Last fall, a group of World of Warcraft
players in China committed mass suicide. They wanted to draw attention
to the latest restriction on their liberty: The same government agency
that censors newspapers and bans books had just mandated a system of
disincentives to limit the number of hours per day they spent playing
online games. Hardcore Warcrafters decided they would rather pull the
plug than, er, pull the plug.
But Fox News and CNN weren’t on hand to cover the protest because it
took place in the game. The players’ digital representations martyred
themselves; their fleshy masters kept breathing. These were virtual
suicides in response to a crackdown in a virtual universe.
Still, virtual isn’t the same as unreal.
If the Chinese government can monitor World of Warcraft players, then
Azeroth (where the game takes place) is in some sense a little bit
totalitarian, too. And it wasn’t the first time Beijing intervened in a
massively multiplayer game: A few years earlier, a Chinese court
ordered a game company to restore virtual biochemical weapons someone
had pilfered from a player.
Other governments are taking an interest in MMORPGs as well. Players
in South Korea have been prosecuted for stealing virtual property. More
than half of the 40,000 computer crimes investigated by South Korea’s
National Police Agency in 2003 involved online games.
American gamers aren’t likely to face dictatorial decrees to limit
their play time, but within the next few years the courts will begin to
examine how laws relating to taxes, copyright, and speech will apply in
virtual worlds. In the near future, the IRS could require game
developers to keep records of all the transactions that take place in
virtual economies and tax players on their gains before any game
currency is converted into dollars. "It’s utterly implausible that it
won’t happen," says Dan Hunter, who has coauthored law review articles
like "The Laws of the Virtual Worlds." A trickier issue is whether an
avatar can be defamed: Will we see potion merchants suing for in-game
slander, much like eBay sellers have litigated over negative feedback?
In the United States, virtual worlds could eventually have the same
legal status as another lucrative recreation industry: pro sports. The
NHL isn’t exempt from federal legislation like labor, antitrust, and
drug laws. But inside the "magic circle," on the field of play, sports
leagues are given great latitude to make judgments, even though jobs,
endorsement contracts, and the value of team franchises hang in the
balance.
By Chris Suellentrop
Wired.com
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