Gamers Rights Law

I am currently “shopping around” for online and local forums that would like to hear me speak about Gamer’s Rights and how it is changing the conceptions of license agreements and forums rules.

Meanwhile, today’s post centers on the great work that other lawyer-bloggers are doing, as well as a few professional papers I recommend you MUST read. 

The one you absolutely must study is The Global EULA, by the lawyers at  Sheppard Mullin.  I really felt like breaking down the article or doing my own synopsis, but instead, go there, read it, consider it.  Beautifully done.

Other great articles I have found after the jump…… Read more…

articles education, EULA, grant, Minimum wage, Mumbo Jumbo, online games, Pop Cap, virtual worlds, Yale School of Medicine

And then I woke up. That’s the way this thought usually goes. But there are new and emerging studies, programs, and anecdotal evidence that this can become reality.

Great article about making serious games work for business, from Clark Aldrich, who writes well and often about this subject.

Further thoughts and related links after the jump……

Read more…

Work and Games

A lot of recent litigation activity lately, and I’ll try to link to it as the week goes on. However this is a long overdue post on how a developer uses perspective (his or her own) to make their world, and how the structure guides the course of that world.

Ten Things a Game Should Have from the Blog “I’m Talking Games”.

Innovation in Games from Keen and Graev’s gaming blog.

Mapping Perfection: talking about user-created maps in games. Escapist Magazine discusses their place and their use.

So, basically, these three articles cover first, the basics a game should have, second, the innovation a game CAN have, and third, the user-created input that a game MIGHT have.

So when will games be ready for a “warranty of implied merchantability for a specific purpose”? Were people hanging around outside Henry Ford’s offices in in 1928 saying their car did not meet their ideas of what the “ideal transportation model” would be? How about 1938? Is this a silly question? Is it a silly question because the software industry feels it is the only industry that can still (after thirty-some years of making money from consumers) say “if it is opened, you can only exchange it for the same software”?

Do you believe there is not a basic standard of usability that a video game must live up to? How about online MMOs? If not now, when?

Comments welcome and expected.

Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents.

video games Game expectations, Game requirements, User Maps, Warranty, Warranty of Implied Merchantability

Just a gentle reminder; I was a gamer a long time before I was a lawyer. Every day I (like many of you) read a lawsuit notice that seems so patently absurd that as a fellow lawyer I wince. Lawsuits that I’m sure 10 lawyers may have turned down before 1 took it. Non-lawyers need to remember; a lawsuit can be turned down by 10,20, even 50 lawyers, but if a person feels he/she has been wronged, it only requires 1 lawyer to file a lawsuit for it to become public record, make the papers, and usually make people say “Lawyers will sue over anything.” Mind you, sometimes it is a meaningful cause that only one lawyer is brave enough to take… but sometimes it can be simply ludicruous. Not here to apologize for lawyers in toto (that’s above my pay grade, as the saying goes) but a caution to non-lawyers out there that most attorneys (such as myself) would rather turn down 3-4 chances to file a lawsuit waiting for something that is truly valid and will result in a substantial monetary judgment/settlement for a client.

Here’s some other thoughts about taking fun out of gaming.

Player Perspectives: Is it Time to Quit, a good article from MMOPRG.com My favorite quote is “The MMO Industry doesn’t want you to quit, of course. It makes money by your loyalty to its game styles and brands, just like any other entertainment business.”

Respecting your Players at the excellent gaming blog “Eating Bees”. (Yeah, I sometimes wish the Bar would let me name a legal blog something really cool… ain’t gonna happen though). My favorite quote from this insightful article is ” I took this job because I thought the product was worth believing in, and because people are pretty much people no matter what the topic is. But having deep, sincere respect for what it is that my players love is going to fuel me for the long haul.” It’s a reminder there are, and will always be, a lot of developers, moderators, and administrators in the video-game and online game business who treat it as more evangelism than simply business. Thanks to them!

Sunk Costs, Pre-orders, and Game Over at the deep-thinking blog “The Psychology of Videogames”. It talks about the reasoning behind following “good money after bad” in a video-game purchase. My favorite quote is ” Robyn M. Dawes even describes in his book Rational Choice in an Irrational World4 how this is pretty much the same logic that a heroin addict would use to avoid treatment before reaching rock bottom. Yeah. Think about THAT. ”

Maybe I’m alone in thinking of an insidious “long-tail of excessive-lawsuit fever”; known forevermore as Lota Elf. I’d be interesting in hearing from developers if they’ve ever scrapped a cool feature of an online game because of worries over possible litigation, or if an online community administrator decided to shut down an otherwise pleasant community because of one or two “dangerous characters” who were repeatedly threatening lawsuits over one topic or another. Remember, it’s the game that doesn’t get made, or the really cool “wave of the future” mod/add-on/enhancement that we will never miss because we never meet (sorry for the chick-flick reference!).

Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents.

video games banning, frivolous lawsuits, Fun out of gaming, online games, Psychology

According to an article on the WSJ.com, today is the day.

Well-done piece on the technical and financial aspects of uploading your own band’s tracks to be sold on the Rock Band Network. 30 cents is not as good a deal per dollar as Itunes, (50 cents?), but then again the competition is less.

Here is the official site from Rock Band Network. Obviously a lot of effort is required to make the leap from sheet music to a fully rendered song (video/art/lip-sync/different-difficulties) but the explanations are fairly detailed. Quite naturally a cottage industry has sprung up to “assist” (for a fee) the indie artist to alert the masses of their stardom.

This company will assist your band; listed here strictly because of a really great synopsis of the steps to get a sheet music set-up fully ready to be played fully in Rock Band.

Here are the Terms of Service if you wish to upload a song from your band.

A full listing of companies that did the certified training by Harmonix can be found here.

Now if you don’t think this is huge; think of this….. can you think of a greater change in musical notation in the last 300 years??????????????????????????????????????????????? I’m serious; if you know of an intervening notation/upload system in the last couple of centuries, comment below! Here are three excellent articles about this subject, from Wired; and Kotaku, and from Edge-online.

Here is an older article from Gigaom which gets to the nuts-and-bolts of how Rock Band Network works, and it’s potential.

Just on a related note, here is the link to the PSN blog, which explains the latest update and how that helps Rock Band players. A procedural note about the uploads, they will not be allowed to be downloaded until there is “sufficient content”. Just like with regular DLC, the PS3 content would be available a couple of days after Xbox, and Wii (through Wiiware) sometime later.

Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents.

Music games Beta testing, Reaper software, Rock Band, Rock Band Network

So, is your husband, wife, significant other “cool” with your gaming? How about the ex-wife? Thought so.

Yeah, it happens a lot. One has to decide between your clan and your marriage. This post is to alert you to some stories, anecdotes, and resources to help you save your true love (or your marriage, too)

The most amazing WOW addiction Website I’ve found (even though I’m sure there’s many). Claims over 45,000 stories of addiction, recovery, (re-addiction), backsliding…. just read it, trust me.

Article in The Times (UK Edition) about women complaining that WOW is ruining their marriage.

Social networks also add to this trend, according to “Pixels and Policy”. Some law firms claim that virtual flirting accounts for 20% of divorces. Predominantly they are discussing Facebook, but inline chat is prevalent in most every online game.

Don’t expect Second Life to escape un-accused, either. Here’s the article, from CNN, in which the divorcing wife makes the strange-sounding accusation, ” “I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It’s cheating as far as I’m concerned.”

A divorce article from Divorce 360.

OK, this one is just strange. A soldier (serving his country in Iraq) comes home to find a “Mii” on the Wii, that looks almost identical to the male-friend his wife was having rumors surrounding. Read the post. Just strange.

Finally, a common-sense article that states the obvious. Facebook doesn’t cause cheating. Cheating sleazebags do. In other words; don’t blame the messenger. If your significant O is spending more time away from you with you…. do your best to be more interesting than whatever is pulling him/her away. Of course, sad to say, maybe he/she isn’t worth it. Obviously, I’m not a divorce lawyer; video-game lawyer… so yeah, MAKE SURE the video games worth it before you blow it all… remember, marriage is a lifetime but the video game will only be supported for 3-5 years tops.

Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents.

divorce divorce, Second Life, video game addiction

So many links; so many directions. But they are all tied together by students seeking knowledge and educators attempting to reach the masses with important content.

Virtual Worlds (116 resources via Educause)Most are from their own magazine but some are from presentations you could find no where else. Plus, did you know there were Education in Virtual Worlds podcasts?

“>PageFlakes (Training blogs) links Some very helpful material, even though a lot of commercial activity. Many are to virtual worlds, most to more traditional methods.

Ten great sites for finding Educational games. Many of these are sponsored by conglomerates (National Geographic) or software companies, but some are put together by smaller outfits. Well worth a look.

There’s way too much wealth to comment upon everything. One intellectual property note to consider when visiting all these sites sponsored by universities, software companies, and private website: when the university uses a professors’ ideas for an original creative game; do they have the right to make money from it? Right now it’s not an issue; so many free choices and educational games for the most part are licensed by software companies…. but that day is coming when? I wonder when we’ll have the first well-publicized dispute between professor and university about a game/website/application that just “takes off”?

Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents.

education Educational games, Games for training, links, online games, Training blogs, video games

Tracking your virtual character to track YOU!

Pixels and Policy has a great article about using a guy’s WOW profile to arrest him in real life. Extraordinary piece of reporting about interaction between police and WOW support system.

This is a link to a somewhat related story where Blizzard (WOW-maker) was sued for the way the program worked with personal information.

