In class on Wednesday we had a brief discussion about how to inventory and keep track of possible paper topics. So you will notice a new menu item on the website “Paper Talk”. Here anyone in the class (or last year’s class) can post new ideas and anyone can comment on them. Will certainly do my best to keep track of and post ideas as they come up.
Following is a break down categories from last year’s papers as they reasonably represent traditional paper topic areas. Will also add a few thoughts on emerging topics.
Traditional Topics (note all of theses can be prefaced by “Legal aspects of..”)
*Violence in games – various takes on the Scwarzenegger case and it’s antecedents, usually with a particular focus on how games might be regulated.
* Freedom of creator/gamer expression in games.
*Copyright in games as a sport
* Mods
*Women in games
* Virtual property
*Video-game financing (crowd-funding emphasis)
* Patent trolls
*The patent system & the future of games
*Moral rights
*Augmented reality games
*Gambling and/in games
*Games as art
*Games as services
*Privacy, identity, on-line content sharing and games
Some Emerging Topics
The areas I see as most emergent are oddly related. They include:
*Virtual reality by merging real-world and gaming (“Ingress”)
*Virtual reality through devices (“Occulus Rift”)
*Surveillance through games and gaming hardware
jon
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Hi everyone,
After watching the Eve Online videos and reading the backstory, I began thinking about how real world value can be created and destroyed in virtual games. Destroyed ships, lost items and the like do represent actual monetary/economic loss [an ingenious business model, whereby a player’s accumulated value can be stolen and destroyed by other players!]. Further research into Eve Online showed me that the game has a very complex and intricate economy, including forming companies with shareholders and directors, IPO’s, share trading and dividend payments. Incredibly, people have even scammed these virtual corporations for many thousands of dollars.
See: http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/09/11/eve-online-player-steals-45-000-worth-of-isk-in-massive-investm
Also: http://oldforums.eveonline.com/?a=topic&threadID=1378711&page=1 [Quite amazing here to see the scammer engaging with the forums, and people expressing congratulations to him!]
This, and the proliferation of selling/buying in-game currency got me thinking about virtual economies, and, from a policy point of view, how to regulate them. My initial ideas for a paper are to look at first whether any game developer or even country might have the jurisdiction to regulate a virtual economy with players from all around the world, what measures might be available to such a party and whether these might be beneficial to the real economy and the in-game experience. Currently the exchange of real world currency into virtual in-game currency is prohibited in most MMORPGs that I have come across, and I am thinking of challenging whether this is the best model.
I am hoping that this might kick-start some discussion. Any comments, ideas or criticisms are welcomed!
The academics doing lots of work on the subjects that interest you Jonty are: Edward Castronova whose webpage is http://mypage.iu.edu/~castro/home.html; & Vili Lehdonvirta whose webpage is http://vili.lehdonvirta.com
Coincidentally, Vili Lehdonvirta just released a pre-print of a chapter which will appear in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality called “Virtuality in the Sphere of Economics” which you can find at http://vili.lehdonvirta.com/files/usvk5883/Lehdonvirta2013virtualityinthesphereofeconomics.pdf
jon
Jonty: Eve Online is a wellspring of academic ideas.
I also took some time to look into the community behind Eve Online and discovered that the game includes an elected “Council of Stellar Management”, made up of players and organized by the publishers. The “Council” hears gamer’s complaints and requests and then passes them onto the developers for possible implementation.
While the whole thing sounds as effective as student governance, it got me thinking of the use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) techniques in online videogames. Online disputes extend beyond local jurisdictions, and most litigated disputes seem to end in deference to the EULA (and therefore the publisher). The development of ADR in online communities seems to be an important necessity as people spend more of their lives and money in virtual worlds that seem to sit outside the jurisdiction of courts (sometimes because courts would rather not deal with it).
Communities will develop laws. One could trace the development of law in the western world and find parallels with these online communities: From absolute rule with absolute punishment (death/deletion), to the necessitated input from subjects/users.
Beyond the “Council of Stellar Management” what other types of ADR exists within the online communities, and how successful have they been?