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The Lawbringer: 7 tips on holding the security line
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, and esoteroic topics that slip through the cracks. Data breaches cost a lot of money, consumer satisfaction, and trust. In the MMO world, the trust that exists between the game's developer and the player is a tricky relationship to navigate and extremely fickle. Any number of wrong moves or postures can turn your profitable subscription MMO into a public relations nightmare forced to turn the wagon around mid-trip. Security compromises a large part of that MMO trust. Blizzard has had its fair share of security issues and trust problems between the players and itself. As the first MMO to have to battle hackers and not just gold farmers to the scale present in WoW, Blizzard had to invent its own way to do business in the world as it was -- an insecure place dominated by gray-market gold sellers and account hackers looking to sell to an eager, ready-to-spend playerbase. While WoW isn't the astronomically large service that some others affected by recent and notorious hacks are, it serves as an example of one of the big guys in the industry doing their best to navigate a minefield. Greg Boyd and Gary Kibel wrote an article for Gamasutra discussing seven steps to improved security in the online and gaming space. After reading over the article, I felt that many of the points discussed had Blizzard and WoW-specific analogs and real-world examples that might shed some light on the security concerns still out there, what WoW has accomplished in the MMO security space.
AGDC08: On avatar rights and virtual property
If you're anything like the average MMO gamer, you click through that 'shrinkwrap license' without even batting an eyelash. The End User License Agreement, or EULA, is just a speedbump in the logon process for game players. For game companies, though, they're extraordinarily important documents. They require legal consultation, careful thought, and even more careful wording. They do exactly what the name says, spelling out the rights a player has in an online world. Noting that he really enjoys it when panel participants argue and disagree, Erik Bethke brought together a group of people to debate and discuss the issue of user rights. Along with Bethke, author Erin Hoffman, legal representative Greg Boyd, startup VP Scott Hartsman, and noted industry designer and analyst Raph Koster filled out the panel. Read on for notes from their fascinating discussion, which covered everything from government intervention in online worlds to the 'ownership' of virtual property.
