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The Virtual Whirl: A virtual environment user's bill of rights
This week, in The Virtual Whirl, I'd like you to join me as I take a stab at a virtual environment user's bill of rights. It's a perennial topic given that service operators have a very unbalanced power relationship with users. I don't believe that users should make unreasonable demands or boss their VE providers around, but certainly there's a list of things that I believe are important to look for in a general purpose virtual environment, and that the lack of one or more of them should certainly get you thinking about alternatives.
Picking apart the MetaPlace Bill of Rights
MetaPlace is not an MMOG. It's a platform for creating virtual spaces that can be used for anything the creators can imagine. As such, the traditional MMO EULA is completely inadequate. Raph Koster -- the head honcho on the MetaPlace project -- made that clear in a panel at AGDC08. So, the folks working on MetaPlace had to come up with a whole new set of rules -- rules that allow users ownership of their virtual property, for example. There's a veritable landmine of problems awaiting this endeavor, of course. That's not to say it's impossible. It's just going to be extremely challenging.Koster published a first draft of the Terms of Service for MetaPlace on his blog the other day. It's based based on the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars that he conceived back in 2000. Readers of the MetaPlace ToS are likely to come away with two impressions. The first: that it's really cool and admirable and that in a general sense, Koster and friends are on the right track. Two is that the MetaPlace team seems to be underestimating just how epic a quest it's committed itself to.
MMO customer 'Bill of Rights'
Here comes the familiar discussion of player rights once again, but this time in a different form. Warhammer Online blog WAAAGH! has a post discussing the possible virtues of an MMO customer "Bill of Rights" as it were. Our immediate thoughts were of Richard Bartle's presentation discussing the good, bad and ugly futures of massively multiplayer online worlds. If you skim through Bartle's presentation, you'll come across the future involving player "rights" pretty quickly. Otherwise known as the lawyer future, possibly one of the scariest suggestions we've ever heard for our beloved MMOs.Granted, some of those predictions are quite out there. Paying income tax on the money you earn in-game is a pretty big leap, but it all starts out with players pointing to EULAs (End User License Agreements) as unfair. If we start demanding more rights within our online worlds we run the risk of having to walk a very thin tightrope that could lead to a lot of headaches later on. Don't get us wrong, we're all for companies treating their player-base better, but a virtual coup d'état is the last thing any of us should want.
