Lucious the Luscious; Sabrina the Sorceress; Paul Philbaum, Crombie, PA, acct.; Rena Tsolitias, adm. asst to Mr. Philbaum; Larry Goldberg, CPA; Crombie, PA. (All names totally fictional, for the purposes of illustration)
 
Maybe your teammates figure out that you’re an accountant, too.  After all, if your friends all go by their real name and you’re simply “Grandmaster G”; you go from part of a club to “that guy”.  No one wants to be “that guy”.  We want to be “that group”.
 
If you opt out when all else are “opting in”, you go from being cool to being an insider trying to be an outsider. More after the jump…

Photo courtesy of Flickr; http://www.flickr.com/photos/katclay/4449231084/, Creative Commons, attribution required.

An outstandingly thought-out article about Blizzard’s plan to use RealID for Starcraft MMO. (From Networkworld)

Another incisive guess (or discovery) from a Harvard law student’s blog about WHY this Blizzard game makes RealID necessary. (Korea?)

A gamer’s blog with a decidedly even-handed description of why RealID is a bad idea. (Epic Slant) My absolute favorite quote, “The internet is full of cowards. These cowards delight in forums and message boards because they can say terrible things with little to no consequence”

A gaming blog’s listing of reasons why it is a good idea, from MMOsite.com, Celkie’s blog. (Total disagreement; but the logic is impeccable, that’s why it’s included)

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Other blogs giving their opinion on the debate, (including an incident with the de-privatization of an executive’s identity, and an about-face by Blizzard[perhaps] on this being a firm rule). These presented without comment.

http://www.gamingunion.net/news/blizzards-community-manager-the-first-victim-of-real-id–2141.html

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/07/esrbs-privacy-badge-all-about-best-practices-not-anonymity.ars

http://kotaku.com/5585451/people-complaining-about-blizzards-real-id-have-their-email-addresses-exposed

http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/07/is-world-of-warcraft-headed-into-privacy-troubles/
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8806623.stm
 
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/07/blizzard-backs-down-from-real-name-requirement-on-its-forums/1
 
http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/8551/battlenet-removes-veil-of-anonymity-on-forums-real-names-used

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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.

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.

A full story from PC Mag says report claims adult content still viewable by children, despite precautions. Notably, “It is far too easy for children and young teens to access explicit content in some of these virtual worlds,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a statement. ”

One short thing to note in the virtual worlds’ defense, in the reports’ Footnote 26: “In visiting each online virtual world studied, the Commission’s researchers did not put themselves in 45. the place of an average virtual world user. Instead, the researchers were specifically instructed to search for as many different types of explicit content as possible in the time allotted, performing key word searches using explicit terms, looking for explicitly-themed discussion forums and chat rooms, and observing explicit avatar chat.” I only have an opinion as an attorney, not a researcher, but that kind of testing would seem much beyond the pale of unbiased researcher and would go towards “ghost hunting”(i.e. if you go looking for ghosts you’re going to find them).

From Ypulse, a Website focused on youth worlds, “The FTC report brings to light the challenges facing companies trying to cash in on the virtual world phenomenon.Unlike traditional pre-packaged products, online virtual worlds are driven partially (and sometimes primarily) by user-generated content.”

A family-friendly Website, Netfamily news says “This is a great start. As purely user-driven media, virtual worlds are a frontier for research on online behavior.”

A social games Website article notes “Given important First Amendment considerations, the Commission supports virtual world operators’ self-regulatory efforts to implement these recommendations.”

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Here is a representative sample of the many Websites attacking the content or methodology of the Study.

Ars Technicais critical of the FTC study. It says “That’s on top of the fact that the biggest threat to kids online is… other kids. According to a 2009 report by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the percentage of children being sexually targeted by adults online is very low compared to kids targeting other kids

Massively (features on Massive Multiplayer Online games) reported the results were to be expected. They pointed out ” some elements of the study’s methodology are a bit questionable, especially as their list of explicit material included words common to anyone with a history of playing video games. (Or cable television.)”

