[MUD-Dev] To Kill an Avatar

[David Kennerly]

Interesting!

My chief concern is that I'm not aware of what MMO developers are
lacking in terms of duties to their customers.  Most commercial MMO
developers exceed reasonable player expectations in the duties that
they ascribe to themselves.  I don't understand the law in any
practical capacity, but I hope that each law conforms to reasonable
expectations, as may be determined by consistent and coherent
explanation within a voluntary contract.

In my opinion, this is so precisely because there is a evolutionary
learning process established by professional developers and
discerning customers.  Customers can and do cancel on a whim.  The
developer receives the electronic notice within minutes.  That's
instant feedback.

I'm not sure what legal duties a developer has to protect an
avatar's property and game status as an undefeated avatar.  I mean
we say the word "kill" but we don't mean it at all.  On almost all
commercial MMP games an avatar doesn't cease to be until the
customer stops paying for the account of the avatar or voluntarily
deletes the avatar.

As a humorous aside, if we could call PKing "killing an avatar" then
we'd be hard pressed not to call deleting an avatar "suicide of an
avatar", which for humans is strangely illegal in many jurisdictions
in North America, I would guess elsewhere too.  Strange, in my
uneducated opinion, in that the illegality suicide presumes some a
form of self-ownership have been stolen.  Someone stole the
possession of one's own will to live from the self.

However, I have run into the practical problem of use of unintended
or hacked programming to defeat an opposing character on a regular
basis (I'll use "character" and "avatar" interchangeably).

Ren Reynolds wrote:

> 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'.

This conclusion requires more statements to be true.  In many games
the exact reverse is true.  In Korea, I'm told by Korean developers
that Lineage has a stable MMO item trade economy, in external
markets akin to eBay.  Lineage is the most popular PK=ON MMORPG.
It's a wierd facet of human value that many value exactly what may
be taken away.  What's granted and protected, at least in this
example, has less value than what is unstable and at risk.

*

That's the end of my direct reply to your post, but for whatever
benefit the following tangents may be, here they are.  These are
more like conjectures to consider in the role of law in MMORPGs than
conclusions of experience or research:

Killing is not like killing in real life.  Just as monsters respawn,
players do too.  What's more sensitive to the player than his
character's "life" is his character's "property."  Even in games
that support unrestricted PKing this is true.  This is because,
property takes longer to reclaim.  Many items may be equivalent to a
large fraction of the accumulated energy the character has spent.
The solutions employed are universally not legal solutions, but are
programming solutions.  It is simply made impossible.  MMOs approach
utopia.  It's like Heaven from the Christian Bible where the animals
love each other and no one dies, has sex (despite users' best
attempts), or has things stolen from their personages.  It can do
this precisely because it is not a virtual world.

I believe it's unwarranted to ascribe a legal responsibility to a
game service provider to be held financially responsible for misuses
of the service being provided.  I don't think Milton-Bradley is
responsible for how players use Monopoly, even if the players began
to give value.  Cheating in a financially-incensed Monopoly session
is an absurd example, but this is not: Magic: The Gathering (MtG).
In this card game, each card is routinely and legally bought, sold,
and traded.  Whereas most every MMP game posts notice of the
illegality of trading characters, trading is almost an unwritten
facet of Magic: The Gathering.  So players certainly fulfill
requirements of financial investment for their cards and for the
rules of the game.  It is common to "ante" a random card from one's
deck versus a random card from an opponent's deck.  The winner of
the game session will win both cards.  Each of these cards has
well-established market value, similar to a comic book's market
value.  So if one player cheats another player in a game of Magic,
to what extent is Wizards of the Coast, the developer and publisher
of Magic: The Gathering, financially liable?  For example, suppose
he performs sleight of hand while shuffling that ensures him much
better than random chances of drawing the initial cards he desires
against this particular opponent's deck.

Then take an example one step closer to a MMP game, Diablo II.  It's
uses a blend of client-server and peer-to-peer technology that is
similar to the model that MMPs use.  Diablo II is famous for the
players' hacks and exploits that have killed other unsuspecting
players.

To take an example that's been mentioned here, there is an offline
game that has persistence and many of the other qualities that
qualify it as a virtual world, "Living Greyhawk," which is a kind of
Dungeons & Dragons.  Suppose a player in this game cheats along one
of these lines: fudging a die roll (such as by padding the roll,
whereby the die is aligned on its most favorable axis and rolled
with such care that it fails to ever turn up the two sides that are
not on the spinning axis), altering a character attribute, or
outright lying or deception of a rule or attribute.  To what extent
is Wizards of the Coast, the developer and publisher of the Dungeons
& Dragons game system, financially liable for the illegal outcome,
which could be as much as death.  And death in Living Greyhawk in
some circumstances may be more severe a result than any of the
currently famous MMPs.

I'd like to point out the extremity required to hack some MMP games.
It's common knowledge among MMP developers that client code is
hackable.  So most MMP developers only trust the server for their
critical game logic.  The server is a computer that the MMP
developer owns and only grants access for a game client (the program
on a player's computer) to communicate with.  Many MMP developers
have proven protocol.  That is, the server is immune to hacked
client inputs.  Therefore, to hack the PK code for this game, a
criminal needs to hack the server that the developer owns.  It can
happen, but that's exceptionally rare compared to what usually goes
awry in the operation of an MMP game.

Instead of hacking, usually someone PKs another player because the
developer introduces new code that is not PK-proven.  It's a fact of
development that there isn't enough resources to prove all code for
correctness for before public release of the code.  It's not special
to MMP games; just look at the operating system you're using and
recall that last time it crashed.

MMP games are a subset of game software.  That players ascribe real
value to them important, and does qualify them as more than games.
For a lot of players it is given the same emotional attachment that
an investment is given.  When I operate a game, I've often told my
colleagues to "protect their investment."  That is to treat the
design of the game so that their character's value is never, or as
rarely as practical, decreased by changes in the design.

But what about software that isn't used for games?  To what extent
is Microsoft liable for the data that was lost in the business
report that crashed in Microsoft Word?  To what extent is ICQ or
Microsoft responsible for a hacker who uses a trojan to infiltrate a
user's operating system and capture their passwords and other
identification data?

This, by the way, is one of the most common ways that MM players
become victimized by other players.  One player will unwittingly
install a trojan or its equivalent.  Then the other player will
capture his player identification data directly, peer-to-peer, from
the victim player.  Then he will do as he pleases.  He, for all
identification purposes, is now the owner of the account and its
players.  He can, and does, kill, steal, libel and slander the
identity he has stolen.

David
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