[MUD-Dev] To Kill an Avatar

[kennerly at sfsu.edu]

I appreciated the recap of a lot of customer service and public
administration issues in this article.

    To Kill an Avatar
    http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/July-August-2003/feature_hunter_julaug03.html

It touches base on several famous customer service and
administration cases in: Habitat, LambdaMOO, Ultima Online,
EverQuest, and There.  I also care deeply about the potential to
explore the nature of human conflict and other ethical issues in
online communities.

But my personal opinion, based on years of MMO customer service and
design, is that making an analogy of virtual laws is a result of
sloppy thinking, or that the author is just yanking on the ear of an
uneducated reader.  Especially equating code to law.

> Stanford Law School's Lawrence Lessig has memorably advanced the
> idea that code amounts to law in the technological realm of
> cyberspace. Nowhere is this analogy more literal than in virtual
> worlds, where software designers provide the law, the courts, the
> constitution, and the very physics of existence.

The only "law" that code is analogous to is physical laws, which
nature enforces without human effort.  Code defines the machine.  It
doesn't define the mores, customs, or policies.  These are all done
the old fashioned way.

And statements like:

> In a recent article in the online magazine Slate, Robert Shapiro,
> an undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton Administration,
> argues that a system of sound property rights and initial equality
> in the virtual world EverQuest---all characters are created with
> nothing to their names---has allowed limited government to flourish
> and "economic nature" to take its course. "Real equality," he
> concludes, "can obviate much of a democratic government's
> intervention in a modern economy."

Are extreme in their sloppy logic, which the article does a fair job
of pointing out as trash.

However the article continues to look at the communities as somehow
a "virtual world."  But we don't breathe, eat, defecate, have
children, kill others, or do any other of the routine activities of
the world we're living in.  Nor is there much demand from players to
add these "features."  In fact, players are often asking developers
to remove such features.  Several years ago, hunger and the majority
of night time were removed from The Kingdom of the Winds, because of
player demand.  Ultima Online did away with a simulated economy, a
simulated ecology, and most murder.  EverQuest and most others, did
so too.  Not completely; there are fun forms of competition, but in
the default case, it behaves in accord with a controlled, carefully
engineered environment.  Not by human law, but by definition of the
game.

With the exception of player-created laws, the "laws" of virtual
worlds are much more like the "laws" at a retail store or a
restaurant.  They are customer service policies.  They're a limited
set of guidelines' whose purpose is to satisfy the maximum number of
customers with the fewest customer representatives.

Frankly, I wish more real law makers, enforcers, and other public
servants had the mindset to treat their fellow citizen as a customer
to which they are are, by an eventual chain, employed.  Some do, but
its painfully obvious that a devastating proportion (acting not
unlike a griefer exploiting a loophole) to reverse the relationship.

David

<EdNote: Copy below>

--<cut>--
To Kill an Avatar

Norrath, the online world created by Sony, has more residents than
Miami and a bigger GNP than Bulgaria. Who will make its laws? By Dan
Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka ON YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN YOU SEE
YOURSELF APPEAR as a toned and taut female figure dressed in a shiny
black half-shirt and a pair of tight-fitting Levi's with distinctive
stitching. Your stylishly coiffed head turns from time to time, your
big blue eyes blink, and your shoulders rise and fall with your
every breath. Behind you stretches a sandy beach and a crystal-blue
ocean. You hear the pounding surf and see a cluster of cartoonish
grass huts sprouting in the distance. Alice and Leet are standing
nearby. You walk over to them and notice a speech bubble hanging
over Leet's head as he tells Alice a joke. She cocks her head with
interest and then laughs out loud. Both of them see you approach and
they turn to you, smiling. Leet waves hello and asks whether you'd
prefer to hoverboard or race dune buggies. "Dune buggy," you
type. Alice yells "Yay!" and jumps in the air.