PlayNoEvil, predomimnatly a developer and security Website, talks about the difficulty of the type of age verification proposed in the government report. ” One suggestion that is solid is to use an “Age Neutral” request for a new user’s age – e.g. “Enter your birthdate” rather than “Are you under 13″.The other is to tag a computer as being used by a minor if they try to login again with a different age.”

A difficulty that’s not discussed is online access through simple devices, Nintendo DSi, Iphones, and other platforms that aren’t really computers but allow net acess. I would predict that to be a “hot point” of the next government report following up on this report.

Last note: one recommendation by the report would seem to be unanimous to both sides of the argument. “The report recommends that parents and children become better educated about online virtual worlds, and affirms the FTC’s commitment to ensuring that parents have the informationthey need to make informed choices. A consumer alert, Virtual Worlds and Kids: Mapping the Risks, is available at www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/alerts/alt038.shtm.

As always; a couple of intellectual discussions which further the brief discussion above, for those wishing to inform themselves:

Protecting Children in Virtual Worlds, cited as Protecting Children in Virtual Worlds Without Undermining Their Economic, Educational and Social Benefits, Benjamin Duranske, Pillsbury Winthrop LLP, Robert J. Bloomfield, Cornell University – Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, October 13, 2009
Washington and Lee Law Review, Vol. 66, 2009

Social Networking and Age Verification, cite as Thierer, Adam D., Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions (March 21, 2007). Progress & Freedom Foundation Progress on Point Paper No. 14.5. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=976936

A related but interestingly similar argument: a Supreme Court case related to delivery of another contraband, tobacco products, to a minor, and the expectation that online delivery measure up to the standards of actual in-person delivery of product.

I encourage comments upon this topic, pro or con, as I consider this one of the most important issues facing online games.

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.

Let’s break down the component parts first of all. No discussion of legal terms is complete without a glossary, so I’m going to give you the abridged version. There will also be a referral for outside reading to understand the history of community in video games.

Universal banning – A pipe dream. Not yet technologically possible from an economic standpoint. For example, that would be Sony (or Activision) or Microsoft feels you have created a grievance so heinous, or repeated on so many occasions, that your personal ID (not just your gamertag, or your machine-tag, or your IP address, but you PERSONALLY, are banned from their games online at any computer, any console, or any IP address.) Developers can only dream of this type of power.

Banned by gamertag – this is the way of most online games. Depending upon whether player is paying for the gaming, or whether it is free-to-subscribe (and paid via optional add-ons) the banning varies in effectiveness. Tracks you by username and billing/registration information. Obviously if free-to-subscribe it is simple (if you are dishonest) to give an email address and a fake name.

Banned by game console or IP address – This is the most used these days. Especially with Xbox360 and PS3 accounts now updating regularly so as to tie these to the internet, the difficulty of “just playing” and not connecting is very complicated. And so the banning effectively “bricks” the Xbox360 or the PS3 to any additional updates through the company servers.

Starting from most recent to a little earlier: here goes…

Bragg vs. Linden
A great article on Law.com about the banning of Bragg. It is insidiously complicated or notoriously simple, depending upon how you look at it. Here is your legal citation and synopsis, “After a dispute over a land auction, Linden seized Bragg’s virtual land as well as an account with $2,000. Bragg v. Linden Research Inc., No. 06-08711 (Chester Co., Pa., Ct. C.P.). ”

Dailytech tells the story of the estimated one million X-box live customers banned from using the service for having modded consoles. The quote from Microsoft is “When a Gamertag comes up as violating our policies for online behavior, the person who owns that Gamertag is punished by being banned from the service. Keep in mind, this isn’t just a ban on a particular game. This is a ban on the Xbox Live service as a whole, so you won’t be able to go online at all during your ban”

Activision’s proactive legal strategy to give cease-and-desist orders to Websites running programs/addons that Activision feels violates the terms of use. (The Cease and Desist letter posted at Play No Evil video-game security blog).

