John Quiggin of Crooked Timber has posted about a fascinating legal case. Two Chinese players of an online game acquired a valuable virtual sword. What happened next?
One of them borrowed it and sold it for about $1000. The other player went to the police without result, and eventually confronted his partner, and in the ensuing argument, pulled a knife and stabbed him to death. It’s sad that this happened, but the most interesting aspect for those not directly involved is the question of whether the seller had committed a crime, and if so what.
Perhaps some Samizdata readers who are lawyers or gamers or both can help him out. (Although F. Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter already have written a paper.)
Even more interesting than the legal question is the evolution of the game worlds in ways, good and bad, that the designers don’t anticipate or want. A commenter to John Quiggin’s post, Keith M Ellis, says:
But it strikes me that the game designers have some oddly familiar problems on their hands: they want a particular outcome, but people self-organize in ways that make it very hard to simply engineer that particular outcome.
The libertarian angle on that is obvious. Is the Hobbesian outcome that some (apparently rather a high proportion) of the players seem to go all out to make others have a bad playing experience a challenge to our worldview?
Yet another aspect is the interaction between the game world and the real world. Another commenter, “asg” says:
In World of Warcraft, there are two factions (the Horde and the Alliance). Players from the two factions aren’t allowed to communicate across faction lines—they can’t talk to each other, mail each other, group with each other, etc. Some enterprising players discovered that, while the game garbled their speech for players on the opposite side, it didn’t garble digits or punctuation, so someone developed a code to allow cross-faction communication. The latest patch put an end to that.
For some reason I thought of this from the point of view of the fictional game characters, not the players. The thought of the characters in the game world, forbidden to speak to their enemies, yet finding a way to communicate by going outside the bounds of their own reality, would make a story worthy of Philip K Dick.
Intangibles have value, ergo they can be stolen. Ask any stock exchange. Hell, making a copy of a copy of copy of a copy of a lossy compression of a digitised audio track is ‘theft’, we are constantly told.
FWIW, I play an online game called Eve Online in which players interact in a persistent world. Game items are always on sale on Ebay. For example, currently a large sum of game currency is going for eight hundred dollars.
Another interesting aspect of Eve is that the game has a real economy, whereby goods can be manufactured in game and traded at a market price set by players. In this respect Ebay works a bit like a currency exchange between in-game and real world money.
My god! $800!?!
It kind of makes you wonder what effect these huge online games will have on society. How much time is spent (i.e. wasted) building a business (or whatever you do) in online games? Is it boredom that attracts people to these games?
Is your status in the game so important that you would kill someone to maintain it? Or even worse, spend $800?? 🙂
I’m not into these online games but such things shouldn’t be poo-pooed simply because they are online.
The analogous situation would be someone who took a piece of scrap steel, spent many hours fashioning it into a work of art, lent it to a friend who then sold it.
True, in theory, this “sword” in the game could be trivially reproduced but the game owners do not allow this and thus an artificial scarcity has been created and market forces apply.
Perhaps a different but also analogous situation would be the diamond trade. Rocks dug from the ground whos value is only so high because the suppliers keep them artificially in short supply.
And whilst I may not think that online gaming is not a particularly useful use of time, I expect others not to make judgement on how I spend my free time so I extend that respect to others (it’s the libertarian way).
Rich
No idea. How much time do people ‘waste’ socialising, running, playing golf, going fishing, cycling, watching football, raising families or doing any of the innumerable ‘unproductive’ activities that make up modern recreation?
Strictly speaking, Rich, I would say that the libertarian way is to defend the right of others to spend their free time as they wish, not to refrain from judgement on how they spend it.
Don’t take this as meaning that I have anything against online games: I don’t.
Quite often a reasonable person should make no judgement – tastes differ and that’s all there is to it. But I can conceive of pastimes that I would judge as bad or stupid, while still defending the rights of those who enjoy them to go on doing so.
John B: Once you’ve done enough work to get food and shelter, everything else is either recreation or work to pay for recreation. That we can ‘waste’ time playing games is a testament to enconomic growth.
As to effects on society: how about when these games get so good that they’re better than real life? Would it be so bad if the fate of humanity is to live for eternity in a computer generated paradise? 😉
I’m a World of Warcraft (WoW) player, and one of the most interesting aspects of the game is the economy. Most trade takes place in the Auction House (think a simplified, in-game ebay), with absolutely no enforced price controls. A group of people could easily take control of the market in certain popular objects and start making serious real world profit.
The following link shows the crazy sums involved, it can only be a matter of time before the state wants its cut and we all have to pay VAT on our swords of +5 strength.
Good points all, however, I’m still not convinced. I understand that everyone has different tastes, and in general people earn the right to spend free time and money on those tastes. My problem is this: I’m sure many of these games are played by children. These kids haven’t necessarily earned the money to pay for these games, and I’ll bet you that many of them are neglecting more important (yes, a judgement) activities such as school, or friends, or for god’s sake, playing outside.
A lot of these players also seem to be college kids. Lord knows they waste enough time and money (usually their parents’ money) already. (Of course, it is probably better than listening to professors like this – http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/pages/mclaren/).
