Apr 1
Trust Me, We Don’t Want Rights
The issue of virtual rights has been raised, first at Kendricke’s blog and then by Grimwell. Kendricke is bouncing off of ideas raised this past weekend at IMGDC, and I really must codify my notes from Dr. Bartle’s fantastic session on government intervention in virtual worlds …
In any case, the bottom line is that having ‘rights’ is more trouble than its worth. I want to make it super clear here that my opinion here isn’t ’siding with the devs’ – it’s a purely selfish notion. Games with ‘rights’ aren’t games anymore. They’re extensions of reality and by definition no longer exist purely for fun. With ‘rights’ comes a legion of unwanted components like tax laws, intellectual property rights, etc, etc, etc … all BS categorically not having anything to do with gaming or fun. I don’t want to have to submit a W2 everytime I join a new gameworld, and then think about my virtual income come tax time.
The biggest thing here is that once users start ‘owning’ their property, publishers and developers are just going to abandon the marketplace. The reason? If I ‘own’ the information in a company’s database, are they ever allowed to turn that off? After all, it is my property and if I don’t want to give it up I shouldn’t have to. So every moment of downtime and the possibility of going out of business/closing out the service becomes moot – that’s ‘my’ stuff in there and they can’t take it away from me!
Dr. Bartle made a fantastic analogy at the event, and it’s one I’m going to use pretty much all the time now. World of Warcraft is a game, full stop. In objective reality, despite the huge number of differences, it is effectively as much a world with ‘rights’ as an instance of the board game Monopoly. Asking for ‘rights’ to the data on Blizzard’s servers is like complaining when a person’s fictitious property empire collapses into nothingness at the end of a Monopoly game. There’s no there there, and so pining after some misplaced sense of identity or ownership is a fool’s errand.
These gameworlds are fantastic, special places. As long as you pay your bill (or whatever) publishers have every reason to make sure you have access to your characters and data. But don’t think of it as “owning virtual property”. That’s a fallacy. Think of it more like “renting a game save”. You’re paying these companies for the right to keep going from where you stopped.
Trust me, if some well-meaning judge ever does get us into the situation where my helm or axe is ‘property’, with all that implies … we’re in serious trouble.
4 comments4 Comments so far
Gotta agree with you, and especially with Bartle. The board game analogy is apt. You leave a game with memories and stories, but that doesn’t imply any rights.
I’d like to hear a legal discussion about EULA’s and character ownership. Well, actually, I’d like to hear the outcome, the actual discussion would probably put me to sleep. I’m pretty sure we’d find out that our rights extend to playing characters on an account that’s current, and that’s about it. Everything you take out of the game world is just your memories. It’s not like you can take your character and publish a book about their adventures in Norrath, Azeroth, etc., not without lawyers breathing down your neck about copyright infringement.
I like the Monopoly analogy! I wish I would have had that in my register of ‘Wise things other men said.’ before I wrote yesterday, it makes the point in a great way.
[...] quite a lot of debate in the comments, which was great. While I was mulling things over, both Michael and Grimwell weighed in on the topic with what I thought were particularly compelling arguments. [...]
“Games with ‘rights’ aren’t games anymore. They’re extensions of reality and by definition no longer exist purely for fun.”
I sooooo disagree with that. Are you saying that games MUST be decoupled from reality in order to be fun? Games are already extensions of reality because money is already involved. If you can make the imaginative leap from monthly credit card payment to virtual world, why the heck can’t you make the same leap from owned digital property to virtual world?
…all in your head people.