Censorship

The first topic I shall look at is that of censorship: The deliberate exclusion of material that would warrant inclusion on purely informative, artistic, or gameplay grounds. The libertarian viewpoint is that all censorship is bad; everyone has a right to free speech, whatever they want to say and to whomever they want to say it. The common-sense interpretation of this is that there are certain conditions where what is said can be profoundly damaging (thus the libel laws) or dangerous (shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater ¹), and in these situations

free speech takes second place to some greater right. Otherwise, people can say what they want ².

There are still exceptions, though. Elizabeth Reid argues in a paper ³ about the ethics she employed when undertaking her research into virtual worlds that she should perhaps have self-censored some of the details that were given to her, even though they were provided willingly by people in the knowledge and expectation that they would be published. Her reasons for this are that her discussion of JennyMUSH provoked such interest among social scientists that they descended on it en masse to study the community; needless to say, this put it under such pressure that it almost fell apart. Legally—and ethically, as far as the players were concerned—Reid had every right to publish the details she did. Nevertheless, in retrospect she wished she had MADE every quotation anonymous (even if that meant being unable to use some of them) because then people wouldn’t have been able to find JennyMUSH so easily and their sheer number wouldn’t therefore have impacted it.

Currently, censorship in virtual worlds is performed almost entirely by the designers. The marketing group may insist on some changes, and licensed worlds have to remain true to the franchise, but beyond that there is only the law of the land (whatever “land” that may be). In the U.S., virtual worlds have been able to pitch themselves as examples of free speech in action, so they have been relatively free of legal interference. It may be just a matter of time before a major test case comes to

court over violations of anti-hatred, libel/slander, or property laws, but for the moment this has not occurred. This is in part due to two factors:

• It’s fairly clear that virtual world operators are no more responsible for what players say within them than telephone companies are for what people say on phones. They relay communication; they don’t publish it ⁴.

• Virtual world designers self-censor their virtual worlds so that contentious or provocative content does not appear.

So, let’s look at the kind of thing that might, at a glance, seem legitimate material for virtual worlds but that never seems to make it into them.