Though you know you are here, sitting at your computer, you are,
virtually, There. Unveiled in January, There is an online place
where you can hang out, chat with friends and family, and go
dune-buggying. It is one of many virtual worlds where millions of
people spend large portions of their lives. (A study conducted on
another world suggests that the median user spends about 20 hours
per week in the game.) Some worlds, like Ultima Online or EverQuest,
are Tolkienesque games where you might be an elf or a dwarf fighting
against dragons and goblins. Virtual worlds such as There or The
Sims Online are modeled on more familiar environments and seem like
three-dimensional electronic chat rooms where each friend on your
buddy list happens to look like a digital version of Jennifer
Aniston or Tom Cruise. (Think AOL, but with wish fulfillment.) This
digital you is called an "avatar," a term borrowed from the Hindu
religion that otherwise connotes the incarnation of a deity. Through
your avatar, you move around the representational spaces of virtual
worlds, seeking out interesting new locations, acquiring and
creating virtual objects, and meeting other avatars. Graphics-based
virtual worlds are extremely beautiful, with majestic sunsets,
delightful beaches, even dual moons. And like real places in the
real world -- Philadelphia, say, or Rio de Janeiro -- they continue
to exist and evolve when you are not around.

While reliable indicators are hard to come by, it seems that the
average player of a virtual world is a man in his mid-twenties who
earns around $30,000. Access to real-world cash is essential,
because most virtual world players pay subscription fees of about
$10 a month. EverQuest, introduced by Sony in 1999, now collects
$12.95 a month from 430,000 subscribers (on top of the $21.99 price
of the start-up software). Though Sony's initial investment in
creating EverQuest's virtual world was significant, the subsequent
costs to operate it are modest, with expenses mostly limited to
maintaining the servers, expanding and refining features, and
providing customer support. It's not hard to see why the business of
creating and running virtual worlds is popular. Outside of
pornography and eBay, virtual worlds are one of the few online
businesses that are making money.

KEEPING A WORLD PROFITABLE means keeping its subscribers' monthly
payments coming in, which means keeping subscribers happy. Like
political leaders in the real world, game designers are under
constant pressure from a citizenry with competing demands. Should a
game stress equality of power among avatars or should it reward with
greater power those who invest more time in the world? Striking the
wrong balance could make the virtual world less attractive to new
users or offend the subscriber base of long-time residents. And
designers must be mindful of the principle of liberty as well as
equality. Part of the appeal of the virtual worlds is the feeling of
freedom they offer users, allowing them to interact with others and
shape their environment. Each restriction on avatar freedom and
power may undermine the allure of the virtual environment.

One problem that has troubled virtual worlds from the start is
crime. It isn't obvious why online communities have problems with
crime at all. You might think that in worlds where avatars can fly,
spells can turn pumpkins into coaches, and it's possible to
custom-build your own virtual castle in the air, the incentives for
criminal activity disappear. But greed and schadenfreude have
carried over from the real world to the virtual, whose residents
demonstrate a propensity for all the familiar crimes and social
frictions that characterize the real world.

Take for example the first case of fraud in There, in which an
avatar put up a "For Sale" sign in front of a house that he didn't
own. Since few users knew how property transfers were supposed to
work in this brave new world, the scam artist collected some serious
Therebucks (the currency of There) before the creators of the world
discovered what was afoot and took corrective action. This was not
just a case of imaginary theft. Therebucks, like most virtual
currencies, have real-world value. The economist and virtual-world
theorist Edward Castronova made a number of calculations regarding
the economy of Norrath, the virtual world of Sony's EverQuest. Based
on trading indices from eBay and elsewhere, Castronova was able to
calculate the de facto exchange rate between the currency of Norrath
and the U.S. dollar. His findings suggest that in 2000, the GNP per
capita of Norrath -- the total, in real dollars and cents, of all
goods and services produced therew as roughly equivalent to that of
Bulgaria.

