A brief preface before I post this editorial: This article was written for an English seminar I'm taking at college, so some of the explanations are rather thick to cater to a non-gaming crowd. Please don't think I'm talking down to any hardcore gamers out there already familiar with the terminology petaining to online gaming. Also, my citations had HTML problems and did not make the cut, but rest assured that I gave credit where credit was due.

The New Frontier of Online Games: Policing the Wild, Wild Web

In America and around the world millions of people are leading double lives. Maybe you know one of them. It could be the mailman, a coworker, even the nice old lady down the street. At first they appear normal in every way: they get up, go to work or school, come home to their families, and turn on their computers. Instead of sending e-mails or checking the weather however, they're slaying 50 foot tall dragons or running across an alien landscape with guns blazing. These people are part of a relatively new development in the world of Web 2.0. Nearly 16 million of them log into sprawling virtual worlds every day. These worlds are the settings for a type of game called an MMORPG, which is short for "Massively Mmultiplayer Oonline Rrole-playing Ggame". The membership of these games has been steadily doubling every two years since 2000 with no sign of slowing down. These games allow their users to meet and socialize with other people that may be thousands of miles away, but they have also brought with them a new wave of concerns about some of the legal and economical implications of virtual interactions in a Web 2.0 world. As we move further into the 21st century it is important to consider what changes will need to be made in order to adapt to the challenges posed by an entirely new online frontier. Like the Wild West before it, this frontier is still largely untamed, but by better understanding what specific problems we face, game designers and governments alike can update their current policies to keep this new technology on the right path.

There are three primary legal and/or economic problems that have arisen with the advent of MMORPG's: violent crime and theft as a result of digital property disputes, gold farming and the sale of digital goods, and integrated as well as un-integrated online game gambling. All three of these issues are reasons why it is necessary that MMORPG's should be more closely regulated, and all three of these reasons fall under the general umbrella of digital property rights management.

Some people world contend that the most serious and pressing issue related to the rise in online gaming is the problem of addiction to MMORPG's. This is a very serious issue that is deserving of further discussion and research, but the purpose or this article is to outline legal and economic problems, and it is my belief that seeing as how videogame addiction is a social and psychological problem, it would receive a far more thorough and useful evaluation from a medical journal than this critique of law and policy.

Since all three of the aforementioned legal/economic topics rely on having a basic understanding of digital property rights management, I will briefly explain the way the current system of digital rights works before going into more detail about the three issues. There are currently dozens if not hundreds of MMORPG's on the market, and almost every one of them uses a system in which a user pays a given company a monthly fee for access to a sprawling virtual world where they then earn virtual currency, acquire virtual items, and gain virtual status and power. Under the current system however, items and wealth accumulated in the game are not property of the players that work to earn them, but are instead property of the game company and are "rented" to the player for as long as they continue to pay the monthly fee. The reasons why this current method of transaction is inherently flawed will become more apparent as each of the three reasons stated earlier are touched upon.

Violence and theft are certainly not new concepts, but when they occur as a result of an online dispute in an MMORPG, it is especially saddening because these conflicts would be largely preventable if laws had kept pace with technology as the internet has evolved over the last decade. In China in 2005, a gamer named Qui Chengwei stabbed and killed Zhu Caoyuan because he had sold a virtual sword from the game 'Legend of Mir 3' for real world money which belonged to Qui. Although there is never a justifiable reason for murder, Qui rightly felt that he had no legal recourse. As previously mentioned, under current (Chinese and American) laws an item from an online game is property of the game company, not the person who acquires it. Technically, Zhu was selling the game company's sword, not Qui's.

If a new regulation was passed either by the game developers themselves or by a government where a virtual item was considered the property of the person who possessed it in a game, such a person would have the same legal options if someone tried to steal their digital goods as if someone had tried to steal their physical possessions. A typical response to this sort of proposition would be to question the validity of applying real property laws to an item made up of nothing more than one's and zero's. After all, how can an item be worth something if it doesn't really exist? Online blogger David Wong excellently counters this argument by pointing out that .the victim of a virtual theft worked many hours to "earn" the object. The victim used it daily and depended on it. He derived happiness and satisfaction from it. Why shouldn't depriving him of it be punishable by law? It is also worth noting that only 10% of America's wealth exists as actual printed currency. The rest is on computers and in the minds of the people. Money only has value because people give it value. The whole concept of physical wealth in the modern world is almost entirely arbitrary.

