[MUD-Dev] BIZ: Who owns my sword?

[Matt Mihaly]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Marian Griffith wrote:
> In <URL:/archives/meow?group+local.muddev> on Tue 16 Sep, Matt Mihaly wrote:

>> Well, what happens in the fictional universe is largely
>> irrelevant. It's the real-world implications we're discussing and
>> in the real world, avatars don't own things as they are not
>> persons under the law.

> It is not a fictional universe but a game, and the principle does
> make a lot of sense actually, if you think about it.  Suppose you
> are playing monopoly and you buy 'main street'.  Do you own that
> street? Yes and no. You own it only within the context of the game
> only. You could even argue that your 'avatar' owns the street.
> You most assuredly are not allowed to cut the street out of the
> game board and take it with you.

No, it does not make sense. We're talking about whether or not an
avatar can own something under the law. It cannot because it is not
given personhood by the courts and as has been said about 5 times on
this thread so far, only entities with personhood can own
things. The law could recognize an avatar as having personhood but I
believe that's an extremely far-fetched possibility in the
forseeable future. It serves no wide-spread public purpose, unlike
corporate personhood. (Yes yes, any WTO-protestor types out there
can complain that corporate personhood is detrimental to society but
the law has definitively decided otherwise, for good reasons.)

> Or, consider games like quake or counterstrike.  If you would not
> accept that the laws of the game apply to the avatars only, you
> would, in effect, proclaim the players murderers, since they have
> killed hundreds if not thousands of other 'players'.  Within the
> laws of those games murder is not a crime. It is even encouraged.

Murder involves killing someone. We call it "killing" when certain
changes to a database are made in a game but nothing is being killed
and no murder is taking place.

--matt
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