Passive Censorship

Censorship is generally active: You have a design that includes an element that you want, but you decide to take it out. If you did nothing, there would be no censorship. However, on occasion it can be passive: Information comes to light that is not in the public domain, and by doing nothing you are keeping it there. This amounts to censorship by inaction.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Many virtual worlds have the concept of “guild ownership” of property. Characters pay money or give objects to a guild, and this can be used to obtain items collectively that individuals could not own themselves; the guild is like a company in real life—a legal entity that can be treated as a person in many respects. Real companies have directors, guilds have leaders. So what happens if the leaders decide to asset-strip the guild, then close it down?

Most virtual worlds don’t account for this kind of activity. On the face of it, why should they? If players sign up for a guild and are ripped off by the leadership, well, that’s just the way of things. Guilds are for groups of like-minded people; choose your friends more wisely next time.

If it were only that guild leaders gave guild property to their other characters, well, okay, a “dog-eat-dog” argument is

perhaps tenable. What happens when they sell the stuff on eBay, though? They could be a team working to a long-term plan, inveigling themselves into other players’ confidences to maneuver themselves into positions of power. Think this sounds improbable? It’s happened; it’s probably happening right now.

So, what does the developer do if they spot players ripping off one another? If they do nothing, this would be a form of censorship. So do they stop it? If it doesn’t break their terms of service, on what grounds could they do that? They would be breaking a trust. One solution would be to make a change to the virtual world design so that there was always an audit trail available and players can see where their stuff came from. That’s somewhat unrealistic, though; it’s not going to please characters who play as thieves in a PvP world, for example.

This is just one example of many. Censorship is the deliberate exclusion of material, but that material does not have to be tangible, and the decision not to act can be as censorious as the decision to act.