Blizzard bans WOW glider from ingame use, and is victorious in the lawsuit. This is another version where the users are permanently banned.

Amicus brief filed by Public Knowledge in the case. Incredible background if you’re asking “what’s modding?”.
Ongoing coverage of the case given by Virtually Blind from 2008. Still the superior coverage of the older cases.

Kotaku has a story about Blizzard banning 350,000 users in Battle.net. The justification and method listed is “The Diablo II CD keys associated with the closed Diablo II accounts are now restricted from playing on Battle.net for approximately 30 days. Repeat offenders will have their accounts closed and their CD keys permanently banned from Battle.net. As a reminder, we reserve the right to close the accounts and ban the CD keys of players who are caught cheating on Battle.net. ”

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Here are a couple of places to find some background on the philosophy of games, choices, and banning.

Interview with Raph Koster :A point he brings up during the discussion is that the biggest and most successful games on the market are the ones that present very little choices for the gamer, and pegs them into roles that need to be fulfilled or they fail (World of Warcraft is the example).

So to this lawyer, it makes sense that the games with the fewer choices would be the most vigilant about enforcement to restrict those choices (i.e. mods, add-ons, etc.).

2. Commentary on a video-games Website; “is there a banning quota?”

3. Again, a good sampling of the response from developers as far as banning games.

4. Posts tagged banning at Massively.com (A great resource for MMO news)

5. Why Governments aren’t Gods and God’s aren’t Governments. Great article, especially concerning the whole philosophical reasoning of why an operation must be able to govern in games.

6. And lastly, of course, one for the eggheads. Basically, an article that gave me a headache, so it MUST BE GOOD.

If you’re looking for a broad statement of philosophy from me about this subject, you can move on. It is like all games, the choices on banning reflect the choices of the developers. Whether that is an actionable offense by the developers to kick out a player forever from their world, that legal decision is in my opinion at least 5 or 10 years away at least.

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.

Earlier this year World of Warcraft was suspended in China. The Chinese government administration did not license the continuation of a server for WOW.
This online game has about five million active users in China, accounting for about 30% of its total users worldwide. In April 2009, Blizzard Entertainment terminated its operating contract with the game’s former Chinese operator, The9, and selected Chinese portal and online game provider NetEase.com as its new operator in China. Since the operator replacement, the operation of the game in China has been suspended and users of the game have consistently complained to get the game restarted.

World of Warcraft in China has seen some six weeks of downtime as government regulators process their approval of the transition to operator NetEase…According to the MMOSite report, the lack of specific age ratings for games in China make issues like showing bones or the undead a gray area. You should read this story to see the difficulties of running a worldwide game across multiple government environments.(legal and cultural)

Here are other links pointing to this monumental story in the MMO world.

The Escapist Magazine

Softpedia talks about the small section of China to the entire WOW market

MMORPQ discusses WOW online again

Gamasutra discusses WOW reopens

Article for background about WOW opening in China, 2005
Another excellent article by same author; great discussion about difference in subscription plans China to US

For the full scope of the story to the World of Warcraft community, read a couple of the stories linked in this article;
WoW shutting down one server in China (GREAT LINKS)

And just these last two; to show the extent of World of Warcraft’s growth.

Blizzard reveals WOW operations

WOW Audience Grows (Gamasutra)

Technically, I know this is a Chinese government administrative decision, and not a legal decision. But it shows the tremendous worldwide reach of these games, and the jurisdictional nightmares if a user wants to file suit against an entity spanning dozens of countries, and thus dozens of different legal environments. It’s also important to have this background when reviewing individual lawsuits against multinational games. Hopefully you’ll read these and have a little empathy for those writing End User License Agreements(EULA) to span five continents’ scrutiny, or a little sympathy for the players or even the lawyers trying to make sense of them.

Jay Moffitt is a TN attorney. The words do not constitute legal advice, and do not create an attorney/client relationship. Jay Moffitt is not certified as a specialist in the subject matter by the Tennessee Bar, and the Tennessee bar does not have a certification in this specialty. Copyright October 2, 2009.

