Two More at Take-Two Fess Up

Take-Two's naughtiness apparently extends beyond their games...
Fudging financial spreadsheets? Check!
Lying to regulators? Check!
Stock options backdating, check and mate!

Steve Jobs, are you paying attention? There but for the grace of...

Two More at Take-Two Fess Up

Take-Two's naughtiness apparently extends beyond their games...
Fudging financial spreadsheets? Check!
Lying to regulators? Check!
Stock options backdating, check and mate!

Steve Jobs, are you paying attention? There but for the grace of...

Gamer Slays Friend over Virtual Property

The China Daily reports that a 41-year-old man stabbed an acquaintance who stole and sold his Dragon Sabre in the MMORPG Legend of Mir III.

The interesting thing is, the accused, Qiu, tried to contain his frustration and do the right thing. He went to report the crime to the police, but they told him that virtual property doesn't count. So Qiu got upset and attacked Zhu in his home.

But if virtual property isn't "real", how could the unfortunate Zhu have sold it for $871?

Qiu gave himself up to police and on the advice of his lawyer, has pleaded guilty to intentional injury, claiming he never meant to kill Zhu.

However, the court's prosecutor told the court: "As cyberweapon is not under the protection of any law in our country, Zhu was faultless in this case."

This case dramatizes one of the reasons Larry Lessug taught the class Law in Virtual Worlds. It seems obvious that a digital era requires new thinking about digital products and their worth. What's odd about the language of the lawyer representing the game company is his terming game assets "just data"; what is a computer program but just data? And don't we recognize that some software company owns that? Surely even in China, for all its supposed leniency in piracy issues, recognizes this. The real issue that's being overlooked in the discourse is whether players can claim any rights to these digital assets. But those issues will be forced on the Chinese court soon:

Now more and more gamers are seeking justice through the courts over stolen weapons and credits.

"The armours and swords in games should be deemed as private property as players have to spend money and time for them," said Wang Zongyu, an associate professor at the law school of Beijing's Renmin University of China.

"These virtual objects are often tradable among players," he added.

But other experts are calling for caution.

"The `assets' of one player could mean nothing to others as they are by nature just data created by game providers," said a lawyer for a Shanghai-based Internet game company.

Online game companies in Shanghai -- the city with the most players -- are planning to set up a dispute system where aggrieved players can find recourse.

Shang Jiangang, a lawyer with the newly established Shanghai Online Game Association, said: "The association has drafted some measures to facilitate the settlement of disputes over virtual assets."

He added: "Once any cyberweapon stealing occurs, players can report to the operator, which will then sort it out according to the circumstances."

Côte d'Ivoire Charge d'Affairs, call your agent.

We all get them: e-mails based on an original concept, the Nigerian 419 scam, formerly a post scheme called after the statute number of Nigerian law that makes them a crime. Typically, the contents have lots to do with you sending them a substantial chunk of change -- or the routing codes and numbers for your accounts -- to help them semi-licitly spirit a large sum of money out of their government's bank accounts and a rather small bit to do with the scads of money -- usually in the millions, US dollars -- they will send you after the money is safely tucked away in the Cayman Islands.

MORE...

The World is Owned by EA

"Raking muck in the Sims Online" is a fascinating piece on Salon about an online journalist in TSO whose account got terminated by EA. The intersection of law and the virtual is something I studied last semester with Larry Lessig and Julian Dibbell at Stanford, but I'm afraid I'm no closer to deciding what is right, if there is a right.

One factor is that the aims are very different. EA's goal is to make money, with the ancillary goals of protecting the brand, protecting the paying customers, and protecting future earnings. Ludlow, the journalist in the article, has a very different aim: he's a philosopher using the environment of TSO to experiment and gather data. For a time the two can co-exist but it's inevitable that they'll clash at some point. My question though is, capitalism (and, therefore, law) naturally rewards the owner; are there times when we ought not side with the doer, in this case Ludlow? There is no money in what he does, but that doesn't mean there is no value. In fact, there may well be value for EA in this, as well as for society. There is no good financial reward system that rewards the pursuit of knowledge, or art, even when it benefits us all.

These are problems that crop up when people begin to behave in a world as if it were free; when it fact it is paid for and therefore owned by a corporation. It's simulated freedom.

Currently I'm writing about the Simgallery project, curated by Katherine Isbister and Rainey Straus. Although I am not aware of any legal issues surrounding their situation, I wonder how copyright will work. All art created in the environment technically belongs to EA. Which isn't a problem - yet. An installation of Simgallery is slated to open on January 16th at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of their Bang The Machine exhibit.

