Morgan’s comment is typical of the kind of really troublesome assault that some people try to make on the concept of the avatar.

I’m not talking about avatars. I’m talking about your condition.

Well…No.

Avatars aren’t used merely in MMORPGs, where you write “OC” before a post, literally or figuratively.

My avatar is a legitimate, bona-fide real aspect of my real self. Prokofy Neva isn’t some sort of lame “role play” on some “RP server”. I stand by every single thing he says, absolutely, because there’s no “contradiction” in the way Morgan imagines.

Hamlet nee Linden Au recently did this awful thing (at VW07 in San Jose) where he sneeringly told me that while Prokofy Neva was banned from his blog, my RL person could post on his blog with my RL name. Ugh. Can you imagine anything worse?! Than the idea that some blogmeister gets to pick how you express yourself, and with what — and does this only in the very, very mistaken belief that you “RP an avatar” to make forums posts but if only you can be trapped, shamed, cajoled, whatever into filing with your RL name, you will be “behaved” because of the Google linkage immortality factor. Bleh to that — I don’t play that game.

In this thread, I merely made the point that this whole discussion on GoPets is continuing, as Raph indicated, and mentioned Fleck’s comment at VW merely for informational purposes — but that’s because the huge voluminous amounts of dissenting opinion I filed with Erik’s well-intentioned but wrong-headed notions are all on the record.

[...] issues? I thought I remembered reading something EULA related on Raph’s site…and whatta ya know…http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/10/11/the-better-eula/Might be worth checking out. _________________Hoojib, jefmes, Rodo, Dwalthoror just call me [...]

Out here in Asia it has been established in actual court cases that operators of online games have had to replace lost in-game items due to bugs.

Your non-starter comment is the normal western developer side assumption that I have seen for the last 3 years.

There are *so* many examples of *virtual property* in the “real world”:
Starbucks Coffee
Time-shares
Condos
bank accounts
futures markets
I could go on for a substantial fraction of world GDP is in non-physical, ephemeral goods and services that people pay real money for.

-Erik

“virtual goods exchanged via commerce should belong to the purchaser to the same degree that real life goods are;”

This is such a non-starter. I guess I should post that there, but years of experience shows that it won’t be worth the effort, again.

Randy

Absolutely we are continuing on with BetterEula – thanks Raph for pointing out the link!

I asked Erin Hoffman to be the main editor for the wiki as well as write a lot of the articles.

Erin Hoffman is extremely passionate about the rights of players and citizens in virtual worlds and has an inherently strong sense of justice – after all, she was the author of ea spouse!

We are currently outlining where we need to go, personally I am fairly satisfied that we will figure out the property rights side of things quickly.

It is the human rights side of things that seem so sticky. I *really* want to find a path to due process.

Cheers,
-Erik

http://www.bettereula.com
http://www.gopets.net