In addition to problems of fraud, virtual worlds are plagued by
virtual violence, theft, and harassment. One early incident of
violence occurred in the text-based virtual world of
LambdaMOO. Julian Dibbell gave a first-hand report in The Village
Voice of how two female avatars were "raped" by a male avatar whose
owner used a coding trick to control them and then sodomized them in
a public room before a large number of others. Though the only loss
inflicted was of dignity, the incident had distressing consequences
for the victimized avatars' real-life controllers. Dibbell famously
dubbed the crime a "rape in cyberspace."

More prevalent than rape is the crime of player-killing. In virtual
worlds where avatar violence is possible, more advanced and powerful
users sometimes harass, torture, and kill the hapless avatars of
neophytes, rather than going after the ogres and orcs that the game
developers have created as appropriate sword fodder. The death of an
avatar will sometimes terminate the avatar's existence entirely, but
this is not usually the case. In most virtual worlds, death is
reversible: An avatar can be reincarnated, resurrected by a healer,
or otherwise brought back to life. This process, however, is often
attended by other serious penalties. For instance, in Lucasfilm's
Habitat, one of the first virtual worlds, death was expressed by
making the avatar reappear decapitated at his home, with all of his
possessions lost at the scene of the crime. The avatar would then
need to find a way to reattach his head -- and rebuild his virtual
life from scratch. What may look like murder on the computer screen
may in fact be closer to real-life assault, but it is hardly a
victimless crime.

Stopping such crime, or at least containing it, has proved to be one
of the most vexing challenges of maintaining an online community. If
paying subscribers are constantly being slaughtered and robbed by
avatar miscreants, subscriptions will surely decline, hurting the
bottom line of the world's owner. In Lucasfilm's Habitat, citizens
complained to the company that player-killing and corpse-looting
were detrimental to the game's future. The designers' initial
solution was to banish death within the city limits by coding it out
of the program. Stanford Law School's Lawrence Lessig has memorably
advanced the idea that code amounts to law in the technological
realm of cyberspace. Nowhere is this analogy more literal than in
virtual worlds, where software designers provide the law, the
courts, the constitution, and the very physics of existence.

IT IS THE NATURE OF A SOCIETY AND THE NATURE OF ITS DISPUTES that
determines the regulatory response of the state. Virtual worlds are
little different from real-world societies in this regard, and their
regulatory options range from heavy-handed crackdowns to the
promulgation of social norms. Unlike the real world, of course,
virtual worlds are representational creations constructed of
human-written code that designers can manipulate with uncommon
precision. For example, in There some users delighted in driving
their dune buggies into groups of chatting avatars, scattering them
like tenpins. Designers added a "forcefield" option to each user
interface. With your forcefield turned on, the disruptive
dune-buggy-driving "bowler" just bounces off you.

But such code-based efforts by virtual-world owners are not always
successful. Consider what happened to Ultima Online, where designers
attempted to address the problem of player-killing by instituting a
system for publicizing criminals' pasts that operated much like
Megan's Law. The game designers modified the program so that each
time an avatar killed another player, his namenormally displayed on
other players' screens in blue -- would glow in a redder hue,
broadcasting his violent tendencies. New players were advised to
"read" the reputation of other avatars and understand the dangers of
speaking with those who weren't "pure blue." To allow for the
possibility of rehabilitation, they coded a way for an avatar to
reclaim his "blueness" by attacking known player-killers, creating a
loophole that was immediately exploited. Player-killers paired up,
attacking each other as a way of restoring their good names. The
experiment in fostering better living through technology was
abandoned, and the designers chose instead to go the Habitat route
of making killing impossible except in certain zones.

Code is immensely powerful, but it is not a panacea for virtual
crime. Certainly, if one were to virtually bind and gag all avatars,
virtual crime would disappear. But, for a business dependent upon
increasing subscribers, this would be suicide. Designers of violent
worlds such as EverQuest or Ultima Online don't have the option of
banishing virtual death completely -- the thrill of risking "death"
is part of the game's pleasure. Moreover, the incentives that create
virtual player-killers do not seem to be based upon a rational
calculus. Coding player-killing to make it less profitable will
probably not solve the problem. The narrator of Johnny Cash's song
"Folsom Prison Blues" famously shot a man "just to watch him die." A
virtual rogue is probably cut from the same cloth. Dibbell's virtual
rapist defended himself by saying that the whole thing was just a
game and that his gruesome and sadistic virtual acts were simply an
interesting experiment.

