Sin in cyber-eden: understanding the metaphysics and morals of virtual worlds

Ethics and Information Technology (2007) 9:205-217 DOI 10.1007/s10676-007-9144-4

© Springer 2007

Sin in cyber-eden: understanding the metaphysics and morals of virtual worlds*

Ashley John Craft

School of Law, New York University, 240 Mercer St. Apt. 1002, New York, NY 10012, USA

E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract. This article uses a notorious incident within the computer program EVE Online to exemplify and facilitate discussion of the metaphysics of virtual worlds and the morality of user behavior. The first section examines various frameworks used to understand virtual worlds, and emphasizes those which recognize virtual worlds as legal contracts, as representational worlds, and as media for communication. The second section draws on these frameworks to analyze issues of virtual theft and virtual betrayal arising in the EVE incident. The article concludes by arguing that, in the absence of countervailing contractual obligations, users of virtual worlds have the same de facto duties to each other as they do in mediated and real environments.

Key words: applied ethics, computer games, EVE Online, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, video games, virtual reality, virtual worlds

What are virtual worlds?

Virtual worlds: a case study

On April 18, 2005 Istvaan Shogaatsu, the leader of a group of mercenaries called the Guiding Hand Social Club in EVE Online, announced that his organization had just completed one of the biggest acts of theft and betrayal in the history of virtual worlds. Members of the Guiding Hand spent a year infiltrating a rival organization before assassinating their leader and stealing in-game assets valued at 16,500 US dollars, effectively shattering the trust within the organization’s social network setting its members back months of playing time.1

Were the members of the Guiding Hand wrong? While those unfamiliar with virtual worlds may be tempted to dismiss any moral query on the grounds that all involved were just playing a game, the ‘‘brutal and devastating’’ psychological impact that the

* This paper grew out of my senior thesis in philosophy at Pomona College, entitled Game Theory: The Metaphysics and Morals of Massively Multiplayer Environments. I am indebted to Peter Kung and Paul Hurley for their critical insights and constant encouragement, as well as the Fulbright program, which afforded me the time and resources to develop this project.

Guiding Hand’s actions had on their victims shows that their behavior was both unexpected and harm-ful.2 And, in the course of describing the metaphysical nature of the EVE universe and comparing the Guiding Hand’s actions to actual theft and betrayal, we will find several reasons to think that the Guiding Hand’s behavior was immoral as well.

A brief history of virtual worlds

Virtual worlds are a recent phenomenon, with a history only a quarter-century old. Their technological predecessors, called Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, were created along with the first computer networks to help networked users communicate in real-time. With the mainstreaming of the Internet, MUDs got a graphical face-lift in the form of chat rooms like America On-Line and instant-messaging services like AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). These multi-user environments became virtual worlds when graphics cards became good enough to render them in three dimensions. The most popular of these early virtual worlds, including Ultima Online (1997) and Everquest (1999), introduced elements of role-playing computer games, even though a significant number of users participated for the social aspects of the med-ium.3 Only recently have programs like Second Life (2003) departed from the computer game format and marketed themselves as virtual worlds in their own right.

Features of virtual worlds

EVE Online is a program that, for a monthly fee of about $15, allows users to access the computer-generated, science-fiction-themed virtual world of EVE, and to interact in real-time in this world with thousands of other users through representational characters they have created.3 4

As with many virtual worlds, EVE exhibits many characteristics of role-playing computer games. A user first enters EVE with a weak character who can pilot only the most basic spaceships, with no specialized skills, and a paltry sum of virtual credits to her name. By flying missions and mining virtual resources, a user can gradually upgrade her character’s virtual spaceship, train her skills, and pad her bank account. These enhancements, in turn, allow the character to venture into more dangerous parts of EVE and take on a greater role in the universe.

The sheer numbers of actual people interacting simultaneously in a virtual world, however, offer a social dimension not found in traditional role-playing computer games. When she has reached a certain level of experience, a user can join a corporation - an alliance of other users - which opens up another range of possibilities within the world. Corporations can make their own charters, elect or appoint leaders, run trade routes, wage wars, share resources, corner the market on virtual items, and generally cooperate to further their collective power within the EVE universe. Users spend much of their time working closely with others in their corporation, and during space travel or even in combat situations get to know each other by exchanging text messages through the EVE user interface. Through these exchanges, users form friendships, romantic relationships, and even marriages, which often expand beyond the confines of the virtual world to chat rooms, instant messengers, and face-to-face meetings.5

Among existing virtual worlds, EVE Online is neither the most popular nor the longest-running. Yet because its administrators have taken a laissez-faire approach to governing the actions of their users, EVE has gained notoriety as a site of corporate warfare and deception, extensive user-versus-user combat, and unforgiving ship destruction and character death.6

Virtual worlds in academic discourse

As virtual worlds are a recent phenomenon, the body of relevant academic literature is still nascent. The first groundbreaking analyses of virtual worlds were journalistic: Dibbell’s A Rape in Cyberspace uncovered the circumstances surrounding the cyber-rape that occurred in an early multi-user environment called LambdaMOO,7 while Peter Ludlow exposed cyberprostitution in Electronic Arts’ The Sims Online and muckraked in Linden Labs’ Second Life.8

Some of the most interesting works concerning virtual worlds have arisen as academics have begun to evaluate them from their own disciplinary perspectives. Edward Castronova, for instance, applied an economic analysis to the virtual economy of Everquest, and calculated that its GNP per capita rivaled that of some European countries.9 More recently, Beth Noveck’s State of Play conferences and anthology have drawn prominent cyberlaw scholars, academics, and software developers together to answer the legal questions arising from the first court cases involving virtual worlds.10

Like representatives of other disciplines, philosophers are now in a position to give to and gain from the ongoing study of virtual worlds. The metaphysics of virtual reality has been with philosophers as long as Descartes’ demon, and contemporary metaphysicists can now virtual worlds into the fold. Acts of theft and promise-breaking have long been the domain of moralists, who can compare these acts to virtual thefts and mediated deception. in exchange, virtual worlds provide us with challenging real-world thought experiments and case studies against which we can measure our erstwhile speculative thought experiments and theories.

