The Right to Protest–Second Life and World of Warcraft
I was thinking about this brilliant post of mine, where I pretty much said nothing of value, and wondered what virtulegal issues actually arise on Second Life, and whether other MMORPGs like World of Warcraft would have similar issues.
I mean, one major difference is that Second Life, well, has “people,” whereas WoW has, well, gnomes. In Second Life, people live in houses and have jobs and sit around and drink coffee and have sex. WoW–well, has gnomes. And they kill monsters. And go on quests for magic weapons.
So, where there is no specific object for “life” in Second Life–no quests, no XP, no magic weapons to find–maybe there’s more room and time for free minds to start thinking about their rights. (The “quest,” if any, in Second Life is to make money, buy cool things, and have lots of sex. Just like IRL, right?) It’s like Second Lifers are bourgeoisie, and the WoWers are serfs locked into meaningless toil, unable to afford the luxury to think about rights.
WoW is more of a game, where arbitrary rules are accepted. (Think if football was controlled by common law, and not by code.) You either follow the rules, or you don’t succeed in the game. What “rights” beyond that could you need?
I suppose there is the process, IRL, of “support”–bug fixes, code improvements, server uptime, game tweaks. And this is basically what the SLLA is asking for–an IRL improvement, external to the VR game life. This is what spawned the old-time protests on EverQuest and Ultima Online (though the Ultima Online protest about inflation was actually quite an interesting one, deserving a New Yorker article).
But last year, there was a WoW protest where a bunch of warriors gathered en masse to protest deficiencies in how the warrior classification was configured. By virtue of the numbers of characters on-line, in a single location, the servers had trouble handling the load. WoW ended up suspending the accounts of those who participated. Talk about protest and suppression!
I should really get back to reading Evidence… So I’ll finish this later, and try to wrap up my wandering thoughts.
(For full disclosure, I have a character on WoW, and, yes, he is a gnome. But a damn fine one. With lots of magic weapons.)