twistedlibrarian writes “At a Friday morning session here at the second State of Play conference, a panel of legal and academic experts offered varying thoughts about what should be players’ rights of speech and expression.
“I come to this event as a virtual-world outsider and a free-speech insider,” said Frederick Schauer, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “I’m interested in particular in the way in which free speech ideals, models (and) structures play out in the game environment.”
Free speech and MMORPG
A while back, a popular MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) had an honest to goddess protest occur within the game. The game, Star Wars Galaxies, had an internal flaw which basically allowed cheaters to forge money or credits. Obviously, this can be bad for the game and Sony responded by banning everyone who had forged credits.
Sounds okay, right? Well the plan did have a small flaw. It was bolloks. See by the time Sony figured out what was going on, the cheaters had spent the forged credits freely and people who had no idea that they had bad money also got banned. In other words, they banned the counterfeiters and those who, by happenstance, possessed counterfeit currency. Kinda like shooting the shopkeeper for getting taken, no?
So friends of those unreasonably banned staged a protest on one of the main worlds in the game. There was shouting and what amounted to an online virtual riot. Sony’s solution? Ban some, or better yet they’d teleport the characters into space. Now in the real world, people can’t live in space. In Star Wars Galaxies, this remains true. So, in effect Sony executed characters because they protested an act by the administration.
Before someone says how silly this is, keep in mind, it’s a game. Sony could have banned people, canceled accounts, suspended accounts, etc. They chose instead to destroy characters which people spent hours and days and weeks and months developing and building. Galaxies is NOT an easy game and becoming a Jedi is really a feat to be proud of. It takes a long time, even if you play it constantly.
Keep that in mind, when it comes to virtual free speech.
Re:Free speech and MMORPG (Addendum)
This was also featured in a Penny Aarcade comic. If you’re interested, click here.