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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.

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.
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