The metaphysics of virtual worlds

Understanding virtual worlds: a new analogy

For a long time, programs like EVE were labeled massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), an unwieldy moniker that essential-ized them as trumped-up computer games. only recently have theorists begun using the term virtual worlds, suggesting that there is more to EVE than meets the eye.

While EVE certainly contains elements of roleplaying computer games and to a large extent resembles them, users do not simply log on to EVE and play a game. They are also experiencing a virtual reality, negotiating sets of explicit and implicit legal and normative contracts, performing improvisational role-play, producing a collaborative work of representational fiction, and making use of a communicative medium.11 The virtual world is the environment in which all of these activities occur. We should therefore think of virtual worlds not just as games but, more broadly, as virtual spaces, fantastic three-dimensional locations in which users can socialize and role-play as well as entertain them-selves.12

Here the analogy to a theme park is useful in understanding virtual world creation and participation. Like theme parks, virtual worlds are designed primarily for commercial purposes, and seek to attract the greatest number of users multiple times to maximize profit from entrance fees. One way a virtual world can attract users is by providing a fantastic, interactive, exciting, and visually stunning world to explore - the theme of a theme park. Another is by filling out this world with compelling characters and a narrative back story - the costumed cartoons and fairy-tale castles in Disneyland. A third is by offering games to play against both the environment and other users - the whack-a-mole and laser tag games found in the arcade. A final way is to provide spaces for socialization, away from the competition of games - the food courts and park benches.

Whereas users log on to virtual worlds for all of these reasons, the frequency of their visits - an average of 20 hours a week13 - distinguishes their participation in virtual worlds from that of the occasional theme park visitor. While families can only explore a small corner of Disneyland in an afternoon, virtual world users can, over many months, chart the details of entire continents.14 While theme park visitors are watching poorly-scripted plays in which oversized cartoon characters rehash tired movie lines, virtual world users are improvisa-tionally role-playing their characters in order to collaboratively expand upon the fictional back story of their universe. When arcade goers redeem hard-earned tickets for overpriced novelties, users are continually re-investing the virtual credits they earn into their characters’ equipment and skills so that they can access higher-level content within the world. Whereas park visitors may spend a day with their friends, virtual world users spend months making friends, as well as pursuing romances, holding board meetings, staging protests, and securing venture capital.

Metaphysical paradigms: an overview

Because of the different kinds of activities in which virtual world users participate, it should come as no surprise that they have different understandings of the nature of virtual worlds. Yet users and researchers alike recurrently invoke several paradigms to make sense of their own and others’ virtual existences. The remainder of this section establishes a metaphysical framework in which to understand the immorality of the Guiding Hand’s actions, first by identifying and evaluating each of these paradigms in turn, and then by demonstrating why two of them are the most appropriate.

Figure 1 outlines the paradigms we should consider in our evaluation of immorality within virtual worlds. Although they resemble games and may

Figure 1. Analytical frameworks

include several of them, user behavior is not bound by rules or referees like those that regulate traditional game players. Virtual worlds more closely resemble amusement parks, as they are essentially expansive virtual realities or spaces within which users can interact. Before they can access these environments, users must agree to certain terms and provisions, usually contained within a legal document called the End User License Agreement (EULA). To the extent that these provisions specifically allow or prohibit certain kinds of user behavior, users may have a moral obligation to abide by be these provisions. However, when the agreement is vague or silent concerning these matters, they must look to the nature of the virtual world to determine what behavior is appropriate. specifically, we can understand that users in virtual worlds are simultaneously engaged in two distinct kinds of activities: They are collaboratively producing fiction through role-playing characters within a representational world, even as they are communicating with other users through text messages. The specifics of each of these paradigms, as well as the primacy of the representational and communicative ones, are detailed below.

EVE is not just a game

EVE and many other virtual worlds are marketed and described as computer games, and certainly much of users’ activity resembles this kind of play. In EVE, users guide their characters through a variety of objective-based missions, competing individually or in teams for rewards of virtual credits or items. Users operate within the framework of several rule-sets, and derive enjoyment from succeeding within these limitations.15

Despite these similarities, several technological aspects of virtual worlds distinguish ‘playing’ in cyberspace from playing conventional games.16 In games, rules are clearly formulated, normatively enforced, and negotiable. When a Monopoly player gives herself a loan from the bank, other players can point to the section in the rulebook that prohibits this behavior, refuse to play until the money is returned, or decide to allow it just this once. By contrast, in virtual worlds, rules governing user behavior in the EULA, if they exist at all, are vaguely or ambiguously worded, while rules hard-coded into the game mechanics and are inviolable and non-negotiable. An EVE user who is scammed out of her hard-earned virtual credits and looks to the EULA finds only a vague prohibition against ‘‘abuse or harassment’’ of other players, enforceable ‘‘at the sole discretion’’ of the administrators.17 She cannot access the scammer’s account to take the credits back, because the interface will not allow it. In terms of the game mechanics, she is now too poor and powerless to exact her own revenge, and, though she can stop playing, the ‘game’ of EVE continues, indifferent to her loss.18

Most games end at a certain point, and those that don’t persist only through the continuing efforts of the players involved. A basketball game is over after time has expired and the team who won is the one that scored the most points in the allotted time period. When the two teams meet again, the scoreboard is reset to zero. The fictional worlds created in penciland-paper role-playing games may persist from one night’s adventures to the next, these worlds exist only through the collective agreement of the players. These worlds disappear when players lose interest, or are rewritten through collaborative narration. By contrast, EVE is an existential universe, without a reset button, win conditions or definitive goals. EVE’s servers allow the universe to persist independently, regardless of whether a single user is logged on, and to track users’ gains and losses through every session, rendering them permanent.

Unless they have made bets on the outcome or are playing professionally, game players can separate their persona from their person - that is, their interests in the game world from those in the real world. A shrewd Diplomacy player can betray another at an opportune moment within the game, and still retain his trustworthiness as a friend. A linebacker can deliver a brutal hit on a quarterback in a football game, and yet fans need not worry about their own safety. in virtual worlds, we will see that the characters and objects found in the game represent users’ personae and their person - and that the death of a character or the theft of an object sets back a user’s interests both in the game world and in the real world.

