[MUD-Dev] To Kill an Avatar

[Ren Reynolds]

I agree with the majority of points in your post. I also agree with
a lot what Lessig writes too.

Lessig says 'Code is Law'. This is very snappy line, a great
meme. I'm not knocking this as I think Lessig's ability to sell his
ideas has got a lot of people thinking about some very important
things. But here we are unpacking the thought so we need to get
under its hood. There are two ways I think we can approach
this. First, we can take 'code is law' as a strong analogy and look
to see where it breaks down. Second, we can look relationships
between code, law, individuals, society etc., and look for the
unique bits.

To put it another way, what I think we are trying to understand here
is what is the role of code in the governance of virtual
communities? And when I say governance I mean this is a very broad
sense of the way that freedoms formed through the inter-relations of
players, developers, physical-world laws etc.

Taking your example of two games:

  A) PK = OFF with players P and Q
  B) PK = ON with players R and S

The code in game A is acting as a law in what I take to be Lessig's
sense as it is acting as a limit to action, in that is it is
preventing P from killing Q.

But it's doing much more than this. The fact of PK=OFF will change a
number of dynamics of game A, it also changes things at a more
fundamental level. Avatars P and Q in game A are different types of
things than avatars R and S in game B. Because of the nature of the
player killing attribute. For example, all other things being equal
I would imagine that the economic value of P and Q (in game A) would
be higher than R and S game B, as in B they are a less 'stable'.

Now let's assume that player P succeeds in killing Q and that player
R succeeds in killing S. To me these are different acts, and the
difference comes about through code.

I can see that you might say that I've suddenly broken the rules
here.  You said that in game A player killing is not possible. I
guess I deny that this state exists. OK player-P might have had to
find an exploit in the code, or they might have actually had to
crack it to kill avatar-Q - but what if this is what they did do?

I think here we have an example where code is doing a lot more than
simply restricting action.

First, there is a relationship between code and the real world
economic value of virtual items - make the items the kind of things
that have a hierarchy to them that takes time to create and make
them relatively stable virtual entitles and we get a value
structure.

Second, to kill avatar-Q, we are supposing that player-P has had to
crack the game code - there is a good chance that this is a crime.

Now it looks like I've shifted ground again here. It looks like I'm
talking about the status of cracking not player killing, but I want
to hold onto the idea of the status of the end state, in this case
where an avatar is 'dead'. In game A the choice of code means that
to get to this end some acts need to be illegal, this is not the
case in game B.

On 6 July 2003 07:00 David Kennerly said

> Simply that programmer-created specifications which define the
> states a machine may have are analogously equatable to
> legislator-created specifications which empower law-enforcement
> agents and judicial agents.

In this case while the code is not empowering law-enforcement agents
to act against player-P it is certainly enabling legal sanctions to
be used. That is, the freedom to kill players is prohibited by legal
sanction in virtue of a choice of code.

Third, let's look at this from the point of view of player-Q and
player-R. In game B where PK=ON, if R gets killed legitimately, then
player-R should accept this (OK they might be annoyed at someone and
the act might be socially frowned upon in the group so they might be
personally v unhappy). In game A where PK=OFF, when Q gets killed,
player-Q is going to be more than just unhappy. By virtue of the
code they have certain expectations about what is going to
happen. They would have grounds to view the killing of the avatar in
very different terms.  It certainly feels ethically worse moreover
player-Q might want to argue that they would have a claim against
the game company for not making the code or the security around it
good enough.

Just to re-enforce the fact that I'm talking about ends not means
here I want to contrast killing Q by cracking from killing R by
cracking. I feel that that PK=ON in game A really does set up very
different expectations as well as a probably a different economic
and social value structure, such that even illegitimate killing are
made different acts and would motivate different legal remedies.

To summarise, you have a choice whether to code or not, when you
code you have a choice what you are going to code. Through your code
you grant certain freedoms to users of that code, and close off
others, you also set up sets of expectations that have social and in
some cases legal implications.

> I am curious about the specific duties that you propose.

Well I'm still thinking about this one. I think that one position
(not mine) is that as the virtual object in MMORPGs
(player-characters and other things) have significant economic
value, game companies have a duty to players to protect that value -
the value of their labour \ investment. I think it would be argued
that this duty stems from the fact that the developer-publisher has
created a 'game' in such a way that it value is generated in
association with its component parts, the developer-publisher could
have avoided this duty by either not creating the game in the first
place or creating one that was not value creating in this way.

I think there are issues with every step of this argument, but I
still think that it needs answering.

> I see the fine point that the copy-protection code itself is
> actually protecting something that is legally free to copy

I think Lessig's main argument is that there is information that we
can now access - generally termed the Creative Commons, the more of
this that is put in certain digital forms, the more of it is denied
to the public. This he thinks has a significant social effect, and
hence anyone that creates anything that has the possibility of
shutting off information like this should think about their social
responsibility.

I kind of feel similar about virtual worlds, these are great things,
but we have to be careful about the way that they are created, one
aspect of this is the way that certain types of coding may have
different legal implications - actually at the moment I think that
the law is so utterly confused about virtual worlds this is not the
case; but the law will catch up and when it does I don't want it to
do so in a way that acts in a way the significantly impacts what it
is to be free in a networked world.

Ren
www.renreynolds.com
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