[MUD-Dev] Blacksnow revisted

[Kylotan]

On Thursday, April 04, 2002 3:41 AM,
Mark Eaton <marke at mac.com> wrote:
> On Monday, April 1, 2002, at 11:31 PM, Eli Stevens wrote:

>> From my point of view, Mythic owns the toys, and the rest follows
>> naturally from that.  If we disagree on the ownership part of the
>> equation, it seems THAT is what we should be talking about.  And
>> from what I can tell, we _do_ disagree on that point, which I
>> find hard to understand.

> I think the source of this notion is that players are allowed, no
> encouraged to trade items amongst themselves in game. Players are
> allowed to sell items for in game currency. This is all encouraged
> under the rubrik of 'in game economy'.

> If players have no ownership whatsoever how is the above fair?

Just to throw in another angle into this debate... perhaps the
player's -character- has ownership of in-game items, but the player
does not. Ownership is not transitive, as the players do not own the
character as such. [1] Characters are entitled and encouraged to
trade items. Players are, of course, necessary to facilitate the
process. But players themselves could be forbidden (by game rules
and/or EULA, whatever) to arrange for the trade of goods directly.

Would such a distinction be easier to justify than the whole "you
can give it away but you can't sell it" concept? Personally I think
it would make it clearer about how goods can be traded and why, but
on the other hand it opens up the whole player/character debate
too. So maybe it's no better. And is it any more policeable?

I suppose it would at least mean that any web site dealing with the
trade of goods would obviously be a player concept rather than a
character concept and would be easy to nail under this rule without
it feeling like a 'special clause' added just to stop the player
making money from the game.

  [1] They may own some of the intellectual property attributed or
  attached to it, but that is going to be descriptions, biographies,
  portraits etc, not a particular arrangement of equipment which
  contains no original authorship as such. Besides, just as a book's
  author may own the text but not own my particular copy of his or
  her book, a player may own part of the IP on a character but they
  don't own the actual instance of the character on the
  server. (There, that's my analogy for this thread, to go with all
  the others.)

--
Ben Sizer



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