Games are, as Huizinga and others describe, limned by a ‘‘magic circle,’’ inside which players need not worry about real-world standards of behavior.19 In many games this ‘‘magic circle’’ is visibly represented, as by the four edges of a board, on which players’ tokens, representing their individual interests within the game world, are shuffled about, or as chalk lines on a field, in whose bounds two teams try to score. We may be tempted to outline the boundaries of virtual worlds in a similar fashion. The nature of the medium offers a convenient dividing line: Everything that happens on-screen is part of the game world; everything that happens behind it is part of the real world. For reasons we will soon see, this line is drawn too broadly. Virtual worlds certainly have ‘‘magic circles’’ inside which both conventional games and open-ended role-play take place, but they also include content that lies beyond the bounds of game-play.

EVE is a virtual reality

As the analogy of the theme park suggests, virtual worlds are essentially spaces, in which many things, including conventional games, open-ended role-play, and real-world socialization, can occur. EVE is an immersive, interactive, persistent three-dimensional environment, viewed from a first-person perspective, and populated by humans and their representational counterparts. While contemporary virtual worlds are far from the multi-sensory total-body simulations imagined in philosophical thought experiments or science fiction, they nonetheless meet some of the more practical definitions of virtual reality offered in the field.20

Virtual reality is by definition a paradox, something that closely resembles reality, yet is distinct from it.21 EVE is, on one hand, an elaborate and imaginative representation of the future of the human race, a space-aged pioneer village animated by tens of thousands of users in character. It is, on the other, a place where real people are at present investing real time interacting with one another. This metaphysical tension between representational and actual worlds is at the heart of the Guiding Hand incident, and one which we will address shortly.

Participation in EVE is regulated by a legal contract Users must enter into virtual worlds before they can begin to perform or communicate. All commercial virtual worlds have a set of rules which users must agree to before opening an account. This usually takes the form of the EULA, a standard legal contract between the program administrators and individual users. To extend the amusement park analogy, the EULA functions much like the park rules posted outside the gate: It sets out the terms and conditions under which users will be granted access, effectively giving administrators the right to regulate their own virtual private property.22 Because all users must read and agree to the terms before entering, the EULA acts as a universally binding contract governing user behavior. In describing which behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable, it also gives users an idea of what kinds of behaviors they should expect within a given virtual world.

Koster and others have noted that virtual world EULAs tend to vest nearly absolute power in the software companies, and afford minimal rights to users.23 The EVE EULA is no exception, stripping its users of any claim to ‘‘time spent playing... objects, currency, or items,’’ intellectual property or anything else produced within the environment, thereby indemnifying the administrators against legal action.24 While such draconian policies have prompted Koster to ponder declaring the rights of virtual world users, the companies’ response is that, unlike in the actual world, virtual world users have other places in which they could exist. The administrator’s terms and conditions are a take it or leave it policy that users have presumably taken, giving their rational, unforced, informed consent in exchange for being granted access to the virtual world.25 Users have entered into a legal, and also a moral, contract that underscores the behavior expected within the environment.

In undertaking an analysis of moral actions within a given virtual world, we should first and foremost evaluate the language of and intent behind the universal contract to which all users have agreed. However, even though its administrators are aware of the propensity of its users to deceive and scam one another,26 the EVE EULA is silent on issues of virtual theft and betrayal.27 Although some users have argued that this deliberate omission implies the administrators’ tacit approval of the practices, we should not read beyond the letter of the license agreement; EVE’s administrators have simply taken a neutral, laissez-faire stance. Their silence allows us to analyze why, in the absence of contractual considerations, virtual world users have the same de facto duties to refrain from theft and deceit as in the actual world.

EVE is a representational world

Virtual environments are almost unique28 in that they enable large numbers of adult users to engage in role-play and collective fiction. Users role-play when they imagine, assume and develop characters different than their usual identities, and act in character for periods of time. When a number of users gather together in character with a common understanding of the nature of their fictional world, they engage in something like improvisational theater, and through their characters collaboratively produce a work of fiction, or a representational world.

The practical necessity of role-playing in virtual worlds is determined by the designers and reinforced by users in their in-game interactions. Among virtual worlds, EVE is notable for the depth of role-play and fan fiction that its users generate. The universe of EVE has a strong science-fiction theme, and is set against a back-story of warring, ideologically opposed spaceaged human factions.29 Before they can enter, potential EVE users must create the characters they will use to interact with this environment. Depending on the race and faction chosen, a new character is assigned a particular role to play in the narrative of EVE. These roles determine the character’s starting location within the virtual universe, their standing with other in-game political factions, and their selection of starting missions.

If the character creation process encourages roleplay, the game mechanics and environmental design make it a practical necessity. EVE is a virtual world filled with three-dimensional computer-rendered representations of asteroids and spaceships, warp drives and laser beams. Whenever users refer to these virtual objects as asteroids or warp drives, or refer to themselves as flying spacecraft or shooting lasers, they are effectively role-playing their character’s presence within Eve’s fantastic universe. Moreover, insofar as others accept these descriptions, users collectively engage in reproducing the science-fiction of EVE.

EVE users simulate immoral behavior

Since the works of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have questioned how humans respond to representations, or simulations, of immoral behavior. In its most recent incarnation, the debate has focused on the violence depicted in cinema and computer screens and whether those who are exposed to such images are themselves more likely to commit acts of violence. The arguments can be extended to include any form of representational immorality, such as virtual theft or virtual betrayal.

One side of the debate dates from Plato’s Republic, and is the same theory as held by contemporary philosophers Noel carroll and Peter Lamarque. Proponents of this theory hold that we react to representations of violence or deceit in the same way as if we had actually experienced them. Just as our repeatedly viewing representations of immoral behavior without consequence desensitizes us to its actual effects,30 so our experiencing or role-playing immoral behavior conditions us to act in the same way in actual circumstances.31 Thought theorists would find the Guiding Hand’s actions immoral, not because they had actually stolen from other users, but because they had made grand theft seem glamorous and without consequence.

