More notes from: The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds

Dan Hunter is talking about various property regimes in virtual worlds and their analogies to real world property law. Read his paper (Virtual Property [PDF]). He is showing a live feed of the notorious Category 1654 on eBay, where you can buy and sell avatars, swords, etc. Conclusion ... Prof. Hunter believes that there is property here and we are going to have to figure out how to deal with it.

How did Edward Castronova get involved in this issue? He thought that eventually, there would be lawsuits. Lawsuits would create a need for expert testimony. Why not him? Read his conference paper (The Right to Play [PDF]).

UPDATE 1030 ET
UPDATE 2 1035 ET
UPDATE 3 1045 ET
UPDATE 4 1100 ET

He provides a bit of a pitch for the excellent Terra Nova blog.

Of course, Castronova got the chance to provide courtroom testimony, if only at a mock trial about rights in the "Staff of Viagra" at a moot court in Las Vegas. Part of the cross examination questioned why we even care about something as silly as games.

The state has long created fictional things with real world legal ramifications, such as the fictional person known as the corporation ... which has a number of utilitarian uses, though it is fictional. But games, according to Huizinga, cannot matter. There is no moral concern, except in breaking the rules of the game. Yet games do have external meaning. The example, the Cubs fan who caught the ball and interfered in the American League championships.

What of online games? Is it play? (Role-players and happy tailors) Is it life? (Power-gamers and eBayers). The government of Korea is getting quite involved. The police, for example, are becoming somewhat willing to hear cases about people who may have stolen virtual castles, etc. How far this has gone is not clear, but Prof. Castronova is encouraging people to Korea and find out (and write papers).

Play-ness is shared cultural assumption. The lack of moral weight for games is a weak alternative to the "games matter" and "games have real-life consequences" meme. How will this conflict be resolved? By courts, perhaps.

How to protect play-ness? Assert a "right to play" as a core element of human dignity. This is somewhat eroded and there has been little political struggle over this issue. New opportunities for protecting play-ness are coming about.

Castronovas initial concept:

Interration
- Not corporation, interration
- Special legal status, for a fictional locale
- Extends the precedent of incorporation to groups of people who play
- It must meet certain requirements (no eBaying - to avoid real world consequences - such as money laundering, banking, etc.)
- In return some benefits (protection from taxation)

The results of this?
Open and closed worlds ... a lot of variety.

So we would have social worlds with different rules. Escapism is pretty important ... the ability to kill dragons and have power in a virtual world that one lacks in the actual world. He quotes from the Star Wars: Galaxies forum where people complain about not having enough power as a squad leader ("welcome to the world of the useless and ignored"). These games have real emotional importance.

UPDATE 3

Yochai Benkler

Deja Vu all over again?

Is cyberspace a space? Who whould govern it?
Not a declaration of independence ... but very much a spatial metaphor undergirding a claim to institutional insularity

Who owns computer generated documents?
A new context for an old question?

What is unique about these technologies that make them different? What old discussions can we learn from.

Collaboration Platform or Game?

We must distinguish between technology and social practice.

MMORPGs provide a powerful collaboration platform
- Rich rendering of
--participants
--actions
--effect

Persistence - richly rendered asynchronicity

Developed in the contect of a particular social practice - escapist play
Offering the possibility of a new cultural form: Participatory play

Hollywood could be considered to be play ... but play as a passive, consumptive activity. Now there is the possibility of the reemergence of active participatory play, not simply consumption.

This not about online games, but crossover technologies ... this is about next year's front page interface for AOL.

UPDATE 4

The real question from Castronova's paper, is that the power of the platform will overwhelm the social practice, unless we create law that preserves game play from incursion by the real world practices, and the institutions we have developed to govern non-play interactions. [I think this is a pretty good summary]

Benkler responds, Do we need a special law? Will existing private/public law regimes suffice?

Hunter & Lastowska via Benkler
Avatars, representations of people - that "make" representations of "objects" - entail property rights of the people in representations.
- Functional, historical, and theoretical reasons to answer yes.
- But: "is it property"

Mapping the relevant relationships:

State - Platform Provider - Non-player X - Player A - Player B

Between players:
Within game (In game rules and dispute resolution - appeal to platform provider)
Without game interaction (you failed to deliver the sword you sold me on eBay)
How much freedom of contract do we allow? Boxing is a game, but we let people do things consensually that is illegal non-consensual (assault and battery).

Platform Provider and Player
Service contract
Propery Law?
- standard questions of contract (market power, ability to negotiate)
- amount of investment, emotionally, time, money (not much liquidity, perhaps)
--number portability for telephone, avatar portability?
- regulatory law; consumer protection (do you force people to permit eBaying)

Player and non-players
Standard law (property, tort, contract)

State and players
No role for law in capacity with regard to "players"
Contract and property create a private sphere

Summaries

Law can overwhelm the game if it intervenes too seriously in what is really play
The form of the platform and its social function should not be confused
It is the social function and the relative positions of power, vulnerability, and freedom of action that determine the need or rol of law

A new freedom to make together?

Not like a book or a movie, a platform for collaborative creativity

Would we conceive of a world in which JK Rowling is subject to suit for killing Harry Potter in the seventh book? No. [Great question ... people would be as greatly affected by this as about anything that happens in MMORPGs]

However, what does the fact that users "own" the storyline in MMORPGs tell us about this cultural form?

In the world of games, we somehow consider the possibility of regulation platforms to some extent, or at least that there is some moral question.

Dangers:

A lack of imagination about human social capacities will import imperfect forms of constraint on social creativity into these emerging cultural contexts.

Habits of controlled interaction bleed into real world interactions where There becomes the front end of AOL.

Do we need Law?

Technology and social structures as a workaround (such as Free software and distributed platforms)