Player Rights

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

A Story About a Tree

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A Story About a Tree ¹ is an eloquent rebuttal by Raph Koster of the suggestion that a virtual world is “just a game.” It concerns a player called Karyn.

In real life, Karyn was from Norway, but she found a virtual home in LegendMUD. She soon made friends, and would sometimes bring friends of her own along (although their English wasn’t always all that good, and she often had to translate). After a while, she set up a web site about LegendMUD, on which she posted a few pictures of herself (she was very photogenic; unsurprisingly, as she was a former Miss Norway).

Masquerading on Designing Virtual Worlds

Player Rights

A Story About a Tree