Another perspective on representation originates in Aristotle and is developed by contemporary philosopher Kendall Walton.32 It gives substance to the common-sense notion that we understand representations - whether they be novels, movies, or computer games - to be unreal. According to Walton, there is a metaphysical barrier separating representational and actual worlds that prevents our moral character from being affected by watching a violent movie or roleplaying a villain. Protagonists of this theory would understand the Guiding Hand as simply acting in an improvisational play, no different than authoring a novel or directing a film. We can accuse such artists as violating standards of aesthetics, but not of morals.

While this is an interesting argument, it is tangential to the present analysis. If the Guiding Hand’s actions were in themselves immoral, any consideration of the effects they might have on third parties is secondary to the effects on their victims. As we will see in the next section, there is reason to believe that the Guiding Hand members were not simply performing within a representational world, but also actively deceiving other users.

EVE is a medium for communication

Practically speaking, users cannot participate in virtual worlds without encountering or interacting with others. In EVE, users derive social, political, and economic benefits from cooperating with others, whether pooling resources for venture capital, cornering the market on virtual goods, or forging military alliances. These relationships are built on trust, gained when users spend time getting to know others in the world.

For many users, these relationships are not merely role-played through characters but also exist between the people sitting behind the computer screens.33 Users frequently communicate out of character (OOC), using EVE as a three-dimensional chat room to talk about events in their offline lives.

Because the anonymity of internet communication makes deception much easier than face-to-face com-munication,34 users often bolster this trust by getting to know each other through other media channels, such as message boards, Instant Messaging or IR chat programs, telephone calls, and face-to-face meetings.35 In forming friendships and gaining trust, users corroborate the identity and sincerity of others.

Representational versus actual worlds

When Guiding Hand operatives violated the trust of their victims, the victims expressed betrayal not just as characters by other characters in a representational environment, but as users by other users in an actual communicative environment. The Guiding Hand, by contrast, argued that they had merely been acting in character, and warned their victims against reading too much into representational friendships. This, both illustrated and analyzed in the previous sections, is the paradox of virtual reality: Users are simultaneously participating in representational and actual worlds.

Morality within virtual worlds

After understanding these two paradigms, we can proceed in our moral analysis of the Guiding Hand’s actions. Here there are two separate issues at stake.

The first issue is virtual theft: The Guiding Hand acquired virtual items that have both value and utility within the virtual world, and deprived their victims of not only the items themselves, but also the time and effort spent acquiring them. Our analysis of virtual theft is representative of a class of crimes against virtual property, including acts of virtual assault, murder, and assassination, which target users’ characters and set them back in acquired skills.

The second issue is virtual betrayal: The Guiding Hand misled their victims for a year in order to gain their trust and the access needed to acquire their virtual goods. Our analysis of virtual betrayal is representative of speech-act crimes against users themselves, a class which also includes defamation, promise-breaking, verbal assault, lying, and cyber-rape.

Virtual theft

The peculiar nature of virtual worlds may tempt us to treat problems like virtual theft as new and unprecedented phenomena.36 However, we should not jump to this conclusion, for we have reason to understand virtual theft as simply a new kind of theft.

We can define theft as an action wherein ‘‘a person (1) intentionally, and (2) fraudulently, (3) takes personal property of another, (4) without permission or consent, and (5) with the intent to convert it to the taker’s use.’’37 Virtual theft is theft insofar as the former meets all the definitional criteria of the latter.38

We can look to the perpetrators’ own descrip-tions39 to satisfy several of these criteria. For instance, we can reasonably assume that the group (1) intentionally, and (2) fraudulently, gained the trust of their target organization in order to gain access to their virtual hangars. The Guiding Hand also (5) transferred a large amount of virtual currency and items to their control so that they could benefit, either within the virtual world or by cashing out for actual currency.

However, in order to assess the remaining criteria, we must answer several more general questions regarding the nature of EVE. The first is (3) whether we should consider virtual items and currency personal property, if not in a legal sense, then at least in a moral one.

Personal property belongs to its owner. In EVE, virtual items exist only in the inventories or hangars of the characters who received them. While users can transfer permission to use such objects to others to share or borrow - the Guiding Hand sought their victims’ trust to obtain this permission, and then took permanent control - only one user at a time can possess, use, or sell a virtual object.

Although the EULA forces users to relinquish any legal claim to virtual property ownership, users still possess virtual items within EVE. They reasonably expect that the same items they have in their inventories when they log off will exist when they log back in. The persistence of virtual items is a big reason why users keep paying their monthly subscription fees: such items represent significant investments of time and effort, as well as the user’s increased ability to affect her environment. The reason why administrators do not shuffle items randomly among users’ inventories is the same as why they do not tolerate one user stealing another’s login information and transferring ownership of virtual property: If they allowed either to happen, users would leave.

Personal property has value. In their article on virtual crime, Lastowka and Hunter note that virtual items behave like other representational items which are given actual monetary value when bought and sold on the marketplace. They draw a comparison between virtual items and objects like paintings, fictional characters, and domain names, recognizing that each are given legal protection against theft or infringement. Like any other virtual world, EVE has its share of online auction bids for virtual currency, spaceships, and character accounts, all of which exchange virtual items for actual currency.

But Lastowka and Hunter overlook another, more important feature of personal property: It also has utility in the environment in which it exists. The creators of EVE have coded the world so that a user’s having a virtual spaceship is a practical necessity. A virtual spaceship allows a user to quickly access different points within the virtual world of EVE. Users can upgrade or replace their spaceships to make them more powerful, using virtual currency accumulated through time and skill accrued in EVE universe. The better the spaceship, the more dangerous and lucrative places the owner can visit, the more and more powerful users she can interact with, and the better she can defend herself from computer- or user-controlled space pirates who would attack her. simply put, a user’s virtual spaceship unlocks a significant amount of representational and communicative content within the world.

if a user’s spaceship is destroyed or stolen, she loses access to this content until she can obtain another one. This loss is made worse because much of the politics, trade and exploration among high-level users occurs in such restricted areas; the victim has effectively been cut out of her social circle. A user who loses a spaceship cannot petition the administrators for a free replacement, nor is she in any position to steal it back or exact revenge. in order to regain access to this content, and her place in EVE online society, she must buy another one. A user who has lost her virtual spaceship has lost a significant investment, in the form of the time and money it took her to buy the spaceship in the first place.