(Incidentally, I think that's not a very good name for the series. Bang the Machine is the title of a documentary about Street Fighter tournaments. It has the aggression and the suggestion of arcade that's entirely appropriate to the content. The Yerba Buena show has no arcades. Hm. I don't really get it.)

Hacker Trial: Virtual Theft

Touching on auction controversy, the Black Hat computer security conference hosted a Hacker Court:

this year they've decided to put a virtual-economic spin on the facts of the imaginary case: The defendant stands accused of hacking into a fellow MMORPG player's game account and transfering to his own the legendary "Staff of Viagra," a rare game item worth $5000 on the eBay market.

From Julian Dibbells' Play Money.

Edward Castronova testified to the value of items in a virtual economy. To read his web site, it seems he came out on the winning side - there was judged to be a real world economic impact to the hijacking of virtual goods.

The Choice to Cheat

I wrote an opinion piece about Xbox live in the June/July issue of Xbox Nation magazine. I said the online game architecture had promise, but the social experience was limited, curtailed. Over the phone Andre Vrignaud from Microsoft promised me there would be enhanced community tools, so you could more easily find friends and stick with them. I came away wondering if the closed network architecture of Xbox Live wasn't a hinderance - limiting the pool of available online players to those owning Xboxes, and curtailing innovation that might come from non-sanctioned community tool development. Vrignaud responded to my skepticism by arguing passionately for the importance of encrypted communications and secure tamper-free game sessions.

For PlayStation 2 online games, developers must create their own online communications and matchup systems. There's no PS2 online user accounts tied to behavior standards and anti-hooligan architecture. The Sony approach is open - they build the machine, developers make the network and community tools that suit their titles.

The most popular PS2 online game has been SOCOM, a tactical team shooter. If I'm not mistaken, SOCOM has sold about as many software copies as Xbox has sold Xbox Live kits. Immensely popular stuff.

But that popularity might be threatened if malicious players are allowed to mess with the game balance; ie, if players are allowed to cheat in human-versus-human online play. GamesIndustry.biz takes up a recent annoucement by Fire International, a game peripherals company that they are releasing a means to cheat in SOCOM for players in Europe. But enterprising fans have beat them to it in the United States - already, according to Jeff Gerstmann at GameSpot, SOCOM has become unplayable for non-cheaters.

Rampant cheating in the unencrypted, open architecture of this popular PS2 online game would appear to vindicate the technological control scheme of Xbox Live. You can't trust players, argues Microsoft, so you have to limit their choices. Xbox Live doesn't trust anything that doesn't have a credit card and a digital signature granted by Microsoft.

But the GamesIndustry article hints at another way to control cheating online - norms. With technological freedom comes social responsibility. Perhaps, GamesIndustry argues, players will boycott any company offering the means to cheat in an online game. You can see scorn and censure for online cheat-enabling in this GamePro article about the Fire International announcement.

Perhaps if there were robust reputation systems in online worlds, players could flag other players who don't follow appropriate rules of conduct. Or maybe the game system could recognize and flag cheaters. There may be people who want to cheat in online games; let them play against people want to play that way. Or is it better not to have the choice to cheat at all?

Emulator Vigilantes

United Kingdom videogame activists FairPlay caught our attention last year when they rallied against the high price of electronic entertainment - "Video Games Are a Rip Off."

Now they're unmasking unfair, unrandom results of slot machines in the UK. Nearly all modern slot machines and video poker machines run on software encoded on chips inside the devices. Amidst the blinking lights, the sounds of falling coins, and the promise of winnings scrawled on the machines, many folks feel comfortable testing their luck against game software.

Fairplay has taken that slot machine software off the chips inside the machines, and run it on their own PCs, where they can experiment with the odds and probabilities. Evidence on their site demonstrates that most of these games don't pay out at random. The machines pay back on very fixed, and stingy schedules. The machine-makers are lying about the odds, and they're breaking the law.

Maybe some video poker players don't care - theoretically, if they play long enough they should know the machine's behavior. But now those players can play slots, without stakes, on their home PCs - Fairplay has provided the source code of UK slot machines so you can experiment yourself.

It's probably a copyright violation to publish the source code online. But here's a case where diligent gamers have used personal computers and emulators, with a little bit of what appears to be copyright violation and intellectual property theft, to prove an important point and reveal a greater crime - fleecing the public. Now Fairplay is pushing for stronger legislative limits on these one-armed bandits.

(From Slashdot)

Video Games Protected as Free Speech In a landmark case overturning a previous decision stating that video games do not qualify for free speech, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today declared that they are in fact protected by the First Amendment.

If the First Amendment is versatile enough to 'shield [the] painting of Jackson Pollock, music of Arnold Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll,' we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories, and narrative present in video games are not entitled to a similar protection," the court said in its ruling. "The mere fact that they appear in a novel medium is of no legal consequence."

