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GoPets and avatar rights

August 9th, 2007 (Visited 2722 times) Tags:

Erik Bethke’s LiveJournal has a recent post stating that he’s offering a $5000 bounty to those who can help him draft the legal form of an avatar rights document for GoPets. Among the clauses he intends the service to sign up to:

Due process (including playe-run tribunals)
Habeas corpus
Free expression
Free assembly
Property rights
Non-discrimination
Account transfer rights
Right to keep some amount of the value generated by service errors (e.g., if there’s a bug and the player benefits, they keep some of the benefit)
Compensation to players for service outages exceeding the maximum standard downtime
Advance notice in the event of policy changes

Maybe I’ve found my next prediction: over the next few years, more and more services will find themselves pushes towards adopting some form of the Avatar Rights document, in part because more and more platforms will be open, permit user businesses, and in general be treated as places and not games.

So, what would you change and update about the Declaration, given that 7 years have passed?

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Internet: Marketing and Messages wrote on November 30th, 1999 at 12:00 am:

as found by Raph

Wonderland: Avatar Rights wrote on August 9th, 2007 at 1:52 pm:

[...] our own democracies could learn from this, as found by Raph:Erik Bethke’s LiveJournal has a recent post stating that he’s offering a $5000 bounty to those [...]

Extenuating Circumstances – links for 2007-08-10 wrote on August 10th, 2007 at 2:18 am:

[...] Raph’s Website » GoPets and avatar rights Raph predicts: “over the next few years, more and more services will find themselves pushes towards adopting some form of the Avatar Rights document” (tags: avatar rights digital gaming via:raphkoster) [...]

Second Thoughts: A Game-God Makes a Draft Bill of Avatar Rights wrote on August 12th, 2007 at 7:18 pm:

[...] 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. [...]

Second Life :: View topic - bill of avatar-rights wrote on August 16th, 2007 at 8:16 am:

[...] 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/ [...]

Main Page - Wiki wrote on October 11th, 2007 at 10:07 pm:

[...] 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 [...]

Matt Mihaly said on August 9th, 2007 at 9:39 am:

Despite the fact that I’m listed in the credits for the document I now find it odd to be talking about the rights of an avatar. People have rights, not collections of data in a database.

If we dispense with the idea that data can have rights (an idea that I don’t believe is backed up by a single court ruling anywhere on earth) and think about this in more reasonable terms I think we come to the inevitable conclusion that this kind of document is NOT a document spelling out any of what we’d recognize as ‘rights’ in any sort of political/humanist context. It is a document spelling out the Terms of Service. Some of those terms obligate the company to something. Some of them obligate the user to something. If we want to call the ToS a ‘player rights document’ that’s fine but it’s still just a ToS/EULA at the end of the day isn’t it?

–matt

Raph said on August 9th, 2007 at 9:58 am:

I think of it much more in terms of “player rights” than “avatar rights” myself as well. I think that with the passage of seven years, there’s several things where the ground has shifted out from under us a bit. The prevalence of users doing business within the worlds is a prime example — some of the sorts of “rights” that Erik is talking about granting are things that didn’t come up in 2000.

I think the line between rights and Terms of Service is sort of fuzzy, though. After all, legal boundaries are enforced on ToSes from outside, and some of those legal boundaries are determined by, well, rights. And really, even in the original document, it was about how to get normal understandings of rights injected into the ToSes. After all, back in 2000, it was standard for ToSes to basically say you had no rights at all, and we increasingly see legal challenges to that notion.

Matt Mihaly said on August 9th, 2007 at 10:18 am:

Yep, all good points Raph. I don’t see that anything really changes when people are doing business in the worlds though. Your rights under the law are no different whether you’re leveling up or running a virtual whorehouse, I’d think. Or rather, I should say that in either case it’s the law that determines what your real rights are, whether they are different in both cases, and so on.

A ToS can promise all the rights it wants but it’s not the same thing as the rights that the law ‘grants’ you (in quotes as I fall into the camp that believes other people can only take away your rights, not grant them to you). If my rights are violated in real life by, say, being kicked out of a restaurant for being a white man, the law will/may come to my aid in the form of criminal prosecutions.

In the case of ‘rights’ granted by a ToS however, I can expect no such redress. I will have to sue in civil court, the same as I would if the operator broke any other provision of the ToS. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

Anyway, yes, it’s fuzzy. I just feel like there is some definable difference there, whether I’m wrapping my head around it properly or not currently.

Richard Bartle said on August 9th, 2007 at 1:49 pm:

What would the corresponding list of operator rights look like, I wonder?

Richard

Steven "PlayNoEvil" Davis said on August 9th, 2007 at 3:46 pm:

So, to get down to brass tacks, what we are talking about is establishing “Best Practices” for the Online Games / Virtual Worlds industry. This would include such things as model Terms of Service agreements, standards for operations for businesses, protection of minors, etc.

Then, if someone sues a company, they can say that they were following best practices in the industry for whatever (or they can be challenged on their practices against that standard).

Time for the Global Online Game Industry Association.

Morgan Ramsay said on August 9th, 2007 at 5:17 pm:

a.k.a. International Game Developers Association.

Erik Bethke said on August 9th, 2007 at 7:53 pm:

Hey guys!

Wow cool comments here… again Raph I felt very sheepish of not being aware of your work in 2000 until recently.

Again I want to shift the discussion away from what is legal/illegal unconscionable, and so on.

What I want to do is find the EULA that makes more revenue for my company because due to a greater set of rights and transparancy that people are more comfortable inveting more time, creativity and money in GoPets.

SL itself is a great example of this. All of the press attention and hype behind SL is really because of the mass belief that there is protection of property rights (but actually they are missing - read through their EULA and you have really a tiny wafer over a standard EULA).]

In the end it will be a EULA/ToS construct and not a formal recognition by the UN for status as a nation state. But I want to aggressively head in the direction of making people more comfortable to spend more of the conscious hours in GoPets…

Cheers!
-Erik

Matt Mihaly said on August 9th, 2007 at 9:35 pm:

Well, right on for that Erik. Had I more disposable time, I’d take a crack at your prize.

Steven "PlayNoEvil" Davis said on August 10th, 2007 at 7:47 am:

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.

Prokofy Neva said on August 12th, 2007 at 5:54 pm:

I really have to roll my eyes when Matt Mihaly keeps trying to relativize and demean and reduce the avatar as merely a collection of data simply because he manifests from a collection of code. Human beings manifest from a collection of carbon and other elements in molecules, but you don’t deny that they are human.

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.

Prokofy Neva said on August 12th, 2007 at 7:21 pm:

I decided to answer Erik Bethke’s points article by article here

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”.

Taran Rampersad/Nobody Fugazi said on August 13th, 2007 at 7:42 am:

One of the Civil Society issues related to internet governance at WSIS was that there was no use of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a basis for Internet Governance.

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.

Raph said on August 13th, 2007 at 10:58 am:

“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.

Prokofy Neva said on August 17th, 2007 at 12:06 am:

WSIS is an unmitigated evil. The UN should decouple from it. It’s yet another bid by Marxists and other extremists to grab the telegraph station like Lenin and propagandize their economic beliefs under the guise of making information accessible away from “evil capitalist concentrated media companies” blah blah.

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

Prokofy Neva said on August 17th, 2007 at 12:09 am:

>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.

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.

GoPets and avatar rights

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