Some other interesting ideas that use the Metaverse to reveal something about the person behind the character.
There’s an article on Hypergrid Business about “Virtual Drag a Thorny Issue for Employers”.
I especially liked the quote, “A company can require that employees present themselves in a consistent and professional manner while at work and make clear who they are, she said, but can also decide to be flexible on this issue.”

Here’s a link to an earlier story at Poe News that describes an earlier arrest using simpler technology.

There is an interesting story in Networking World magazine describing how DNS tools helped track down the “Craiglist killer”.

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As always, the authoritative peer-reviewed type of article here below the fold.

Levin, Avner and Sánchez Abril, Patricia, Two Notions of Privacy Online (2009). Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Vol. 11, pp. 1001-1051, 2009. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1428422
My favorite quote: “According to network privacy, information is considered by online socializers to be private as long as it is not disclosed outside of the network to which they initially disclosed it”.

Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents.

criminal law Blizzard, extradition, lawsuits, privacy, tracking, World of Warcraft

(Lawsuit, that is).

Apparently the holiday seasons were an excellent time for Hasbro to sue. This story from Industrygamers says Hasbro ” today (Dec 17) announced its intentions to file a lawsuit against Atari, accusing the game publisher of fraud and five separate licensing agreement breaches of the Dungeons & Dragons brand.”

Here is the text of the lawsuit, from the incomparable Courthouse News.

I would urge my readers to peruse this. 176 counts? really? I enjoyed the fact that it did recount the emails, phone calls, contradictions, and internal friction that preceded the lawsuit. It asks for damages plus an accounting, among other other things.

Here is another take on the lawsuit, from 1UP.

Yet another, very clean synopsis, here at play.tm.

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In a somewhat similar lawsuit, Turbine announced earlier it was suing Atari for damages. Here is another article from Big Download about that lawsuit over the game Dungeons and Dragons.

You can read the full text of the August lawsuit here.

Any comments on either of these suits are welcome. As the details become more fleshed out I will follow this dispute.

Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents.

board games, online games Atari, board games, Dungeons and Dragons, Hasbro, licensing, Turbine

This is the best definition of “Griefing” that I have found. Buy Mortal Gold calls it ” the act of chronically causing grief to other members of an online community, or rather, intentionally disrupting the immersion of another player in their gameplay.”

There aren’t any lawsuits for griefing, or glitches, or general screwball hatefulness that goes on in MMOs or online worlds. But I’m always taking emails if you’ve found one or know of one. Here’s a list of the different types of Griefing articles I’ve found lately.

Pixels and Policy has a very interesting article about antisocial gaming.

Ten Ton Hammer discussesThe Seven Types of Spies, Like the Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, but for internet sociopaths.

Play No Evil discusses the Ten Ton Hammer article along with its own persepctive on dissension.

Not quite an other-gamer issue with fun, but a game-based complaint. The blog In Between the RPG has a great article about the disappointment of an MMO. Not a rant, but a thoughtfully written interesting article that you should read for perspective and hopefully your feedback on your disappointments of the past year.

Offline play really stinks in the MMO world(From Anyway Games Blog).

Griefing for Academia; Univ. of Loyola professor reviled in City of Heroes Older article, but still one of the best in-depth pieces on Griefing. And ironically, it’s told from the “Griefer’s” Standpoint.

And finally, a currently hilarious article in Destructoid Magazine about The Five Stages of Griefing.

Lost Garden discusses Games as Government, the surrogacy that each online world must project and administer.

More serious lumps of coal:

Metaplace is closing down. Official letter can be found here. Key points, ” over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer UGC service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company. We’re sorry to announce today that Metaplace.com will be closing to the public at 11:59pm on January 1st, 2010. ”

Personal note: I have an account on Metaplace.com, and I also subscribe to Raph Koster’s blog (for about 2 years). I love open-form MMOs/Games (no rules) and it’s a shame to see it close.

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Below the fold, the indepth viewpoints:

An Avatar’s Day in Court: A Proposal for Obtaining Relief and Resolving Disputes in Virtual World Games
by Farnaz Alemi, cite as 2007 UCLA J.L. & Tech. 6. You really should read this to see her suggestions on alternative in-game courts sytems for expedited relief.

Virtual Parentalism: (In a way criticizing too much energy used on becoming a “virtual parent” instead of a games publisher/administrator). Cite as Fairfield, Joshua, Virtual Parentalism (September 30, 2009). Washington & Lee Legal Studies Paper No. 2009-08. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1480701

As always, any suggestions, comments, or ideas for upcoming articles are welcome.

Jay Moffitt is a Tennessee attorney. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only and does not consitute legal advice or create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in this area by Tennessee and Tennessee does not certify specialists in this practice area. All comments will be answered promptly and courteously as long as they are germane to the discussion and do not contain specific game names or incidents.

online games glitches, Griefing, MMOs, online games, virtual worlds