Just like any other piece of property, then, a virtual spaceship in EVE belongs to its owner, and has both utility and value in the world in which it exists. This is exactly why we think theft is morally wrong: it harms the victim, depriving her of the utility she would have derived from using the object and wasting the time and money she spent acquiring it.

But perhaps the nature of virtual worlds is such that (4) the user effectively gave the perpetrator consent to try to steal her spaceship. it may be that virtual worlds, like casinos or basketball courts, are places where people try to take others’ objects because that is the nature of the activity in which they are involved.40 Even though a player may take a significant amount of money or property used as collateral in gambling from another, he is not a thief because both understood the nature of the game and the risks involved; so the same would be for the Guiding Hand.

When we analyzed EVE as a legal contract, we saw that EVE’s administrators remained silent on the issue of virtual theft. However, the language of the EULA, both in reserving ownership of virtual property to the administrators and elsewhere,41 carries several implications of what users might expect in terms of in-world property possession.

The first implication is that the virtual world is ‘for entertainment purposes only.’ The EULA gives clear indication of the recreational, rather than vocational, nature of EVE when it prohibits the auction or sale of virtual items for actual currency. Yet even though users are contractually obligated to not cash out on their virtual earnings, this does not mean that virtual credits have neither value nor utility. in a video game arcade, players change quarters into tokens which cannot then be exchanged back. Yet we would still treat one player’s taking another’s tokens as theft, because we recognize both their monetary value and potential for entertainment.

If the EULA is neutral on the issue of virtual theft, so are the mechanics of the virtual world. The interface of EVE allows one user to transfer control of a virtual spaceship to another. If there is trust between users, the interface has enabled sharing. If one user has deceived another, the interface has enabled theft. spaceships are not ‘‘designed to be stolen’’ any more than they are designed to be shared; the same interface mechanic can result in either action, depending on the users’ intent.42

The second implication is that the EVE administrators have, in effect, posted a sign saying ‘not responsible for lost or stolen valuables’ on the entrance of their virtual world. The provision functions as a legal disclaimer, indemnifying the administrators against users who could otherwise sue the company for the value of their virtual items in the event of data loss or decision to discontinue service. But the administrators’ relinquishment of responsibility for theft within their world does not mean that they are encouraging the practice, any more than would a similar sign outside an amusement park.

In the absence of countervailing conditions, then, our case study of virtual theft satisfies all of the criteria of actual theft. Virtual theft harms its victims in just the same ways as actual theft, and EVE users, unlike gamblers or basketball players, have no good reason to assume that the world is one in which virtual items are made to be stolen.

Virtual betrayal

In the EVE universe, acts of theft are inextricably tied to acts of betrayal. The world mechanics of EVE bar potential thieves from breaking into a hangar and hotwiring a virtual spaceship. The only way the Guiding Hand could steal from their victims was by first gaining their trust and then asking for shared access to their possessions. EVE is not a world in which virtual items are made to be stolen because EVE is not a world in which users are supposed to betray each other. It is, by contrast, a world designed to reward user trust and cooperation. And, like in the actual world, such trust is only possible when users assume that others are telling the truth.

Like a theater stage, a virtual world is a site of both representational performance and actual conversation, where users can participate either in character or in person. As performers, they can engage in improvisational live-action role-playing, bringing the space-age science-fiction universe of EVE to life. As people, they can discuss specific events and characters, including their own, as well as commenting on the performance in general. or they can discuss topics unknown to the fictional world of EVE: sports, politics, and life in general in the 21st century.

Unlike actors in a play, however, EVE users are not always sure when others are performing. An actor on stage can tell that another is in character by the presence of a costume, the inflection of her voice, or the exaggeration of her gestures. In virtual environments, however, these visual and aural cues are obscured. In order to tell whether others are acting in character or in person, virtual world users look primarily to the content of their communication.

Users indicate the world in which they are operating when they refer to objects that are particular only to the representational or the actual world. If, for instance, User A hears User B talk about ‘flying to the warp gate’ or ‘firing the lasers’ on his ‘spaceship,’ User A understands that User B is in character, since warp gates, ship-mounted lasers, and personal spaceships do not actually exist. User A may then respond in kind, asking B if he would like an escort to the next ‘jump point’ or an extra battery of ‘antimatter missiles’ for his next engagement. Likewise, if User B says he’s sorry but he must ‘‘take his daughter to her piano lesson,’’ User A understands that User B is referring to the actual world, because within the representational world of EVE there is no such thing as a piano lesson. User A may respond by asking when User B will next log on.

Things are not quite so clear, however, when one user refers to something found in both representational and actual worlds. Among the most important of these ambiguous referents are the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘I’. By convention, participants of virtual worlds can use ‘you’ or ‘I’ to refer either to a user’s character or to the user as a person. And while in context users can infer the intent of some utterances - ‘‘You killed me!’’ necessarily refers to the representational ‘you’ while ‘‘I have to take my daughter to her piano lesson’’ refers to the actual ‘I’ - a significant amount of communication lacks these contextual cues.

In a virtual world, the entire process of befriending someone and gaining his trust - built through messages like ‘‘you know, I’m really getting to like you’’ -can be undertaken either in character or in person. The ambiguity of this process is it is well understood, if left unmentioned, by those who use it to their advantage and invoke it to defend their behavior, even as it is overlooked by those who may ultimately find that their ‘friends’ have broken their promises, lied to, and betrayed them.

