A Game-God Makes a Draft Bill of Avatar Rights

Raph Koster tipped us off to a game-god dude by the name of Erik Bethke who makes GoPets who is actually trying to get people to help him write a more enlightened EULA or something of a Bill of Avatar Rights.

I've made my usual critique of Raph's old Bill of Avatar Rights, which is too collectivist and concerned about the "common weal" (as defined by...game gods? their pets?) and doesn't house rights in the individual, and make them inalieable -- as they should be (like the U.S. Constitution, God bless it).

And then I've made a line-by-line critique of this fellow's effort, which I'm forced to conclude is not a Bill of Rights at all, really, at the end of the day, as it stands now, although I think it's an important start. I won't take the nihilist and sneering attitude of Matt Mihaly, that avatars don't exist, and don't have rights, because they are data in game-gods' code, in software on servers. But anything that adds the phrase "and duties" or "and obligations" can't call itself a "Bill of Rights" -- as I explain. It's a set of rules for relations -- a social contract that isn't so much about real avatar rights as it is merely being public about company intentions and expectations. That's good -- more notification and due process is always better than none -- but that's not confuse good customer relations and that PR effort with "making a bill of rights" -- which it definitely is not.

The first thing to do is to get rid of the phrase "And Obligations" from this rights manifesto. It's not a manifesto of rights if it contains that. You should be mindful of the long real-world struggle within the United Nations in the last 50 years or so around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are some countries -- mainly those with heavy security states and reduced rights for their citizens, who often face a significant resistance within their countries from a range of peaceful democratic movements to armed guerilla movements, who want to get the rest of the world to sign a "Duties and Obligations of the Citizen" sort of treaty in order to have more ways to bang their citizens over the head with accusations that they've failed in their duties to the state. And they have been continually rebuffed at the UN in their efforts to do this -- because adding to state's ability to oblige from their citizens takes away their rights in the end.

There's a reason why Western liberal thought -- which in fact was always supported by Eastern liberal thought in the framing of UDHR -- chose *not* to make up lists of "obligations and duties". That's because once people have the freedom to assemble and express views, and due process to deal with criminals, they make up the restraints necessary to deter and punish crime without having prescribed obligations. They allow the society to make up the space of the moral code, whether it is "thou shalt not kill" or "thou shalt not engage in prostitution" -- and then the criminal code created by free parliaments (or not so free) makes the punishment for the crime of killing, rather than prescribing a duty to the citizen not to kill. Hope that distinction is clear; it's an important one, or otherwise oppressive states and game-god companies tend to lard up these documents with awful stuff like "you must be positive in your comments on the forums" blah blah which is horribly discretionary and easily abused.

1) Due Process & Habeas Corpus –
All discliplinary actions that lead to company action must contain the name of the perpetrator, the name of the petitioner or abuse reporter, and the name of the prosecuting company representative -- just like real life. This helps contain abusiveness and false reporting; it helps deter crime; it helps the company be accountable as to its individual staff members, and prevents bias as they are transparent. If the rationale for NOT publishing *all three names* is "but then the abuse-reporter will face reprisals" -- then you have to ask yourself: what kind of game is it that you're running, that a person who reports lawfully and a violation of the TOS and another person is justly punished, that he must quake in fear as if living in a mafia-controlled neighbourhood and hope his name is never published? Either run the game so that can't happen, or don't, but don't hide behind that excuse. Publish all names, as in a real-life court case.

The idea of player-run tribunals sounds interesting, but justice, as in real life, is horribly expensive in time and money, especially appeals systems. It can't scale.

The idea that you prevent bias or you prevent retaliation by "scrubbing identifying data" is fundamentally flawed. It's one that SL tried, and it really rots, and significant numbers of us simply refuse to serve on these kangaroo courts when summoned because they are horridly biased.

