[...] Tech Call #153 8/17/2007: VirtuallyBlind.com covers GoPets and the Better EULA Project. 8/9/2007: Raph Koster discusses the GoPets EULA and user rights topic in his blog. [edit] Project [...]

Is the Internet owned by one person with a power button, Raph? No.

So why should the Metaverse be owned by one person with a power button?

And in a world, if the residents have sufficient stake and put resources into it, you have to ask why there is no equity or sharing of powers, ultimately. Countries aren’t owned, either, by one person with a power button, as much as people think they are. There is some kind of group, levels of control and checks and balances.

The avatar bill of rights needs to be for the Internet and the Metaverse as an ideal and a norm, and it’s understood that different worlds will derogate from it more or less, and just as in the real world, this will suit different cultures and peoples, and people will shop around.

Every decent person I know who has touched WSIS has come away screaming.

[...] the task of drafting a bill of rights for avatars: http://erikbethke.livejournal.com/18138.html http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/08/09/gopets-and-avatar-rights/ [...]

“Special powers or privileges shall be founded solely on the common good, and not based on whim, favoritism, nepotism, or the caprice of those who hold power.”

I mean, serously, what is the “common good”? Why are powers and privileges founded in *that* and not inherent in the individual’s set of rights? Indeed, why did you swerve from “rights” to “powers and privileges”.

So I think that your core point that “the common good” may be the wrong foundation for the document is an excellent one, and likely the core revision that needs to be made to the document as a whole.

That said, what we’re talking about here is essentially the police. The powers and privileges are granted so that they can preserve the rights of everyone else.

I think the core challenge with anything like this is still going to be the “finger on the power button” problem. From the point of view of anyone who has made an investment in infrastructure and in keeping the world running, the risk is basically that of losing all that investment. You may have all the noble ideals in the world, but it’s fairly easy to set up a document like this in such a way that the person who builds a world basically loses all control (and thus all investment) when they open it.

Should that be used as a boiler plate, it may be possible that two birds could be killed with one stone in the context of virtual worlds. If one considers an avatar an aspect of a human being, an avatar should inherit the rights of the human being. Start from an existing work and adapt – it has the benefit of being accepted around the world.

I think it would be a shame if he claimed he had “avatar rights” for commercial benefit and bragged that he gave avatars untold freedoms, when in fact he doesn’t.

It’s like Raph giving away the store back to the game gods again in the preamble with his “except for the good of the Motherland”.

[...] 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. [...]

The avatar is a construction that people make and are intimately bound with. Why can’t that be accepted? It’s not just a browser or a plane; it’s an immersive investment of perception and consciousness in a figure online. Who knows, centuries from now, perhaps scientists will look at people and their online avatars and identities as they look at those sea creatures that wear their houses around with themselves all the time.

Raph, as I’ve said before, the main problem with your avatar rights is that you house these rights in collective good, and even “the good of the platform uber alles” rather than in the inherent right and dignity of the individual and his inalieable rights.

By saying, “That the well-established rights of man approved by the National Assembly of France on August 26th of 1789 do therefore apply to avatars in full measure saving only the aspects of said rights that do not pertain in a virtual space or which must be abrogated in order to ensure the continued existence of the space in question”

…you imply that “for the good of the platform” an avatar can be cut off dead, “for any reason or no reason” because the existence of the virtual space is more important than the individual. Countries that decide governments or states are more important than individuals and their rights seldom succeed, and are constantly challenged.

Then in Art. 1, you revert to this collectivism and Motherland stuff again, with this statement:

“Special powers or privileges shall be founded solely on the common good, and not based on whim, favoritism, nepotism, or the caprice of those who hold power.”

I mean, serously, what is the “common good”? Why are powers and privileges founded in *that* and not inherent in the individual’s set of rights? Indeed, why did you swerve from “rights” to “powers and privileges”.

Who determines that common good, if not individuals, alone or in concert and in debate with others? The game company? But then…why call this avatar rights? Call it states’ rights, then.

And it’s really duplicitous to write that article as if it is a defiant rejection of “favouritism, nepotism, and caprice” that we hate so much in game gods and their little pet wizards, but hey, you undo all that revolutionary spirit in the next line about common good, which we can count on the fanboyz to smugly identify for us, reading the game-god mind five minutes before they know it themselves!

In no. 4, here you go with the collectivizing again:

Liberty consists of the freedom to do anything which injures no one else including the weal of the community as a whole and as an entity instantiated on hardware and by software;

No, liberty is liberty, Ralph. Either there are inalienable rights, or there aren’t. Liberty is negative, too, involving restraints on the state and what it can’t do.

What is the weal of the community? Invoking that endlessly, both game gods and their pets can endlessly subjugate others; that’s how they do it in states that pick individual responsibility and duty over state responsibility and duty, and house rights in collectivism rather than individuality.

The preamble also is a wordy mangle, and I think starts the muddle.

I think rather than containing distorted echoes of the famous American Constitution, you should just repeat it:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”.

You seem to stick on that; you can’t seem to abide by a notion of the game-gods creating the world and the ability to make avatars (the Creator) but then making sure that the rights the avatars are endowed with are *truly inalieable* — that is, not to be abridged by some false notion of the common good, which may well be misused. It really is important that the Framers of the Constitution went with individualism rather than collectivism; the result is history.

Like other collectivists who mean well, no doubt you worried about the individual running amok and griefing.

For that, you have to take care of the problem another way, by invoking the UDHR concept of Art. 30, which is something like “none of these rights may be used to abrogate another right”. So having the right to fly doesn’t mean you can fly in and trespass, or having the right to bear arms doesn’t mean you can shoot people who don’t want to play a war game, etc. etc.

As for Richard’s comments, I’m quite content to leave the project of developer rights for another day, they already have too many, we avatars do not have enough.

Time for the Global Online Game Industry Association.

a.k.a. International Game Developers Association.

No, the IGDA, at least to date, is more focused on individual developers, not publishers and studios (and, increasingly, toolmakers and service providers). If anything, it stands as a separate voice from the ESA.

We need an “ESA” for online gaming. The existing ESA is “owned” by the traditional game publishers – most of whom don’t have much business in online gaming.

While there have been some modest efforts, such as some data formats for reporting in casual games (and this is really an issue because of the very small scale of many casual game studios), the IGDA fulfills a different role than an “industry” association.