The complication with lying or promise-breaking in a virtual world is that those responsible can use the excuse that they were simply acting in character. In character, the members of the Guiding Hand are masterful mercenaries for hire, directed to ‘‘seduce and entice’’ their victims ‘‘into a state of trust and confidence.’’43 In their minds, they are role-playing friendship, a relationship that obtains only between characters in the representational world. Insofar as the Guiding Hand’s victims were also in character, there is no moral content to the Guiding Hand’s actions, for both parties were merely participating in a representation of seduction and betrayal.

However, the victims of such acts do not usually see eye-to-eye with their betrayers. In his mind, a victim likely sees that he was working towards an actual relationship, a friendship obtaining between two users through the medium of their characters. The victim thus feels as devastated when he finds out his friend has betrayed him in the virtual world as he would have been had he been betrayed in the actual world.44

Given the understanding of the users involved, we have thus arrived at an asymmetric, and metaphysically impossible, relationship. User A maintains that he is performing only in character, while User B insists that he is acting in person. But according to the internal logic of representational worlds, a character cannot have knowledge of a person; Character A does not know of a world outside the representational one of EVE, and so cannot have knowledge of Person B.45 Communication, the building blocks of relationships, can only occur between two characters or two users, and relationships can only obtain in the same manner (see Figure 2).

When two users communicate within the virtual world without specifying the world in which they are participating, are they both acting in character or in person? At first glance, the fantastic universe and

Figure 2. Representational epistemology. One-directional arrows show a user’s knowledge of a character. Twodirectional arrows show each user or character has knowledge of the other

on-screen representations of EVE suggest that users are always, as it were, in costume, and therefore in character. However, there are several good reasons to believe that all communication within virtual worlds takes place between people.

For one, in the representational world of EVE, characters are not automata; they are puppets, unable to perform without the constant presence of a person sitting in front of a computer. Whenever a user sends a message, or makes a promise or a request, through a virtual world, even if in character, she assumes that another person will act in response. The representational promise ‘‘I’ll let you ride in my spaceship’’ is also an actual promise that ‘‘I will execute the interface commands that enables you to experience the virtual content that I am currently experiencing.’’ Without the implication of an actual promise, the user might as well be talking to one of the computer-controlled characters in EVE, or even a representational potted plant, and should expect as much of a meaningful response. so every meaningful communication within the EVE universe is, explicitly or implicitly, directed as much to the person behind the computer as it is to the character she represents.46

For another, any user with even a little experience in virtual worlds understands their inherent duality, and the potential ambiguity of language which does not, through context, clearly establish itself as operating to one world or the other. A potentially asymmetric relationship can be resolved at any time by clarifying whether the conversation is taking place within the representational or actual world. This technique can even be performed theatrically as an aside or through a kind of text called an e-mote, which seeks to restore some of the body language lost in the transition to a virtual medium.47 The only reason why a user would be loathe to clarify such a communication is if she thought it might arouse suspicion in another user; this in itself is proof of the user’s intent to deceive.

Had the members of the Guiding Hand clearly indicated the duplicitous nature of the characters they were playing, there would be no reason to treat their subsequent betrayal as anything other than a masterful representational performance. Whether from an aside or an out-of-character message, the users role-playing the ‘victims’ would have been clued in on the impending deception, and role-played their parts accordingly.

However, insofar as they misled their victims for over a year into believing that they were building an actual friendship, before betraying their trust at the most opportune time, the Guiding Hand behaved as immorally as if they had done the same over the telephone or in face-to-face conversation.

Conclusion

We can only undertake a moral analysis of the Guiding Hand’s actions after we have understood the metaphysical nature of the environment in which they acted, and the nature of virtual worlds is a paradoxical one. Virtual worlds have both representational and actual elements, and the intermingling of the two is cause for ambiguity and misunderstanding. However, it is the dependent relationship of these elements that has allowed us to judge certain behaviors within virtual worlds as immoral.

The representational world of EVE is pinned to the actual world through virtual characters and items. Both exist simultaneously as representational and actual users or objects. Behind every virtual character is an actual person, who sits down in front of a computer and logs on in order to derive enjoyment from adventuring and socializing in virtual worlds. And behind every virtual object is the time, money, and skill a user spent acquiring it, and the access to or manipulation of the virtual world that it allows. Users’ interests are harmed when others steal their virtual investments or betray their trust online.

In EVE, virtual theft and betrayal are immoral because users do not have good reason to believe that they should be trying to take others’ property or deceive them. Virtual worlds, like casinos or football fields, can be places in which ordinary moral duties towards property and personhood can be suspended. But without universal informed consent from all users as to the nature of the environment in which they are participating, users have the same de facto duties towards each other when they interact within virtual spaces as they do when writing in print, talking over the telephone, or meeting in person. To paraphrase Castronova, users’ duties towards others within virtual worlds ‘‘have nothing to do with the fact that moral agents are interacting through their characters in virtual reality; it has everything to do with the fact that they are moral agents, interacting.’’48

References

C. Beardon. The Ethics of Virtual Reality. Intelligent Tutoring Media, 3(1): 23-28, 1992.

P. Brey. The Ethics of Representation and Action in Virtual Reality. Ethics and Information Technology, 1(1): 5-14, 1999.

E. Castronova. Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier. CESifo Working Paper No. 618, 2001.

E. Castronova. Theory of the Avatar. CESifo Working Paper No. 863, 2003.

• L. Collins. Emotional Adultery: Cybersex and Commitment. Social Theory and Practice, 25(2): 243-270, 1999.

W. Cooper. Virtual Reality and the Metaphysics of Self, Community, and Nature. International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 9(2): 1-14, 1995.

A. Craft, Game Theory: The Metaphysics and Morals of Massively Multiplayer Environments. Senior thesis, Pomona College, California, 2006.

J. Dibbell. A Rape in Cyberspace. The Village Voice, September 23, 1993. Retrieved october 1, 2007 from http://www.loki.stockton.edu/~kinsellt/stuff/dibbelrap-eincyberspace.html.

J. Elkins. There are No Philosophic Problems Raised by Virtual Reality. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, 28(4): 250-254, 1998.

M. Elton. Should Vegetarians Play Video Games? Philosophical Papers, 29(1): 21-41, 2000.

End User License Agreement. CCP Games, 2007c.

