Online Politics
Next month the Yale and New York Law Schools will present a conference on the intersection of gaming and law, featuring Raph Koster of SWG fame. What’s really interesting, and may I say disturbing, is that it’s a serious attempt to address the possibility of online worlds being subject to real world laws. As an example, makers of creative MMORPG title Second Life recently introduced a tax on all player goods in an attempt to repair the game’s glutted economy. However the tax unduly penalized those players who had created the most complex ingame objects (Second Life allows players to build complex objects such as uniquely designed buildings and monuments), so they fought it:
Having thus decided that the tax system was unjust, they launched a series of highly symbolic protests. Clothing themselves in American icons, they replaced a model Washington Monument with tea crates, donned shirts saying “Born Free: Taxed to Death” and put up “Don’t Tread on Me Billboards.” They even slipped [the game’s maker] a copy of their manifesto, which borrowed phrases from the Declaration of Independence in railing against “Mad King George Linden.”
Gamers in other MMORPGs have staged similar protests against changes to the games’ rules over the years, and the conference raises the bizarre (and incomprehensible to those not involved in online worlds) possibility that “where online democracy does not yet exist, it will be necessary to invent it.” I thought it was fantastic when an Ultima Online player exploited a bug to kill the game’s Avatar Lord British [old and incomplete page], thereby creating a genuine online mythology, but this is taking it all to another level.
posted by monty · at 11:57 pm · filed under News