Copy of the public record lawsuit, Eros v Linden Labs, may be found here.
I know to most followers of virtual worlds a lawsuit within Second Life is not news, it’s a huge world, and it is the most litigious by far of the MMOs. (Massivelly Multiplayer Online games)But this one is a class action by Eros, a company that already has two judgments against other in-game players.

Patent Arcade has a short note about the classification of the interests that are claimed for the lawsuit.
Just a little background; for those of you not familiar with Second Life and its litigious history, you may want to review Virtually Blind.  As a fundamental foundation,  the Terms of Service of Second Life give some limited copyright protection to innovators in its virtual world. Uniquely, the Second Life content is almost all user-created, and thus a climate for disagreement over ownership would and could often become a fact.

Well, on to the alleged facts of the case (and pack a lunch). Eros is a provider within Second Life of certain erotic articles for sale. The complaint lays out how the plaintiff alleges the Defendant, Linden Labs (administrator/owner) of Second Life is not protecting plaintiff’s property rights within the game. (Note in the above paragraph hos Second Life TOS does allow some limited property rights, in distinct contravention to most terms of service in MMOs.) The problem is best summarized in a quote from an incredibly on-point article about virtual worlds:, p. 416 “Where the provider does not enforce the contract against a breaching user, it falls to third-party users who have been harmed to attempt to enforce the breaching user’s agreement with the provider–a contract to which the harmed user is not a party due to the hub and spoke nature of multiple separate user agreements with a single provider.” Risch, Michael, Virtual Third Parties, Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal, Vol. 25, p. 415, 2009.

So the plaintiff, after having in the past sued its fellow players, has resorted to suing the actual service provider. Is this practical legal advice, or going after the “deep pockets”? Opinions vary.

Massively (Daily News About MMOs) has an indepth interview with the CEO of Eros in which he outlines the various prongs of the lawsuit. Filing in California, it uses certain California state law issues, as well as Lanham Act and Trademark Act infringement allegations. The key part of their allegations state “Despite Linden Lab’s actual knowledge of such widespread activity, it has taken no substantive action to prevent, limit, or prohibit such widespread infringement.”

Gameslaw also devotes a short section to the case. It notes as well that it is a further bringing of real-world law into the virtual world, and references an earlier case that first “pierced the veil” on anonymous game players. I agree with its assertion that the primary legal importance of this is its nature as a class-action against the world administrator, rather than an individual against individual case for infringement.

Metaverse Journal takes a conciliatory view and sides partially with Linden Labs. They quote CEO Alderman of Eros, LLC, as saying that Linden Labs is doing 1.2 million per day in virtual transactions. He states that the problem is systemic.

The last article outlining the case, ironically, is New World Notes, a newspaper within Second Life. According to their information, “previous to his career as a virtual adult content entrepreneur, as he relayed in a recent documentary, Kevin Alderman was a plumber. As Stroker Serpentine, however, according to MediaPost, he’s grossed over $1 million dollars in content sales.) Or to put it another way, if Linden Lab had not managed to develop a successful virtual economy, he would probably not have the money to sue Linden Lab. ”

Just a couple of random tidbits to keep you “in the loop” about the scope of such lawsuits:
Roughly 12 percent of Americans, or more than one in 10, have bought a virtual item at some point in the last 12 months, according to a new (July) study by analyst firm Frank N. Magid Associates and commissioned by virtual currency provider PlaySpan., according to Virtual Economies; and directly from Linden Labs: “Now at nearly USD$50 million each month in user-to-user transactions, the Second Life economy is on an annual run rate of more than a half billion US dollars,” from an article by Virtual World News.

This lawsuit should be of interest both from the class-action standpoint and from the virtual-goods standpoint. It will be focused on by legal scholars for years to come.

Jay Moffitt is a TN attorney. His statements do not constitute legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Jay Moffitt claims no certification in the subject matter, and TN does not offer a certification in the subject matter. Post copyright September 25, 2009.