Oh, I didn’t think you were trivialising it (well, no more than it was trivialising the subject matter). I just thought you’d get a better feel for where the remark (and the paper in general) was coming from if I gave a bit more explanation.

Richard

Bret>Both incomplete analysis, and something of an indictment of capitalism, while they’re at it

The analysis is incomplete because we had a deadline, a pages limit, we weren’t being paid for our time, and different people had different priorities. I agree we could have written more about this, but how long would a complete analysis take, and would you be prepared to write one for free only to have other people on the committee want to change it?

As for the indictment of capitalism, it’s an article about risk. The risk is there: if you create a virtual economy with flaws in it, you will indeed see these effects. It wasn’t meant to say good or bad things about capitalism per se, it was just supposed to flag up the risks so that enthusiastic but unworldly-wise new developers might note that it’s an area they should examine.

This is a document with a lot of flaws and incomplete coverage, yes, but it was always going to be like that – that’s the nature of reports written by committees. The fact that ENISA looked for and found some European virtual world experts to contribute is to be applauded, and that we were able to ring alarm bells over some of the more “out there” suggestions means we wound up with something a lot less weird than if we hadn’t been involved.

Richard

I was on this panel, as were some other MMO people (Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, Adam Martin, Ren Reynolds, Markku Kaskenmaa), so we were able to add some realism to the general “what if..?” line. Other people included security experts, ratings bodies representatives, people from fields with problems that overlap ours (eg. access by children), assorted academics, and some people who I never really did find out what they did.

At times I felt that we were clutching at straws to find something to put in, which wasn’t good. Things which were definitely of concern were given the same degree of coverage as things which were more of a potential worry for the distant future. This did get addressed once the “data-gathering phase” was over, but there are still a few idiosyncrasies left. The definition of “security” and “risk” got wider and wider as time went on (or, rather, it started out broad but we didn’t really understand quite how broad until we got into it), but we did manage to arrest that trend and be more precise – the title now says “and privacy”, for example.

On the whole, given the competing areas of emphasis preferred by some of the people on board, I think the result is roughly in line with what I was expecting at the start. It’s not perfect, but if we’d had no industry people on the committee it could have been a lot worse. There may have been recommendations for issuing people ID cards so operators could perform age checks on players, for example. Alongside suggestions like this, recommendations like those given to operators above look positively sane…

Richard

“accunt” account.