Players as People

“It’s just a game.”

When you play a game and you know the rules and something happens within those rules, you just have to accept it. You may not like it that the other team scored the touchdown, but you knew it was a possibility. All you can do is try harder.

This would be a fine analogy if virtual worlds were games. They’re not, though: They’re places. Some activities may be game-like, but not everything is. When players treat non-game

behavior like it was a game, this can have a nasty impact on other people in real life.

In normal computer games, you can do anything that the code allows you to. This is not an attitude that extends to virtual worlds, though. Most of the time it’s a good rule of thumb, but sometimes the virtual world lets you do things that you shouldn’t. As a trivial example, they aren’t coded to prevent your saying things that in real life would constitute verbal abuse.