The reason I’m picking on online games specifically is because they do seem to be better than traditional games. Or, at least much more addictive. The son of one of my friends plays some game called “Yohoho Puzzle Pirates” or something like that. He found the kid crying and screaming in his room because someone sunk his ship. This is a 14 year old kid.
Is it possible that they play these games, and invest so much time and emotion in them, because they have nothing concrete to put their time and energy into?
I’ve never played an online roleplaying game, but I find these sorts of stories fascinating. EverQuest is one game particularly famous for its addictiveness. Online gamers often call it “EverCrack” without blinking. I read a while ago about a (British, I think) addict who took a laptop to the hospital so he could play EQ while his daughter was being born. In another case, a young man in Hong Kong or nearby played an RPG in an internet cafe for goodness knows how many hours, ignoring repeated advice that he take a break, before suddenly dying on the spot from lack of sleep and sustenance.
Part of the addictiveness certainly has to do with the way these games operate, continuing in real time, all the time, in a full self-contained world. As an example of how sophisticated and open-ended the games can be, I recall a friend who used to play a (now relatively primitive) online RPG telling me he had ‘attended’ the public execution of a character whom many other players had decided deserved it.
Because all this goes on in real time, if you need to go to work from 9am to 5pm, and want to be sure your character goes unmolested while you are away, you can’t just hit a pause button on the whole virtual world. You have to spend time finding somewhere safe to hide your character and his various items for those eight hours. Obviously the temptation for some when real life and virtual life conflict must increasingly be to stay playing. And the longer you are playing actively, the faster one does “level up”, in-game time in itself counting positively towards one’s move to the next level. So increasingly one wil be inclined to see every second of real life activity as another second closer one could otherwise have got to being a level 60 Mage or whatever.
Natalie, you are correct of course. Though in my defense, I was thinking of the more general and nonspecific terms that the principal underlying libertarianism is extending to others the same civilities that you would like for yourself.
Rich
Peter’s comment is raises an interesting point. With these games, large investments of time can place one ahead of ones opponents quite easily, sometimes with skill only being a minor factor.
Back in the heady days of student life when the web was young, someone came out with a game. The idea was to buy land on a grid and place a building on it. The proximity of other buildings of other types determined the income of each building and hence your overall income. I had nothing going on at the time and by staying on, refreshing the page every 5-10 minutes, rapidly had over half the board in my control. By the middle of the next day, I was just planning how to issue the coup de grace to my remaining opponents when a feature of the game became apparent to me. The game calculated tax before income. Although I had a huge income, I also had a huge tax bill and the tax bill coming in first took me below zero, causing me to be instantly ejected from the game. One minute, a huge empire, the next, a board full of grassland.
Anyway, I digress. But I have gazed into the maw of online gaming addiction and now steer clear. I also think I have an inkling where my dislike of taxes got started 🙂
Rich
True Steve, until Blizzard catches them and their Murloc overlords consume their fleshy bits, and scatter their bones to the plauge lands.
Blizzard doesn’t just frown on selling things outside of the AH on ebay or similar sites, they ban people and revoke their accounts. It destroys the game economy…plain and simple.
That doesn’t mean they won’t sell their accounts however. Soulbinding items makes a huge difference in the game. One of the greatest things that they added in. To be honest, I haven’t played since the end of the beta. I’ve been strongly considering going back to play again, however.
I would say that the seller’s character in the game world has committed a crime (stealing the sword), which should be dealt with within the game. The real-world seller has just played a character. Since a lot of the point of these games is to be able to do things that you can’t do in real life, it would be inconvenient if you could be held legally responsible for the actions of your character.
The player’s offense was to sell in the real world an article obtained in the game world, which (according to Mashiki above) is against the contract he has with the game organiser. This is the same irrespective of how his character obtained the item.
The game organisers do have god-like, as opposed to state-like, powers in the game world. It is quite feasable that they could organise social or economic systems unlike any that could exist in reality.
Bloody hell. I ‘waste’ my time with guitars, and eight hundred bucks would knock down the next Les Paul Gem series that I came across. (I always seem to see ’em reasonably priced when I’m out of funds, dammit.)
Most of these MMORPGs are fairly libertarian within the game. Even the social structures within the game tend to be libertarian. … and this one is shaping attitudes in China.
I have heard that there are people in India and China who play these game full-time and sell the credits they collect online to rich first-world players via media like Ebay. Apparently these guys can make an OK living doing this. Not great, but a few bucks a day, which is enough to get you by in China or India.
It’s also a big thing in former bloc states in eastern Europe. A University student can live on what they pay them to turn out for 6 or 8 hours of work playing a MMORPG.
This reply is to “I’m suffering for my art” I am surprised that you posted this quote, what makes you think that Indians have purchased a fairly expensive computer and a high speed broadband connection not to mention the monthly subscritpion charges of 20$ and then put up ingame money for selling on ebay.
I am sorry but I would like to clarify that there are very few Indians who play this game as it is subscription based and also requires an alwas on connection with unlimited bandwidth which not every one can afford.