July 01, 2004
Pitfalls of Virtual Property
"The debate over who owns what in persistent-world games got a bit more knotty recently when online gaming consultancy The Themis Group released a white paper written by one of its advisory board members, Richard Bartle. Bartle is an Essex University principal fellow and author of the 1993 book, Designing Virtual Worlds. He has become one of the most visible commentators on the subject of "ownership" of virtual-world property. For anyone who has kept abreast of the conversation, the complications come as no surprise. As Dibbell wrote recently in his blog, "The games we choose for our amusement are becoming so complex, so involving, that the line between gameplay and career, between gameworld and society, begins to blur." According to Bartle, the blurring will get worse before it gets better."
Gamespot news article
Richard Bartle's white paper (pdf)
Posted by kurt at July 1, 2004 11:25 AMComments
Not only is property an issue, but, perhaps more consequentially, the kinds of protection that civil law offers over the virtual inhabitants of virtual worlds. A Supreme Court ruling in 2002 (CNN's nugget: http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/04/16/scotus.virtual.child.porn/?related and the full Court syllabus: http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-795.ZS.htmlraised this issue. The Atty Gen'l wanted to establish child protection laws to "real" as well as "virtual" children. The Court struck down a law that made it illegal to own or distribute movies or images of virtual children. During the time in which the law was in effect (from 1996 until 2002), virtual children had the same protection under federal law as real children, which is remarkable despite the fact that the Court struck the law down. One can look at this as a 6 year "test" of how to live within virtual worlds and live with their virtual inhabitants.
Posted by: jbleecker at July 2, 2004 08:49 AM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