When you strip away identifying information, you a) remove responsibility of the state (game company) to make its case rationally b) you remove responsibiliy of the abuse-reporter to justify and document and back up his claims -- it's a serious matter to take away another player's game/freedom; c) you remove the deterrent power for people making frivolous reports to harass others and game-gods to just attack their enemies; d) you often make the cases senseless and unintelligible; e) you remove the possibility of adversarial defense -- vital to a free and just society -- which comes with showing the reputation, inworld deeds, etc.

Imagine if you were summoned to jury duty to send someone to the electric chair based on a few lines like "illegal immigrant...repeated breaking and entry...murdered ex-husband". You might never see a context in which, say, the accused was entering a home which was once their own where their property was, or the person murdered was a spouse-abuser, etc. You just can't see context when identifiers are stripped away. Don't be afraid of having a just trial with publicity of all parties. It will mean less abuse reports, but that's a good thing -- you shouldn't be running an awful little police state anyway where all the fanboyz get to keep their fingers on the AR button all the time and anonymously rat on their fellow citizens to gain points with the game gods.

Please don't invoke protection of privacy. It's not valid in RL; there's no reason it would be in simulated life except to maintain your own limitation of liability for litigation. If you are running a private country club with very restrictive rules that are at times arbitrary -- say so! -- do NOT dress this up as an avatar rights exercise or you can be sure that we'll be right here to declare it otherwise.

Rotate jurors, pay them a small amount in game currency or gifts, let the accused face their accusers, let the jurors see both accused and accuser *and prosecuting game god* and if this is too "expensive" then let it only work for appeals. That is, game gods make magisterial determinations about people's guilt, and tribunals are only convened for appeals.

(2) Right to free expression and assembly – people should enjoy this freedom up to the point where it sabotages the services or attempts sedition.

Erm, what is "sedition"? Saying the servers don't work and the company needs to fix them? This is terribly open to abuse. Either have freedom of expression or don't. Don't dress this up as a rights exercise when all it is, is a glorified company EULA pretending to be a rights' exercise to get commercial credibility. Even the very speech-tolerant U.S. has Supreme Court rulings that bar incitement of imminent violence, or racial discrimination. You can have tolerance of free speech along with a code to discourage hate speech without having to go too far in defining things like "sedition".

If you are going to go this route of having "public versus private" and control speech only in public venues, that's a possible solution, but then you have to be rigorous about not letting people play the game of suddenly crying foul and ARing over speech in private that they don't like. The public spaces have to be very carefully identified in the world.

I'd have to see the layout of GoPets to see how much capacity there is for intrusion of private communications and spaces to understand more about this.

(3) Right to your property and the security of that property in possession and in transaction –

This is all great, but here's what you have to think of: when tribunals and reconciliation and 14-day suspensions fail, and the person is ejected from the service. What happens to their property, then? Everything is determined by that! How do you think the United States or Australia or other countries that had many fleeing criminals got started? Because oppressive states would confiscate people's very means of livlihood and not respect their property/wealth if they were made criminals. So if you have service termination, you have to think: what do I cash these people out with? There must be a valuation that you automatically apply.

I would definitely about the Second Life wording of "for any reason or no reason" in stripping people of property. The Lindens haven't made use of this too often, but it's a terrible thing to have. There's no reason why, in a synthetic world, that you cannot spell out the reasons for confiscation of property and stick to it.

>(4) Non discrimination – all the usual suspects here we will not discriminate based on race, gender, age, orientation, religion, political views, and so on. We run into areas here on age where we must comply with a myriad of jurisdictional differences on the age of majority and the more subtle protections of teens and children.

I would make sure to have "sexual orientation" or "sexual preference" which would be better, and also "past criminal record" from this world or other worlds. A person whose credit card payment bounced or who got ejected from some ridiculously oppressive other game world out there shouldn't have the mark of Cain on them.

>(5) Right to exit and leave the GoPets service at will.

This sounds wierd to me. It implies only you can grant the right of a free and self-determining individual the right to leave your game. Please. They can press "off" at any time, it's not a right *you* dispense.

>(6) Right to transfer your whole account to another individual.

