinga's Magic Circle graven on)

According to korean Value Added Tax act, anybody who supplies goods or services for business and earns more than 12,000,000 won in 6 months should register as "enterpreneur". Enterpreneur shall be liable to pay VAT.  This new  Implementing Decree do not permit game player be the enterpreneur of VAT act.

This is the end of my brief  introduction to the new game law of S. Korea on RMT.

For me, it seems somewhat odd and interesting that Korea recently enacted another law called E-sports Promotion Act. The definition of  E-sports is 'through the medium of games, human compete for the record, or win the game against human'. Of course, Main purpose of this act is to assist pro-gamer who play StarCraft, Dungeon & Fighter etc for a living.

Earning REAL money from the inferno be banned, while from the space is not.

 

Relating news(translated by google)

 

Former relating posts.

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/11/korean_national.html

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/05/s_koreas_bancan.html

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2010/01/a-rainbow-follows-clouds-korean-supreme-courts-rule-on-some-rmt-.html

 

 

Join me and IEEE in LA

For the last year or so the Virtual Policy Network (that I founded) has been working with a group of good people (the Virtual Environment CoLab) and the IEEE on the slow march to establishing a set of Virtual Environment practices and standards.

We are having an event in LA in September – you can come, in fact if you read TerraNova you probably should come as you probably care about Virtual Environments as much as us. 

The event is NOT focused on tech standards. What we are doing is setting out a set of social challenges and getting a bunch of experts to come up with solutions that harness Virtual Environments. 

The event is titled vPEARL (Virtual Play Exchange Advise Renew Learn), it’s going to be on 20-21 September 2011, Los Angeles, CA in the USA. Registration is $150 and spaces are limited to 100. 

The official event page and regisration is here: http://standards.ieee.org/news/vpearl/index.html

I will be intense and fun. You will get to see my shoes. Come.

A bit too far?

You can’t get arrested for using BitCoin (yet) but you probably can for that pun.

To get to the point - I'm worried about BitCoin. 

The Emperor’s (New) New Clothes

Producers and users of virtual spaces are heading toward difficult times. These could be made worse through increased regulatory intervention by various countries. I suggest that it is in the best interest of users, produces and nation states alike that those online service providers that use virtual items and currency form self-regulatory body. I suggest further that sport provides a ready-made governance model that the online industry should adapt and adopt.

I thus propose the formation of an: Online Dispute Arbitration Board (ODAB)*

*An academic treatment of this was first presented at The Game Behind the Game by myself and Dr Melissa deZwart.

 

Not all created equal

… but that’s ok.

The Meaning of Play

I humbly propose a new theory of what play is....

[edit 28 Feb 11: or do I...?]

SE vs. AE

While wandering through Mass Effect 2, I was struck with the vitality of the world. Circa 2004, the main attraction of a multiplayer environment relative to single player worlds was that single player worlds felt dead. Multiplayer, on the other hand, had vitality but also the annoyances of dealing with other people and their inevitable failure to be perfect friends, or perfect foils.That problem can be reduced by Social Engineering (SE): Designers use policy (sometimes enforced by code) to optimize an individual's experience when dealing with others. Judging from ME2, the problem of dead single-player worlds can be addressed successfully using a suite of tools involving digital storytelling, emotive animations, deep conversation scripts, and a strong responsiveness of the emotive/relational space of characters to the protagonist's actions. Altogether, let's call this bag of tricks "Artificial Emotion" or AE. It's not a new term, indeed Professor Turkle has paved the way here, as before.

As the market for fantasy evolves, these two approaches to improving happiness seem to be facing off.

Intended and Unintended Consequences (or the Nightmares of Dr. Bombay)

I am with A360 on the current child safety debacle, and it raises a conversation that needs to be had (and re-had) before we get a whole lot further. In 1998's My Tiny Life (free pdf) , Julian Dibell  chronicles, among other things,  the experiences of a virtual rape victim and (her) MOO community.  Seminal on multiple levels, the work explores many aspects of identity, ethics and permission in a post-modern, techno-centric age.  

So here's the question.  In an exodus recession, were do we draw the lines with economies made up of adult, child, and child-like beings in virtual worlds? With their child-like or grown-up avatars?  With AI(s), inhabited or not?  What's appropriate, what's not?  What's criminal, what's not?  What is slavery?  Labor?  How do we simultaneously allow freedom(s) and conversations and experiments and deviations and enterprise, and protect from harm?  Does hacking or enslaving one's or another(s) virtual being(s) to elicit behavior other than intended by the owner consitute criminal activity? At what point(s) are we complicit?  Which pathways of influence do we fear?  Applaud? What precedents exist? What forms can teaching a lesson take?  Is it/can it be therapy? Is it 'promoting hatred'to discuss such things openly, or is opening the can of worms a good thing overall?  Let's summarize and rule.

 

Government 1.5

Over at GovLoop, Benjamin Strong is mad as hell. Workers in Federal Agencies are still forbidden from using most of the new social media tools. This means they can't participate in the pro- part of prosumer. Mutatis mutandis they're going to face problems launching anything virtual world-ish, be it MMPOG or MSPOG. It's not impossible, its just that anything they do will require approval from way up top - which defeats the value of open production.

One of the more reasonable grounds for opposing the expansion of government influence is the repeated experience that government actors, exposed to the political winds, tend to build houses of stone. As technology unleashes its earthquakes with increasing frequency, stone goes from being a nice protection from the howling wolves to a rather vulnerable crypt-in-the-making.

Functional Governance

The regulation and governance of technology has tended to be based around industry sectors such as film, radio, television etc., or on things such as the radio spectrum or personal data.

I propose that we change this on a global scale and frame regulation in terms of the relationship between Functions and rights.

Human rights & the 'online game provider'

The Council of Europe (CoE) has developed two sets of Guidelines that seek to interpret Human Rights in an online context. On 6 May 2009 there is a Council convened workshop in Strasbourg to explore the guidelines. Prof Bartle and I (with my think tank hat on) are speaking at the meeting.

In this post I’ve provided a short background to the context of the documents and some of my views on the way that key concepts are constructed in the guidelines intended for online game providers. I think that the Council would appreciated a wide set of views on these guidelines as they seem sincere in trying to gather input from a wide set of actors, hence I post these views here to gather your comments.

The guidelines at hand are"

• “Human Rights Guidelines for Online Games Providers”
• “Human Rights Guidelines for Internet Service Providers”

Mind Bank får banktillstånd - Entropia it's a bank!

It struck me some time ago that under EU banking regulations MindArk’s Project Entropia looked a lot like a bank, or at the very least an e-money institution.

Well - now it is.