Player Rights

Players do have rights. Players are real people, real people have rights ¹, therefore players have rights.

Characters, on the other hand, have no rights whatsoever.

For example, it makes sense to say that players have a right to exist, but no sense to say that characters share that right. Characters can—and do—get killed regularly in game-style virtual worlds. Characters don’t even have to have a human being controlling them.

When players become so immersed that they merge with their characters, they still have rights. Their characters (personae) now have rights too, but only in the sense that players do. Killing a persona does not kill a player; it might cause a player severe emotional distress, but any system embodying “the right not to be made very upset” would be wholly impractical (“You mean I can’t dump my girlfriend?”). Systematically persecuting a player through the vehicle of their persona, on the other hand, does border on oppression (if not exactly torture). It’s still the player that suffers, though, not the character. Just because someone puts your character on a rack, you can’t claim it’s “just like” you were put on the rack yourself. It isn’t.

There is, however, an often-supposed notion that players nevertheless have rights in a virtual world beyond those granted by the real world. There are two arguments as to why this should be the case.

The first argument is that the players of a virtual world make up a population, and populations determine for themselves what rights they have. Who gave the citizens of the United States their rights? “We, the people.” Unfortunately, for virtual worlds the populace does not have sovereignty. The people who write the code and run the hardware have sovereignty. The counter-argument is that with this power comes responsibility. That’s true, it does, but responsibility doesn’t mean rights.

The second argument is more pragmatic. Rights are granted by those who have power. Administrators have power because they can turn off a virtual world. However, players also have power because they, too, can turn off a virtual world—they can stop playing. By constructing a virtual world and inviting people into it, administrators are conceding that they have a need for players. Players are therefore in a position to insist on guarantees from the administrators, enshrined as a constitution, otherwise they’ll go play elsewhere. Players have rights because in the end it is they who wield the most power, not the administrators.

As a thought experiment, Raph Koster constructed a Declaration of the Rights of Avatars ², based on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the American Bill of Rights. On the face of it, the result is way too unpalatable for most developers to swallow, however it loses a lot of its bitterness when rewritten in plain English as “advice to virtual world administrators” rather than “rights of avatars.” What it then amounts to can be summed up pretty well as:

• Ultimately, someone has their finger on the power button.

• What this someone says, goes.

• If this someone doesn’t provide a code of conduct for their virtual world, then anyone playing in it deserves all they get.

• If this someone wants to change the code of conduct, they should consult their players, but they can ignore whatever they are told.

• Codes of conduct should be fair and should be applied fairly.

Codes of conduct are basically sets of laws. Although the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars assumes a U.S. perspective (anything not prohibited by law is permitted), this isn’t to say that alternative forms aren’t valid (in much of continental Europe, what is not permitted by law is prohibited). It’s just one example of what a constitution might look like.

There are two areas of confusion, however: Between players and characters and between real and virtual worlds. The following argument illustrates both.

Let’s accept that people have rights to liberty, property, security, and freedom from oppression. This does not mean that their characters have any such rights. If my character locks your character in a room and steals your stuff, that affronts no inalienable rights. Its rightness or wrongness is determined entirely by the context of the virtual world. Some virtual worlds may be constructed so that this is intrinsic to them. If I were playing in an “escape from Colditz ³” virtual world, I would be disappointed if my character could walk out of the front door simply because some right to virtual liberty was being infringed. I would expect the guards to destroy my character’s digging tools if they found them—it would spoil the game if my character’s property rights made this unconstitutional.

Even if you were to buy a virtual object with real-world money from its real-world owners ⁴, that still would not mean your character had any “right” to it. My character would not be prevented from stealing it from your character if that’s how the virtual world worked. You’d still real-world own the object, but that would not mean you could demand that it be changed in the virtual world unless you’d also bought some sort of explicit servicing agreement. You could conceivably argue that changes due to bugs in the code be reversed, and you may have a case if your object were destroyed. However, if in the real world you own a piece of a virtual world, you can’t extend this to say your character owns it in the virtual world.

The implementation of the virtual world alone determines the meaning of ownership—and everything else—within that virtual world. If you know this when you buy your virtual object, you can’t complain. It would be like taking a bicycle back to the shop because it didn’t turn to gold when you sat on it. The laws of physics don’t work that way in the real world. In a virtual world, everything tangible is subject to the laws of that virtual world’s physics. That includes concepts that are nonphysical in the real world, such as that of ownership.

Virtual worlds don’t work the same way that the real world works. It is a mistake to assume that they do.

So what can we say about players’ rights?

• Players have rights in the real world, of which the virtual world is a part.

• When considering rights, virtual worlds should only be thought of in terms of being a part of the real world.

• Administrators can take their ball home if they like.

• Players don’t have to play ball if they don’t want to.

For designers, the only impact of this is that they should always remember there are real people attached to virtual characters. These people can be affected in the real world by events in the virtual world. If the way these people are affected breaches their rights (or the laws that express these rights), then the designer is errant. Fortunately, the context of the virtual world normally provides enough cover that even when designers do slip up the damage is not normally too great. In the same way that someone who deliberately visits a museum of slavery can’t complain if the accoutrements of enslavement exhibited within give them nightmares, so a player who signs up to an “escape from Colditz” game can’t legitimately complain if there are images of Nazi regalia everywhere. They could, however, complain if their character escaped from Colditz and encountered a starkly realistic depiction of a concentration camp. They didn’t sign up for that, and suddenly the game is not a game any more.

Most problems of this nature will come from misjudgments rather than from deliberate flouting of the law. It’s quite difficult, in fact, to conceive how a designer could contravene a player’s fundamental rights in the real world by means of constructs in the virtual one.

That said, this is not actually hard-and-fast ⁵. I’m not a lawyer, none of what I have said here has yet been tested in a court of law; it might turn out to be complete hogwash. So young is the debate that its parameters are still being set. The first legal battleground to determine the place of virtual worlds in the real world is likely to be in intellectual property law; whether this will turn out to be robust enough to settle all outstanding issues depends on how the lawyers and judges slug it out, but it seems doubtful. In all probability, it will be some time before a working legal and constitutional understanding of the place of virtual worlds is reached.

It would be easy to conclude this analysis of players’ rights by stating that designers have very little to worry about on the subject, so all is well. It has, however, exposed an issue that really should be of some concern to them. In the concentration camp example mentioned previously, it was clear that occurrences in a virtual world can have such deep real-world implications to a player that it can break that player out from the deepest levels of immersion and make them think, “whoa!” This is something that can’t but concern designers. Unless you’re trying to make some kind of provocative artistic statement ⁶, it’s not supposed to happen. Players want to be immersed and designers covenant with them to deliver this immersion; if something within the virtual world shakes them out of their immersion, it’s cause for concern.

If a player loses immersion like this, it’s because they have a problem with something in the virtual world. The virtual world falls short of the standards the player expected of it. Those standards could have to do with the world’s physics, appearance, or performance, but in the concentration camp case it’s far worse: It’s an ethical issue. Bugs just show incompetence, and can quickly be fixed; poor ethics show poor principles, and they aren’t so easily forgotten.

Ethics are so important that they get a whole chapter of this book to themselves, Chapter 8, “Coda: Ethical Considerations.” Don’t expect answers—ethical issues are all questions.

I’ll wrap up this discussion about the intrusion of reality into virtual worlds with a celebrated and oft-republished story from LegendMUD.