Ownership

It may seem odd to include a subsection on ownership when discussing physics, but (as pointed out in Chapter 3) ownership can be considered a physical quality for virtual worlds. Note that this is virtual ownership—that is, ownership within the context of the virtual world; real-world ownership of virtual objects is all about data and intellectual property (as is much else about virtual worlds).

There are two ways to implement ownership. The first is to give all objects an “owned by” property, which can be either empty (for example, no one owns characters) or point to some ownership-capable object (for example, a character, a guild). The second is to make it implicit: You own whatever you carry. The latter works for virtual worlds with low degrees of persistence.

The former would be preferred for ones with higher persistence, except that it gets horribly complicated; they therefore extend the “possession is nine tenths of the law” concept to stuff stored on player-owned property, but don’t track who owns individual objects in general.

At this point, you may be wondering why not. Computers are very good at bookkeeping tasks, and this is just bookkeeping, right?

Right, but the problem lies with formulating the rules.

Suppose character A owns a bottle of champagne and character B owns a bottle of orange juice. They both put their bottles on the ground; they still own them. I pick up the bottles; they still own them, and I’m a thief. I empty the contents of the bottles into a bowl and mix them up; who owns what now? I probably don’t own it, but does character A or character B? Most of it may be character B’s by volume, but character A’s by value.

This same sort of tracking problem arises for components of assemblies and collections. If I steal five units of currency from each of five players, then lose 18 UOC in a bet, who can lay claim to the 7 UOC that I have left?

The simple “if I hold it, I own it” rule doesn’t work universally, either. When your character picks up an object, it usually goes into a container; this will typically be some kind of backpack ¹. However, it could be a hand or a sack or…well, let’s see what it could be.

Solid objects in virtual worlds will usually fit into one of the following abstract categories:

• Things that can be worn (for example, a hat)

• Things that can be carried by an individual (for example, a book)

• Things that can be carried by several people (for example, a bench)

• Things that can be moved but not picked up (for example, a cart)

• Things that can move of their own accord (for example, a horse)

• Things that are immobile (for example, land)

• Things that can appear to be carried without actually being carried (for example, coins)

I can wear a hat or carry a book and be certain that it is mine. If I buy a bench and want to move it, though, how can I be sure it’ll remain mine? What about a horse or cart? As with land, some things do need to have their ownership tracked, like it or not.

Even tracking isn’t always the answer, though. If I steal a sword and sell it for gold, does the new owner have to hand it back to the original owner? If not, great: I’ll have my mule do the stealing and my main character do the buying. If so, also great: I’ll have my mule steal the sword and sell it to someone else, then give the newly laundered coin to my main character. In either case, the location of the original sword is known, but the person who stole it is likely to get away with the theft (at least as far as the virtual world is concerned—the players may have other ideas).

Here come the virtual lawyers….