BC Law IPTF Blog

Virtual Worlds, Real Profits has a blog entry on the rush of older players on MMORPGs and their impact on their virtual “economies.”

Older players, who have less time than younger ones, “power level” or buy time from services who will play their characters to increase their character levels:

The process typically involves two players from the power-leveling service working together, with one player using an existing high-level character while the other one uses the client account. As the C/Net story notes, power-leveling is controversial because it violates the terms of service of many games (which prohibit the sharing of account logins) and is frowned upon by many gamers.

These type of violations usually are ferreted out by other players–some of them dedicated vigilantes on personal quests to find these “farmers.” (”Farmers” also refers to players who only play to find special items and gold, which they then sell for real dollars IRL (”in the real world.”)

There are no rules on these behaviors. The rule that power-levelers are violating is that they give their usernames and passwords to third-parties for them to level their characters.

So there is no law governing this behavior, but there is community and culture which derides it. Where there is no written law, this sounds like law to me. And with a statutory mechanism (violation by giving away a username and a password) of prosecuting this behavior, users and their characters can be “deported” by their credit card numbers, names, and addresses.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Virtual Life, Blogs, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.