Absolutely. All game gods should have this. That they don't is a huge flaw and a set-up for criminalization all over, from WoW to SL. This would be a very enlightened thing to add.

>(7) No bannings or terminations of service on related accounts without due process.

Good! But don't call "due process" a troika-style panel of 3 game gods and fanboyz that will rule on a ID-stripped-away set of data.

*The right of the accuser to face the accused is paramount to all justice systems of all times and places.*

>(8) In the case of service errors that result in the loss of property the recourse will be replacement of the lost property and NOT the fair market value in the secondary markets.

Ok, I guess. Would like to think more about this.

>(9) In the case of service errors that result in the economic gain for the citizens we will generally allow the citizen to retain that gain within a limit of $50 of fair market value or 10% of the total prior direct purchases from GoPets of gold shells and premium services – whichever is greater of the two.

So exploiters and farmers are rewarded for finding bugs/exploits? I'm not getting that. It really seems terribly unjust to all those who aren't exploiters and play by the rules. I would drop this. It's not tenable or fair.

>(10) Service outages – we are scheduled to be down for a total of 12 hours per month. Any outages longer than that will be compensated to premium users in a 200% 24 hours of extended premium service for every 12 hours of down time. Further more any in-game time mechanics will be reset at the beginning of any server restoration (e.g. all ‘cool-downs’ will be reset).

Good!

>(11) We actively encourage private settlements between citizens that alleviate drain on the tribunal and customer support systems. I do not know how to materially encourage this… how about a non-refundable tribunal fee where if you win your case against another citizen (e.g. fraud) you keep 75% of the total fees and the tribal keeps 25%?

Yes, always have local remedies exhausted first. You could make a condition of the tribunal be that any parties to a dispute or allegation of a TOS violation must first meet or talk online to attempt resolution. Player-made mediation councils might be used, but don't expect them to solve every case, as there is a big difference between a dispute which can be settled by arbitration and mediation leading to reconciliation and possibly an agreed and just compensation, and a violation of a law that creates an offender and a victim. The victim shouldn't have to be splitting the difference with an obvious offender in mediation if a clear-cut abuse is involved. An example would be fraud. I don't know how sophisticated fraud gets in GoPets so I can't say if this is relevant.

>(12) Generally we will turn a blind eye to any form of derivative works known as mashups and fan art. We will leave the work of policing that to the individual copyright holders. However, in the event that we are issued a take-down notice or otherwise determine that we must take down some content we will issue the concerned citizen a warning 15 days in advance of that objects destruction. Replacement of the underlying costs of production of that item will be generally be awarded unless we (or tribunal?) determines the derivative work was created solely to grief the system and cost customer service resources.

Only RL courts and lawyers should deal with questions of copyright theft. See the Stroker Serpentine (Kevin Alderman case) underway in SL now. Cries of copyright theft or trademark use abound in games and worlds. They are often used by one older set of people in the economy to keep newer people out of the economy and prevent second-hand resales; they can place a chill on creativity. There shouldn't be game tribunals adjudicating this. If the copyright matter is serious enough, it should rise to the test of a RL case, that is, those truly concerned need to copyright and trademark their property and defend it in RL courts.

>(13) Changes to any policy, terms of service, code of conduct or other ‘governing rule’ we will provide 15 days notice summarized in an easy to read human bullet point ‘above the fold’ in the patch window with a click to accept and continue mechanic.

30 would be better. Some people don't log on that often.

>(14) In the case of emergency either of economic or otherwise causing damage to the world as whole we reserve the option to invoke the equivalent of martial law and take whatever action is required to restore order and ‘return to peace time’. Actions taken during times of emergency will be publicly posted sans personal information and made open for review and comment for the citizenry.

States of emergency can be lawfully declared if you notify that they are declared and outline which rights you are derogating from during the time of national emergency. So frequent communication and specific restrictions must be notified.

>(15) We will of course necessarily comply with all laws local and state globally and above all recognize the natural rights of humans everywhere. If a particular jurisdiction compels us to comply with an unconscionable law we will make commercially feasible efforts to resist the compulsion but it is understood that GoPets is not a platform for political advocacy in the real world territories.