Retrieved october 1, 2007 from http://www.eve-online. com/pnp/eula.asp.

EVE Online Frequently Asked Questions. CCP Games, 2007a. Retrieved october 1, 2007 from http://www. eve-online.com/faq.

EVE Online Backstory. CCP Games, 2007b. Retrieved october 1, 2007 from EVE Online | The #1 Free Space MMORPG | Play here now!.

P. Ford. A Further Analysis of the Ethics of Representation in Virtual Reality: Multi-user Environments. Ethics and Information Technology, 3(2): 113-121, 2001.

T. Francis. Murder Incorporated. PC Gamer UK, September 2005, 126-129.

G. Hill and K. Hill. Theft. The People’s Law Dictionary. Fine Communications, 2007. Accessed 7 April 2007 from http://www.dictionary.law.com.

J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens. Beacon Press, Boston, 1950.

S. Hurley. Bypassing Conscious Control: Media Violence, Unconscious Imitation, and Freedom of Speech. In S. Pockett, W. Banks and S. Gallagher, editors, Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? An Investigation of the Nature of Volition. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006.

J. Juul, Half-Real. MIT Press, Boston, 2005.

B. King and J. Borland, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2003.

R. Koster. Declaring the Rights of Players. In J. Balkin and B. Noveck, editors, The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, pp. 55-67. New York University Press, New York, 2006.

F.G. Lastowka and D. Hunter. The Laws of the Virtual Worlds. California Law Review, 92(1), 2004. Available at SSRN: SSM.COM = 402860.

F.G. Lastowka and D. Hunter. Virtual Crime. In J. Balkin and B. Noveck, editors, The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, pp. 121-136. New York University Press, New York, 2006.

F. Manjoo. Raking Muck in ‘‘The Sims Online.’’ Salon. com, December 12, 2003. Accessed on April 7, 2007 from http://www.dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/12/12/ sims_online_newspaper/index.html.

Nightfreeze. The Great Scam. Retrieved October 1, 2007 from The Great Scam.

T. Powers. Real Wrongs in Virtual Communities. Ethics and Information Technology, 5(4): 191-198, 2003.

J. Rossignol. A Deadly Dollar. The Escapist 19: 18-22, November 15, 2005. Retrieved October 1, 2007 from Issues - The Escapist.

R. Schroeder, A. Huxor and A. Smith. Activeworlds: Geography and Social Interaction in Virtual Reality. Futures, 33(7): 569-587, 2001.

A. Seay, W. Jerome, K. Lee, and R. Kraut. Project Massive: A Study of Online Gaming Communities. Human Computer Interaction Institute, 1421-1424, 2004.

Terms of Service. CCP Games, 2007d. Retrieved September 30, 2007 from EVE Online | The #1 Free Space MMORPG | Play here now!.

T. Spaight. Who Killed Miss Norway?. In J. Balkin and B. Noveck, editors, The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, pp. 189-197. New York University Press, New York, 2006.

K. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of Representational Arts. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990.

N. Yee. The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-user Online Graphical Environments. PRESENCE: Tele-operators and Virtual Environments, 15: 309-329, 2006.

N. Yee. Motivations of Play in Online Games. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 9: 772-775, 2007.

U.G. Yoon. A Quest for the Legal Identity of MMORPGs. Journal of Game Industry and Culture 10: 2005. Available at http://www.ssrn.com/abstract = 905748.

1

T. Francis. Murder Incorporated. PC Gamer UK, September 2005, 126-129.

2

J. Rossignol. A Deadly Dollar. The Escapist 19, p. 19, November 15, 2005. Retrieved October 1, 2007 from http:// www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/19.

Readers unfamiliar with virtual worlds in general or the Guiding Hand incident in particular will find reading both Francis’ and Rossignol’s journalistic descriptions helpful in understanding the subsequent discussion.

3

A. Seay, W. Jerome, K. Lee, and R. Kraut. Project massive: A study of online gaming communities. Human Computer Interaction Institute, 1421-1424, 2004; N. Yee. The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-user Online Graphical Environments. PRESENCE: Tele-operators and Virtual Environments 15: 309-329, 2006.

4

Compare the definitions provided by Book and Bartle in U.G. Yoon. A Quest for the Legal Identity of MMORPGs. Journal of Game Industry and Culture 10: 2005. Available at http://www.ssrn.com/abstract = 905748.

5

N. Yee. Motivations of Play in Online Games. CyberPsychology and Behavior 9: 772-775, 2007.

6

EVE Online Frequently Asked Questions: Can I be a Corporate Spy? CCP Games, 2007a. Retrieved October 1, 2007 from EVE Online | The #1 Free Space MMORPG | Play here now!.

7

J. Dibbell. A Rape in Cyberspace. The Village Voice, September 23, 1993. Retrieved October 1, 2007 from http:// www.loki.stockton.edu/~kinsellt/stuff/dibbelrapeincyber-space.html.

8

F. Manjoo. Raking Muck in ‘‘The Sims Online.’’ Salon.com, December 12, 2003. Retrieved April 7, 2007 from http://www.dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/12/ 12/sims_online_newspaper/index.html.

9

E. Castronova. Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier, p. 34. CESifo Working Paper No. 618, 2001.

10

J. Balkin and B. Noveck, editors, The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds. New York University Press, New York, 2006.

11

A. Craft. Game Theory: The Metaphysics and Morals of Massively Multiplayer Environments. Senior thesis, Pomona College, California, 2006.

12

R. Schroeder, A. Huxor, and A. Smith. Activeworlds: Geography and social interaction in Virtual Reality. Futures 33(7): 569-587, 2001.

13

Yee, Demographics, 2006.

14

See, for instance, the data aggregated on World of Warcraft at http://www.thottbot.com.

15

Compare J. Juul. Half-Real, pp. 46-40. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005. Juul synthesizes a number of definitions of a game to determine six key features: (1) Games are rulebased, (2) with variable outcomes, (3) some of which are better than others, (4) which players put forth effort to achieve and (5) react emotionally to, and (6) which may be played for money or invested with other real-world consequences.