The previous case in St. Louis County had evidently argued that stories were incosequential to video-games because players can skip right through them. The Appeals Court disagreed:

"The fact that modern technology has increased viewer control does not render movies unprotected by the First Amendment, and equivalent player control likewise should not automatically disqualify modern video games."

Obviously, there's some gamers on that 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, or they're at least smart enough to listen to their gaming kids when it came time to research this case.

Looks like we won one today.

Video Game Violence Catching Up To Violence Caused by Day Trading

I grew up reading comics and studying media. Throughout history, new popular-culture forms of entertainment are blamed for the fraying of the social structure and contributing to the general delinquincies. The novel, the ballet, television, rock and roll, comic books, and video games. It seemed obvious to me as I looked back: people blame media for social ills, and then that media becomes more familiar and less threatening. So why assail modern media?

Jack Thompson, a lawyer in Florida, is eager to defend a young man accused of murder because Thompson wants to hold the video game industry accountable - "Lawyer aims to take over murder case." Jack Thompson's few righteous lines sound like they were lifted from a Sinclair Lewis novel.

Some people in our society are locked in a discussion about the propensity of games to provoke violence in youths. How come we don't discuss the propensity of day-trading to provoke violence in adults?

Virtual Police Protection Act Follow-Up Interview

GameDaily is featuring an interview with Representative Mary Lou Dickerson, the Washington state Democrat responsible for the recent legislation outlawing specific video game speech for sale to minors. She hoped to prevent kids from playing games that allow violence to police officers. The interviewer attempts to explain to Dickerson gradations and artistic exceptions; Dickerson has ready, saddening answers. The notion that interactivity makes media different and therefore subject to fewer or different free speech protections is beginning to firm up - a sad sign in the still-early development of the medium of videogames.
GameDaily Newsletter -

The Unprogrammed Enemy

In a plotline reminiscent of Bandai's dot-hack, Slashdot games is tracking the fascinating story of a massively-multiplayer online game corruption. Last night, the servers on Shadowbane were thrown wide open - unholy and unfair acts perpetrated upon innocent newbies, the terror of angry, arbitrary game gods: "It involved more than just a guild taking Khar. This was teleporting people all over the world, teleporting hostile guards into the safe-holds, bringing in hordes of special event monster sand teleporting everyone to a city at the bottom of the sea." (Trol in the Shadowbane forums).

People are arguing over the bugginess of the game in the /. comments. Some believe this was not so much a hack, involving altered client software or server break-ins, instead they suspect people might have taken advantage of bugs in the game. Maybe there is not much of a difference.

Machine9 responds with some veteran Dungeons & Dragons glee: " I absolutely -adore- this, it's the kind of stuff my DM does to us ALL THE TIME! they should be clever about it, and turn all the offending player chars into NPC-evil-masterminds to be defeated after wreaking havoc on the entire continent... "

That's a creative solution, but these game worlds trade in part on stability and predictable experience for their paying subscribers. This could be a splash of cold water for people invested in virtual economies - the economy is fragile.

The official response of UbiSoft/WolfPack has been to invoke law enforcement. Perhaps they will restore the servers from backup, to present the world before it had seen the plagues and scourges. Some people have suggested that they send in Neo or Agent Smith, depending on their perspective - a hero to right the virtual world, set awry by an unprogrammed enemy.

Slashdot: Shadowbane Servers Hacked, Chaos Ensues

Patchwork Policing Player-Cop Killing

Grand Theft Auto 3 has sold a lot of PlayStations. The 80s rehash soundtrack of Vice City drew some fans of electroclash towards gaming in general. Some might argue that GTA3 has raised the bar for open-ended simulations. And some have argued that GTA3 makes law-abiding behaviour seem like more of a choice and less of a compulsion.

Now GTA3 seems to be behind one US state's effort to legislate against violence in games. Soon, Washington state is expected to have a law on the books making it a crime to sell specific games. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,

Under House Bill 1009, which passed the Senate yesterday 42-7, retail clerks could be fined as much as $500 for renting or selling video games that contain violence against law enforcement officers.

So this bill bypasses the ESRB ratings system decided on by software publishers and retailers. This is government reaching out beyond industry self-regulation to make a special case, fearing games permitting violence against officers. If there's a cop in a game, and s/he can be hurt, you can't sell the game in Washington State. Funny - that's home to Microsoft and Amazon - both of them lobbied against it. The IDSA is expected to press a lawsuit against the bill.

Let's hope they succeed - we can't have laws that target specific forms of video game speech, that runs counter to the essence first amendment. If we want to bar content from minors, that's another matter - that's why ratings systems exist.

