How to describe the MMORPG? The easiest way to describe this would be to say that it’s a social game, with several gameplay elements around killing monsters, aliens and whatnot. People build strong friendships online and in the event of a player’s death in the real world have been known to hold funerals to honour them. However, one of the gameplay elements of World of Warcraft was the ability for different groups of players being able to fight and kill eachother. While it should be obvious to see how these two could mix in a bad way, during a funeral a raid group came along and slaughtered everyone.
Many of the players who were involved said that it was disrespectful and demanded the agressors should have been punished, but Blizzard did not act. One of the things that I noticed from events such as this were that there was a general theory of ‘code is law’ that existed in the attacking group, or rather a theory among gamers that if the game world allows you to do something then it is not illegal to do so.
To further explain this. Imagine you see something that you want but could never afford. You know that society has laws in place that prevent you from stealing, but you are still able to. In a sense the law acts as a deterrent and avenue for punishment. In the game world it doesn’t quite work like that, as rather than having punishments for theft of objects they just make it impossible to do as all your possible actions are coded into the game. As you can’t steal anything, what would be the point of making any law or threat of punishment?
To this sense World of Warcraft doesn’t have many laws at all restricting what players can do (most of these are related to either external program use, chat harassment and gold selling) so in this sense, there is a belief that if your player can do something then no matter how unethical it is there will be no punishment for it. Lessig (2006) argues that this is one of the main features of the virtual world, in that it relies more on the social graces of players to make a good society rather than any real world laws.
Another example would be in the game of EVE online (famous for its politics and back stabbing) where a player created a banking system that functioned like a real world bank (IGN, 2003). Players could make deposits, withdrawals, get loans at variable rates and all the other things a bank does. The CEO of this virtual bank, Ricdic, one day decided he had enough money and ran. The most interesting thing about this is that the developers of EVE couldn’t ban him for that, as it wasn’t against the code of the game.
There are of course more examples (EVE online would provide a massive backlog of these), but each of these raise interesting points. Although the actions of disrespecting the dead and embezzlement are crimes in the real world, in gaming worlds they are only unethical. Is this something that should be addressed by real world standards of laws and judgements, or should they instead be relying on the ethical considerations of the game designers to limit the actions of the player?
ReferencesIGN, 2003, 'EVE online bank scandal'
Lessig, L 2006, 'Four puzzles from cyber space', Code Version 2.0 pp 9-30
Real world ethics in a non-real world game - it just does not work nor will it ever. Too many people realize that it is not real, and the ones that do not are left to be pissed off when things do not go there way. Games are for amusement, albeit some people find them more serious and actually make an income from them, but realistically they are aimed at having fun, living out fantasies in an world where rules are not the same...and so they shouldn't. If it was made that the outside world ethics affected the in game world - so much fun would sucked out of games. Imagine having to apologize for shooting a team mate, or shooting an opponent with their back turned... BORING. I enjoyed this post and made me think about some interesting points.
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