If avatars find it amusing to make the lives of others miserable,
they will find ways to do so. Designers and coders can't anticipate
every possible way of circumventing coded restrictions on
behavior. Consider the problems with online speech in worlds such as
The Sims Online and Dark Age of Camelot. Participants overwhelmingly
demanded that their avatars be given the freedom to speak with each
other. But once real-time chats were allowed, designers quickly
realized that it was nearly impossible to develop an algorithm to
block offensive and abusive speech. Technological filtering proved
largely futile because offensive phrases such as "ph*ck_y00,
4ssh0l3!" pass cleanly through an algorithmic profanity filter, even
though humans won't have much trouble gleaning the message.

Alternative regulatory approaches have been tried, with equally
unsatisfying results. To address the problem of harassment,
designers have adopted real-world legal solutions such as end-user
license agreements. Players are required to agree not to "grief"
(harass) other players, and designers are given the option to revoke
the subscriptions of those who pester or harass others. But this
kind of monitoring is, for the most part, difficult to do:
Designers, like federal prosecutors, have overbroad laws but not the
resources to enforce them. As in the real world, online policing
costs money, and it drives up the cost of subscriptions. Sony
doesn't want "law and order" from EverQuest, just profits.

WITH DESIGNERS OFTEN ABDICATING RESPONSIBILITY, virtual inhabitants
are left to solve problems on their own, and the mutability of
online identities has made some novel solutions possible. Like
real-world harassers, online sexual predators seem to prefer
targeting women. But gender in the virtual world is an attribute to
be chosen, and some women choose to avoid griefing simply by
foregoing their biological sex and playing as male
avatars. Similarly, male players cross-dress and defend gender
swapping as a move that makes strategic sense. They argue that while
female avatars are harassed more often, they also obtain numerous
benefits, like free gifts and favors from male avatars.

Other social responses are more traditional. In Habitat, players
instituted a virtual church to promote the concept of avatar
nonviolence. Other virtual communities, such as those in End of the
Line, enforce norms against player-killing by putting player-killer
names on a board with posted rewards. Posses are deputized to hunt
them down, execute them, and confiscate their property.

Grassroots activity of this sort has its limits. It should come as
no surprise that the owners of the current crop of virtual worlds --
Sony, Microsoft, and Electronic Artsare not rushing to create
political spaces, nor do they wish to identify their virtual
dominions as nascent democracies. But democratic alternatives are
possibleat least in theory.

LambdaMOO was created in 1990 by a researcher at Xerox PARC as a
social experiment. Its designers voluntarily relinquished control
over social regulation, implementing an elaborate petition system
instead. Anyone could petition for a change in the social structure
or architecture of LambdaMOO. So there were petitions seeking the
institution of new property rights, a ban on bulk e-mails, and a
rule against confusingly similar avatar names. (There were even
petitions seeking the removal of the petition system.) Once a
petition got enough signatures, it went up for a vote by all users,
and the results were then published. Once new rules were approved,
the game's wizards (as its designers were called) implemented them
using code. Still in existence today, LambdaMOO stands as the most
inclusive and democratic virtual world.

Yet LambdaMOO's text-based environment pales in comparison to the
visually immersive worlds of There and EverQuest, and few people
participate in it. Like all of the most popular virtual worlds,
EverQuest and There are the children of large corporations; their
massive visual environments require vast resources to build and
maintain. At times, it seems like LambdaMOO survives mainly to allow
endless theorizing among sociologists and political scientists about
the emergence of society in online environments and about how
virtual worlds might give rise to unique and innovative forms of
politics and law.