The woman who proposed the bill, Representative Mary Lou Dickerson, wrote an editorial last December, "Parents, take charge of kids' video games." In that piece, she argues that parents don't check ratings on games they buy for their children. It sounds like the solution to her problem is more media education, not a state-by-state determination of evil in this medium.

CNN/Money 's Chris Morris has some additional coverage.

Busted for Game Hints

Earlier this week we posted a story about a guy going to jail for selling mod chips online. Now we have a story about a guy going to jail for sending game hints through the mail!

It's a little more nuanced than that - Gary L. Messenger II, a state trooper at the time, got a little excited and beat up a guy with some trooper buddies. He was sentenced to time in prison. During his stay at the Mount Olive Correctional Complex, he made some friends. Evidently they were playing video games together there, but they were stuck! There was some part of the game they couldn't get past. So when he got out of prison, he looked up hints on the internet for the game they had been playing, and mailed them to his inmate friends back at Mount Olive. Unfortunately, this broke the terms of his parole - no correspondence with convicted felons. So he had to head back in for another 90 days incarceration at a halfway house. The story is here, in the Charlston Gazette: Ex-trooper sent to halfway house for giving game hints to inmates. I saw the story on TechDirt: Locked Up for Sending Game Cheats to Inmates. As TD points out, there's no mention of what games, or game systems these inmates have access to. I'm waiting for a call back from Judy in the warden's office at Mount Olive, she said she'd look in to it for me.

Mod Chip Chill

A sentence was handed down in the case of David Rocci, a Virginia man caught selling Xbox Mod Chips off ISONews. He got 10 months in prison and a $28,500 fine (not the maximum possible sentence, that was 5 years and $500k).

For two months, he sold chips for people to fix their Xboxes to play non-Microsoft sanctioned disks. He was held to be in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s provisions against the sale or distribution of circumvention devices.

In online flea markets, I've seen people selling bootleg Xbox disks, so I can see that there might be console privacy concerns. But I've travelled between Japan and the United States, trying to play games in each place, and so I've wanted to be able to circumvent region encoding protections to keep me from having to buy a new machine in each country I play games in.

Is there some way to distinguish between people illegally copying games and people wanting some flexibility with their console? The DMCA's oppressive potential has been well covered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The game publishers' lobbying group is psyched by the DMCA though: "IDSA Applauds Federal Prison Sentence for Mod Chip Trafficker." Applauding a prison sentence, that seems a bit crass to me. I guess they are happy that people might start to perceive mod-chipping as risky, instead of empowering.

From Computer and Video Games: "The Long Arm of the Law Reaches out to Xbox Mod Chips"

Video Game Censorship: Coming to a Country Near You

Think that the gaming ban in Honduras won't happen in your country? As it turns out, there's more than one way to get violent games out of the hands of consumers, and a way to make sure it happens in every country.

According to a recent GameSpot article, which is based on an ESPN.com article, the NFL is taking a closer look at their licensed video games (specifically NFL Blitz, although allegedly that game is not their sole target) due to an editorial by Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly which attempts to make a moral statement on the violence in NFL Blitz and its relation to the actual NFL games.

As it turns out, there's an excellent chance that the makers of NFL Blitz will have to scale back some of the classic violent play that made Blitz the game it is, in order to maintain the NFL license. In what could be a precedent making decision, a game already in production and one that has already published this known "violent" gameplay (which is rated E, for everyone) for four years is going to probably be asked to pull content which gamers fully expect to be in the next version in order to appease the NFL.

The only question which remains to be answered is whether or not real football players will stop making late hits and illegal chop blocks due to this video game censorship.

Russian Roulette

FatBabies correspondent FatCosmonaut went searching for pirate versions of various popular games in the software stands of the former Soviet Union. He found hundreds of thousands of copies of Warcraft III, and two copies of Marrowind. He sees piracy as a result of stupid business decisions:

Our industry is extremely international these days and we should begin to understand that it is in all of our best interests to understand how Intellectual Property law works in these foreign lands so that we can best manage our properties and rights within them.

Presumedly all these games should have been popular and pirated, but some had made the right kind of deal to protect their interests. So he's written up all you need to know to prevent piracy of your games in Russia.

Lik Sang back - modless

Hong Kong-based Lik Sang has been among the Internet's finest purveyors of tools for hacking and cracking your game consoles and trafficing data between your computer and your GameBoy. Their e-commerce site went down a few weeks back, and while they have returned to the web, they no longer have "the good stuff." They've posted an explanation about a pending lawsuit, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft vs. Lik Sang, and their users have responded with a lengthy string of comments.