Suppose you spent the last eight weeks leveling up in a massive multiplayer online game to obtain a particular armor, only to find out that two days later the online game company took away some of the protective effects of that armor. Do you have a legal remedy for the devaluation of your virtual property? Does it matter whether the company discriminates against you personally (e.g., you’re so good in combat that other players have complained and the company decides to impose an handicap on you alone) or whether it adjusts the properties of items with effect inter omnes (e.g., the Starcraft 1.04 patch is still a sore topic for me, because it completely killed my Zerg game). Michael Meehan in a recent paper examines some of these questions, many of which are unchartered legal territory in the US and elsewhere. Michael draws a useful distinction between what happens in the context of a game and what happens to the game itself. As to the latter, he concludes that game companies have no obligation to compensate players for any loss of virtual property if the game is simply terminated.
Most players would expect to play a game and keep virtual property as long as the game is around – not after the company has decided to terminate the game.
In contrast, while the game is up and running, unjust destruction and devaluation of virtual property may give rise to liability. Put differently, Michael proposes that game companies must have legitimate business reasons for devaluation. Balancing the game would probably qualify as a legitimate reason. Taking away my hard-earned armor because I’m too good at melee combat probably wouldn’t. Michael derives the normative standards for evaluating the company’s conduct from a comparison with legal rules involving real-world property, such as the duties of bailees, good cause, good faith, and takings.
In order to get to the virtual property question, one must first find that the EULA is not the last word between the gamer and the company, and Michael raises a series of good questions in that regard. But ultimately, at least in my view, there must be a way for a provider of virtual worlds to conclusively disclaim the creation of and of gamers’ rights in virtual property. Rights and entitlements are mostly questions of justified expectations that the legal system chooses to protect. As long as a provider of virtual worlds does not promise persistence, consistency, or even fairness, as a gamer I can’t just import my real-world sensibilities and expectations. No real-world lawmaker has the normative freedom of a game designer, as “ought always implies can.” Unlike in the real world, the natural laws of virtual games are very much in the hands of the designer. For all intents and purposes, the designer is god, and thus the baseline expectations of the inhabitants of virtual worlds should be guided by voluntarism as the operative theological doctrine.
That said, I am not suggesting that no in-game virtual property rights can be created, to the contrary. Commercial gaming environments compete for players. One critical aspect of that competition may turn out to be the bundle of virtual property rights that a company is offering to its gamers. Some worlds might offer a limited guarantee of persistence, in-game referenda on balancing issues, and (as some already do) official exchange rates between in-game and real world currency. Notably, any significant company-initiated or maintained commercial interface between the real and the virtual world (e.g., the sale of in-game property for real-world cash from the company to the gamer) is likely to transport certain justified expectations of persistence, consistency, and fairness from the real world into the virtual environment. (In contrast, player-to-player trade of in-game items on eBay, for example, should leave in-game expectations unchanged.)
[tags]virtual property, voluntarism[/tags]
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
You hit the nail right on the head. It does not follow from the fact that we can make virtual reality realistic that we should or must. Part of what makes games fun is that they are *not* real and can have rules very different from the boring rules that govern the real world.
Just as my Demon Knight is largely immune to gravity, so his possessions may be immune to constancy. This is because the real-world valuation of property permanence may not not apply so much to a virtual reality where fairness and fun are more important.
It would be a serious error to forcibly import real-world rules on virtual realities where they need not apply and where other sets of rules might better support the objects of those particular virtual spaces.
I found your article interesting and vaguely similar to an article that I have been working on with regard to virtual property in the age of Google Earth (http://www.redbugtech.com/weblogs/andrew.php?permalink=126). Perhaps, you might do a followup at a later date taking another look at how virtual property is continuing to evolve?