You're a dwarf in a virtual world, and that troll over there has just defamed you in front of everyone. So can you sue, or is it all just fun and games?
That's what a collection of the brightest thinkers and best designers of games like EverQuest, and metaverses like There and Second Life, will be talking about in New York starting Thursday. They're gathering for the first State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds conference.
host of questions are on everyone's minds: Are virtual worlds the new Wild West or a legitimate province of the courts? Is game play equivalent to speech as defined in the First Amendment? Is there such a thing as fraud in a metaverse?
"As the game universe becomes intricate, as transactions start to cross the boundary between the game world and the real world, it becomes more complicated as to what you're going to call defamation," says Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School and an organizer of the conference. "The more closely your life is tied to the game, the more what happens can be construed as injury to yourself ... privacy, fraud, breach (of contract). Maybe you really did break a promise. Maybe you did defame me. Maybe you did defraud me, and maybe that does matter."
Beth Noveck, a professor at New York Law School and another organizer of the conference, says those arriving for the three days of panels, discussion and networking are coming to intellectualize about where games and virtual worlds fit into the fabric of their lives.
"We might learn a lot from looking at how laws are made and broken in these virtual worlds," she says.
Noveck says she believes that by studying how virtual worlds work and how they relate to the real world, we can learn how to make societies better.
"My supposition is that virtual worlds are going to be the best training ground for teaching the practices of democracy, not simply simulations that passively demonstrate something," she says. "They offer a playground for complex social interactions and collaborative decision making, according to a set of rules defined by the game space."
Meanwhile, any discussion of the law, especially with lawyers involved, will inevitably turn to contracts and financial responsibilities. And the State of Play conference will be no different.
The buying and selling of elements of games like EverQuest on eBay has been well-documented. One of the hottest topics of the conference will be whether such commerce should operate outside the law, or whether such transactions should become the realm of contracts.
One conference panelist, Julian Dibbell, who has written about virtual worlds and their economies for years, has a website devoted to an experiment in which he is trying to make as much money as he can trafficking in Ultima Online goods.
"On April 15, 2004, I will truthfully report to the IRS that my primary source of income is the sale of imaginary goods," he states on his site, "and that I earn more from it, on a monthly basis, than I have ever earned as a professional writer."
But some at the conference, even working partners of his, question whether such behavior should be allowed.
Edward Castronova, an economics professor at Cal State Fullerton and a conference panelist, says he believes that in most cases, real-world money should be kept out of the equation of the game.
"I think if we don't do that," he explains, "these marvelous fantasy places we have now are going to get overrun by people who see them as commercial places to make money."
But Castronova's real point is that somehow, the state of play in games is going to have to be very well-defined, lest the lawyers be allowed to run amok.
"I would go about defining fantasy play space and define how it has to be treated by state, federal, local and world governments," he says. "Terms of service have to tell players that they can't use Earth incomes in the play space, and list the things defined as play."
Yet, to adhere strictly to such a belief may be unrealistic.
"When you first ask lawyers whether these (virtual) things are property, they say, 'It's not land, it's not my car,' so the initial assumption of most lawyers and most people is that there's no way these things can be considered to be property," says Dan Hunter, an assistant professor of legal studies at Wharton and another conference panelist. But "our analysis is that the hoverboard you use in There and the house you build in Second Life would all be considered to be property for the purposes of the American legal system. That leads to issues about what we do about that. It's all about end-user license agreements."
For its part, Second Life's publisher, Linden Lab, has since its inception told its members, who themselves create most of the metaverse's content, that they do not have property rights to that content. But the company has been reviewing its terms of service and will likely make an announcement at the conference on the matter.
On its forums, Cory Ondrejka, a Linden Lab vice president, recently wrote, "We understand that there are (member) concerns and stresses between creating interesting, innovative content and any" term of service. If "you could wait about a week for us to complete the current internal review, I think that you will be pleased with the results."
In any case, the State of Play conference is not necessarily about arriving at definitive answers to many of these questions, but rather to foster new discussion and thinking about the issues.
And that's vital because, while those issues may currently be important only to the people playing and designing the virtual worlds, that could change in a hurry. Video games are becoming as big a market force as movies, and virtual worlds are an ever-increasing part of that.
"Twenty or 30 years from now," says Castronova, "big parts of the economy could be happening in there."
For now, though, the conference attendees and panelists just want to get a better handle on what it is they're dealing with.
Castronova says he fears that without laying clear ground rules for where reality ends and virtual worlds begin, those play spaces could become "suburbs of Newark," replete with oversight from governments and all the attendant bureaucracy and corruption.
Will Harvey, the founder of There and also a panelist, says he's not too worried about virtual worlds becoming suburbs of reality. But he does admit that corruption is part of human nature, so it's important to figure out ways to design virtual worlds that insulate the members and the designers of those worlds from the inevitable bad actors.
"Look at whether the corruption of ... special interests (is creeping) into the real world as an artifact of human interest," Harvey says. "If that's the case, then one would have to expect that they would creep in just as ferociously into the virtual world."
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