The second reason that current digital property rights need to be updated is that online items and currency from MMORPG's are being sold for huge profits, but the items don't actually belong to the sellers. Just like the murdered Chinese gamer mentioned before, millions of gamers buy and sell virtual wealth for real-world cash. This is a huge problem because not only is it illegal because it's not the property of the sellers, but there is also the fact that nearly every MMORPG has what is commonly referred to as "unlimited assets". To better explain what this means, imagine this scenario: A player completes a task in an online game and is rewarded with an item that he can sell for $20 in the real world. Seconds later another player completes that same task and is rewarded with an identical item by the game. Those virtual items cost less than 1/1000th of a cent to "produce" but they can inundate the real world market which can lead to serious repercussions like inflation and deflation in actual economies. In China, an entire black-market industry has sprung up around the sale of virtual currency, or "gold". This "gold farming" as it is referred to by MMORPG players involves thousands of Chinese workers playing online games, the most popular of which is World of Warcraft, in sweatshop-like conditions in order to amass huge sums of virtual gold which is then in turn sold to overseas distributors where it is then sold to wealthier gamers at a better exchange rate than the Iraqi Dinar. In 2005 the Chinese government imposed a limit on the number of hours that users could spend on an online game because the effects of the gold farming industry were actually hurting the entire Chinese economy. A worker farming gold actually made more money than he would have at a factory job, and as a result many workers were quitting their jobs at textile and machining plants to "play" MMORPG's for a living.

The best way to solve the dilemma of online goods being illegally sold for real money would require two simple steps. First, as I have stated before, items and money online would have to be considered the property of the user. Second, game designers would have to create virtual worlds without unlimited assets so as to prevent wealth from being created out of nothingness. This wouldn't stop digital goods from being sold online however. To the contrary, it would legitimize it as a market. People would be able to invest in the currency of World of Warcraft the same way they can currently invest in the Euro.

MMORPG's are here to stay, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the problems we face today concerning digital property rights will only become more pronounced as time goes on unless serious steps are taken to re-evaluate the way in which virtual property is treated. As I have stated several times, the most important step towards setting MMORPG's on the right path is instituting a system by which wealth attained in a virtual world is the property of the person who earns it, not the company that generates it at almost no cost to themselves. Once virtual property can be owned in the same manner that physical property can be owned, we will see a dramatic reduction in the amount of crime, both violent and white-collar, that involves an online game. Millions of real dollars are spent every year in transactions on auction websites like eBay and similar but less reputable ones like it involving digital property. By allowing for real ownership of digital goods in MMORPG's, that large and constantly expanding market is legitimized and allowed to become a functional part of the capitalist machine. If game designers can self-regulate their content to prevent unlimited assets and keep minors out of harm's way, the entire MMORPG industry will be able to experience healthy growth far into the foreseeable future, benefiting both the producers and the consumers. Of course, change like this won't happen overnight. MMORPG's are not usually native to just one country so wide-spread legal alterations won't be easy at first, but similar to the way in which China's government imposed regulations on that country's online gaming market, America should be at the forefront of the push to rework the way in which digital property rights are managed.

he probably won't care, but here it is :

"Mr. Thompson, its obvious that most people who play games do not agree with your views, nor, most likely, do advocates of the first amendment. so, if i may ask you... who exactly does support you? people who know little about games? if so then there support should be dissmissed as trivial because they knew little to start with... or maybe the choir you're preaching to is that of concerned parents of video-game playing children. but if they are so concerned, why don't they take an active role in protecting there own children, instead of leaving the task to an idealistic lawyer such as yourself? i guess what i'm really getting at is: if you win in your cruscade against violent games, who will stand with you on that winning podiium? certainly not the people that the games matter too. Just a bunch of politicians and irresponsable parents who are more interested in PR and proving a point than they are in actually bettering society. It's obvious that you are intelligent and very dillegent when you have a goal in mind, so why not pursue issues that everyone could support; like lowering real crime rates, not the ones in the latest grand theft auto game."

spoilers:

that movie was terrible IMO. sure, a lot of things blew up, but the plot of a hundred year old book where germs kill off the aliens is to tired to work today, the plot (all 5 minutes of it) was loosley seeded in between 20 minute chase scenes that all ended up the same: tom cruise and that annoying, whinny, pain in the @$$ girl (dakota fanning) surivive. hell, even the boy survived and he ran head on into a giant alien army! why did he do that? for some reason a perfectly normal seeming teen had a severe death wish and didnt care at all about the well-being of his step-dad and sister. oh, and the ending? im sure it makes plenty of sense that every major city has been overrun by giant tripods, but GRANDMA'S house is just fine. this movie was a cliché ridden, mind numbing bore.

4/10.... meh

this game is consuming my life right now. i have so many ideas for a game. here's a wallpaper i made if anyone wants it:

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y135/muddyalcapones/rpgmakerback.jpg

Today i discovered the simple joy that i had forgotten years ago. Pokemon on the gameboy. in honor of you guys i named all my pokemon after you. i have a totodile (alcapones, after myself) a golem (scarface85) a alakazam (neoevaevangelon) a sudowodow (jason again) a Pickachu (lyxnup) and a hitmonchamp (lawlessxx) and they all rule. i luv u guys. and scottster06 gets a special shout-out because he feels left out of this thread. however... i did make it about 3 months before i met him... so tough cookies. shibby5589 gets one too. why dont you guys post in my journal entries that arent 4 months old?

this fake pic i made was deleted for TOS violation, but i think Nsync in san andreas is hilarious! check it out:

http://img84.imageshack.us/my.php?loc=img84&image=nsyncinsa.jpg