If you recognize natural rights, what is your problem here with "sedition," which could simply mean criticizing the poor performance of your system, or the kids on the leader board who may be insufferable prima donnas getting favours from game-gods? Don't put in language claiming you do things that you don't do, just to make a commercial fiction here that you have an enlightened rights-based game world: you don't.

Whyville is a game that as far as I understand, does not attempt to regulate the childrens' and adults' discussion of real-life politics. I don't see how you could police this in private avatar-to-avatar speech anyway!

Are you saying GoPets can't demonstrate against the Iraq war, even with a texture or a t-shirt? Why?

>(16) We welcome all 3rd parties from the largest corporations to the individual citizens to invent novel ways to exploit the Gopets virtual world platform for their own private gain. We will not take any action against derivative or mashup work unless it directly threatens our essential trademark, patent and existential rights. For example, we do not allow a toy company to go run and make GoPets plush toys without a license from us, nor do we allow another company to setup a ‘rogue’ server that uses the GoPets client and assets to create a competitive service that would threaten our existence. How to define the lines – I do not know exactly.

This isn't really about avatar rights. This is about you defining your own rights. I find the Lindens put somewhat vague language in the TOS and are making case-by-case judgements about avatars' use of words like "Second Life" and "Lindens" in their businesses or groups.

It's better sometimes not to prescribe law in too much detail; it only makes for far more magisterial and discretionary rulings that oppress rights. You should take the position that the less said the better, and whatevery is not expressly forbidden is allowed.

Comments

[ErikBethke]

Honestly,

Thank you for a lot of good comments.

Also, while I too like the UN Universal as the best so far that humanity comes up with... it too falls short of your ideal where the state recognizes full inalienable rights and frees the individual for maximum liberty. No real country has done that and now we are even backsliding.

Again, while I would like to move the ball a giant step forward, I am not going to solves every issue of rights.

#3- right to property and expulsion - exactly THIS IS why I am bringing this up. In a world like WoW with such a compelling grip of content - they may be approaching the point where they could get away with banning 1-5% of the pre-paid accounts and say "sorry, trying to catch cheaters, please pay again, too difficult to check, you see..."

My current best thought is when someone is banned either the core market value, or the fair market value is donated to a basket of charities so that neither the service nor the banned citizen has an economic incentive.

Right to exit, this is serious, for Star Wars Galaxies, I could not cancel my membership for the longest time, for I had to re-install the client and remember my email/password combo to reach the 'true' exit button. Anybody with a EULA could say "You agree on a one-time DB cleanup fee (a restocking fee) of $10, $20, $30, or whatever. Anyways I agree with you that exit barriers and fees are reprehensible - I just want credit for formalizing it! :-)

No, protest away on the politics. I am talking about the people who cry foul when Google or Yahoo comply with Chinese censorship laws, or those that comply with the Bush Administrations wiretaps.

Political speech is fine, I am saying we will try not to cooperative with an unconscionable law - but we will not try very hard - if they twist our arms I will give up.

Sedition is a word I used on purpose to solicit these kinds of comments. Saying our servers suck is totally fine. We already have a free to criticize policy - even on our public forums - many organizations do not.

If it is senseless repeated taunting of the GoPets staff that has no informational value but is instead hurtful and meant to distract the team from working - I consider that an electronic scream of fire. So how do I express what we agree to better?

anything with #29:

Article 29.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
(Loophole Alert! Iran has the same escape code for Islamic Law)

-Erik

[Prokofy Neva]

Thanks for stopping by, Erik, I replied to this post back on your blog and the conversation continued. I'd urge others to tune in on Erik's blog and past posts and add their thoughts.

[Desmond Shang]

I think this is a great step in the right direction.

Too many times, people come to a world for the snazzy graphics, but leave due to the zeitgeist.

The very fact that GoPets has *tried* to set up something like this is very refreshing.