16

These differences distinguish virtual worlds apart from live-action role-playing (LARP) games as well.

17

Terms of Service. CCP Games, 2007d. Retrieved September 30, 2007 from EVE Online | The #1 Free Space MMORPG | Play here now! terms.asp.

18

Compare R. Bartle. Virtual Worldliness. In J. Balkin and B. Noveck, editors, The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, pp. 34-35. New York University Press, New York, 2006.

19

J. Huizinga. Homo Ludens. Beacon Press, Boston, 1950. Quoted in J. Juul. Half-Real, p. 164. MIT Press, Boston, 2005.

20

P. Brey. The Ethics of Representation and Action in Virtual Reality. Ethics and Information Technology 1(1): 5-14, 1999; W. Cooper. Virtual Reality and the Metaphysics of self, community, and Nature. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 9(2): 1-14, 1995; P. Ford. A further analysis of the ethics of representation in virtual reality: Multi-user environments. Ethics and Information Technology 3(2): 113-121, 2001.

21

C. Beardon. The Ethics of Virtual Reality. Intelligent Tutoring Media 3(1): 23-28, 1992.

22

F. G. Lastowka and D. Hunter. The Laws of the Virtual Worlds. California Law Review, 92(1), 2004. Available at SSRN: SSM.COM = 402860. Lastowka and Hunter cite Koster as saying that virtual world developers need to be able to expel unruly users from their environment (80-81).

23

R. Koster. Declaring the Rights of Players. In J. Balkin and B. Noveck, editors, The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, pp. 55-67. New York University Press, New York, 2006.

24

CCP Games, End User License Agreement: Property Rights, 2007c.

25

A. Craft. Game Theory: The Metaphysics and Morals of Massively Multiplayer Environments. Pomona College senior thesis, 53-55, 2006.

26

See the EVE FAQ entries on corporate spying, grie-fing, scamming, and player harassment (CCP Games 2007a).

27

Compare with the EULA for Ultima Online, for example, which reads:

...[P]layer killing and thievery... [are]not considered harassment...There are game mechanics created around these play styles.such as.the thieving skill.Ultima Online is a role-playing game that encourages various play styles, and players should seek ways of protecting themselves against these play styles through game mechanics.

Material quoted from F. G. Lastowka and D. Hunter. Virtual Crime. In J. Balkin and B. Noveck, editors, The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, pp. 121-136. New York University Press, New York, 2006. This provision clearly indicates that Ultima Online is an environment in which virtual items are meant to be stolen, and so if users fall victim to virtual theft in Ultima, they have no moral basis of complaint.

28

See also the dedicated few who engage in live-action role-playing.

29

EVE Online Backstory. CCP Games, 2007b. Retrieved October 1, 2007 from http://www.eve-online. com/background/.

30

M. Elton. Should Vegetarians Play Video Games? Philosophical Papers 29(1): p. 22, 2000.

31

S. Hurley. Bypassing Conscious Control: Media Violence, Unconscious Imitation, and Freedom of Speech. In s. Pockett, W. Banks, and s. Gallagher, editors, Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? An Investigation of the Nature of Volition. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006.

32

K. Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of Representational Arts. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990.

33

Yee, for instance, has found that 20-30% of virtual world users have told personal issues or secrets to other users that they have not told to their offline friends. Quoted from Yee, Demographics, 2006, p. 26.

34

For several descriptions of identity deception within virtual environments, see the story of Sue the Witch in B. King and J. Borland. Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2003. See also the story of Miss Norway in T. Spaight. Who Killed Miss Norway? In J. Balkin and B. Noveck, editors, The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, pp. 189-197. New York University Press, New York, 2006.

35

For a description of this process, see Nightfreeze. The Great Scam. Retrieved October 1, 2007 from http:// www.wirm.net/nightfreeze/.

While those familiar with the EVE universe have discredited Nightfreeze for several factual inaccuracies and generally written off the description as exaggerated, if not apocryphal, the work nevertheless serves as an interesting example.

36

Compare J. Elkins. There Are No Philosophic Problems Raised by Virtual Reality. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 28(4): 250-254, 1998.

Elkins cautioned philosophers against seeing virtual reality as raising entirely new sorts of philosophical problems rather than recognizing familiar problems in their most recent incarnations.

37

Hill, Gerald, & Hill, Kathleen. ‘‘Theft.’’ The People’s Law Dictionary. Fine Communications, 2007. Accessed 7 April 2007 from http://www.dictionary.law.com.

38

G. Lastowka and D. Hunter, Virtual Crime, 2006.

39

T. Francis, Murder Incorporated, 2005; J. Rossignol, A Deadly Dollar, 2005.

40

Compare with G. Lastowka and D. Hunter, Virtual Crime, 2006.

41

End User License Agreement, CCP Games, 2007c.

42

G. Lastowka and D. Hunter, Virtual Crime, 2006, p. 127.

43

Shotgaatsu, quoted in Rossignol, A Deadly Dollar, 2005, p. 129.

44

A parallel situation arises in cybersex, another cyber-relationship which users may approach with different expectations. Collins offers a well-reasoned exposition of the perils of cybersex from a feminist perspective.

• L. Collins. Emotional Adultery: Cybersex and Commitment. Social Theory and Practice 25(2): 243-270, 1999.

45

Walton, Mimesis, 1990.

46

powers draws on the speech Act Theory to make a similar point:

Because what an agent says, intends, and achieves is real, it is the subject matter for moral judgment, even when his or her agency is mediated by computers. The utterances and intentions of agents in cyberspace are partly constitutive of the socio-technical system that we call the online world.

T. Powers. Real Wrongs in Virtual Communities. Ethics and Information Technology 5(4): 191-198, 2003.

47

The user role-playing the Guiding Hand operative could, for instance, type an e-mote during a lull in the conversation: ‘‘Shogaatsu’s eye twitches involuntarily, as though he has something to hide.’’

48

E. Castronova. Theory of the Avatar, p. 17. CESifo Working Paper No. 863, 2003.