Massively multiplayer online role-playing games call into question the notion of "citizenry." It's as if paying taxes was all it took to belong to a country - but what rights does paying taxes get you? What does citizenry mean in online multiplayer worlds? What are the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in these virtual spaces?
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games call into question the notion of "citizenry" as if paying taxes was all it took to belong to a country - but what rights does paying taxes get you? What does citizenry mean in online multiplayer worlds? What are the rights and responsibilities for citizenship in these virtual spaces?
Citizenship is a natural metaphor since each game avatar is tied to a specific player (or at least has been, so far, in the MMOGs to date). For the Internet at large, authentication is key for regulation. When you can say, this person is a man/woman, from Minnesota, you can prevent certain forms of Internet traffic (ie, they should not be allowed to gamble here). You can set up zones, exclusion based on identity. Identity is possible with encryption and digital IDs, adopted by people as means of convenience, urged on them by commerce companies. Government regulates these commerce companies as a means of regulating both net and consumers.
In the case of MMOGs, the world is set up by commerce, each citizen is a subscriber. MMOGs eliminate software piracy this way. They solve one problem - authentication of ID, by certifying that that is definitely the only case of "John DoPe" logging in. But is John DoPe a man or a woman or a dog? The game is designed to allow you to play with that.
And so the question emerges - in online worlds if you wanted to set up areas that excluded based on gender, for example, would you exclude based on gender of the people playing, or the characters they play? There is no easy answer - as a woman playing a man might act more masculine than a man playing a woman. And requiring digital ID signatures signifying degrees masculinity and femininity is not yet possible.
The problem extends as well to language - if you set up "shards" or role-playing areas based on country of origin, you can't use "country of origin" necessarily as a basis for common communication. Similarly, if you ask someone to choose a language when they enter the game, it ignores the fact that they might be able to communicate bilingually. Sure they may have a preferred language, but is that system binary? This is not a choice with as much impact as some others, still it shows that a system of real world identification (I am Justin, in Tokyo) might have flaws when it translates into online variables.
Play is in a sense fluidity, and digital signatures are decidedly not fluid. So in essence, players are giving their real identities, and real credit card numbers, to the MMOG companies in exchange for the right to remove those outfits. Perhaps now we pay in order to have the freedom online we had in 1995 before authentication and reputation permeated.
Or another way to look at it, digital citizenry in one game is fluid, but across games, it is fixed. Question: what will make governments care what happens in MMOGs?
(Note - a good place to look to think about conditions of citizenship in online spaces would be the User Agreements for the major online games).
Posted by justin at October 27, 2002 03:50 PM