Other political pundits contend that virtual worlds make a strong
case for limited government. In a recent article in the online
magazine Slate, Robert Shapiro, an undersecretary of commerce in the
Clinton Administration, argues that a system of sound property
rights and initial equality in the virtual world EverQuestall
characters are created with nothing to their names -- has allowed
limited government to flourish and "economic nature" to take its
course. "Real equality," he concludes, "can obviate much of a
democratic government's intervention in a modern economy."

SHAPIRO TAKES THIS ANALOGY A BIT TOO FAR. Unlike the designers of
EverQuest, Congress cannot create the conditions necessary for
limited government by, for example, coding away poverty and sickness
or letting us all choose our gender and race. And while the markets
of EverQuest may work as smoothly as real-world markets, the
politics of EverQuest do not appear, to the casual visitor, as any
to which a real-life government would actually aspire. Norrath is
brutally violent and anarchic. Its world may be fun, but it is
dominated by the invisible yet powerful hand of the Sony
designers. Rather than trying to extrapolate ideas about real-world
government as Shapiro does, it seems wiser to study the law of
virtual worlds as a largely sui generis field.

It is important to understand what role law is playingand should
playin virtual worlds. Over the next few years, increasing numbers
of communities will come to exist in virtual worlds and real-world
economies will continue to bleed into their virtual
counterparts. (Companies like Nike and Levi Strauss have already
agreed to set up shops in There, selling virtual-world products --
and promoting real-world onesto virtual customers). The types of
rich social interactions that can now be found in places like There
will one day be built into all communication systems. Why would you
want to talk with a distant friend on the telephone, when you could
meet her in a lush tropical forest online? But keep in mind that
Microsoft, Sony, and other companies own these environments. Our
lives in the virtual world will not be structured like our current
real-space world of sidewalks, parks, coffeehouses, and living
rooms. This is because, contrary to what Shapiro says, the
government of Norrath is not limited. In virtual worlds, where code
is truly law, the designers of the world are that world's de facto
authority. Because they are not held accountable to any democratic
process, virtual worlds are dictatorships of the most absolute kind.

Yet because their "subjects" are free to subscribe to a competitor's
service at any time, these dictatorships do not pose the same
problems as the traditional kind. And in any event, "good
government" may not be what their subjects desire. To the extent
that good government aims to improve the commonweal, good government
is exactly what most virtual worlds seek to avoid. In such worlds,
scarcity, danger, and struggle are features, not bugs. Programmers
could have easily created virtual worlds where every avatar had the
option of obtaining every available power. That was tried, very
briefly, and people found it boring.

If EverQuest's substantial numbers are any clue, people seem to
prefer to suffer through adversity in order to "earn" their status
within a virtual community. The resultant struggles among avatars to
increase disparities in status, wealth, and power are part of the
entertainment. When it comes to the virtual world, it is the will to
power that is the feature, and equality the bug.

Because adversity and violence are features of these worlds -- and
not just side effectsit is wrong to think of crime as an unfortunate
byproduct of virtual societies. Crime is simply an extension of many
of the same freedoms that make these worlds so appealing to their
inhabitants. Game designers have their hands tied. They should, and
do, take significant steps to enforce basic rules of fairness,
trying to hand out power equally at first and to create impartial
systems by which power can be obtained. But if they allow avatars
the freedoms to shape virtual society, they cannot clamp down on the
many ways that avatars use these opportunities and powers to commit
virtual crimes.

You could make a virtual world without the possibility of crime --
but it would probably be about as dynamic as Pong or Tetris. It
turns out that as we build denser, more immersive, and more
compelling virtual realities, we bring into our virtual realities
numerous unanticipated real-world potentials. By creating virtual
lives, investments, and freedoms, we create the conditions for
virtual crime. Is there a solution? Short of changing human nature,
there is probably no way to avoid the difficulties of crime, at
least if we want our virtual worlds to be as engaging as the real
one.

Dan Hunter teaches at the Wharton School, University of
Pennsylvania. F. Gregory Lastowka is an associate at Dechert LLP in
Philadelphia.
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