Sin in cyber-eden: understanding the metaphysics and morals of virtual worlds

Ethics and Information Technology (2007) 9:205-217 DOI 10.1007/s10676-007-9144-4

© Springer 2007

Sin in cyber-eden: understanding the metaphysics and morals of virtual worlds*

Ashley John Craft

School of Law, New York University, 240 Mercer St. Apt. 1002, New York, NY 10012, USA

E-mail: ashley.craft@nyu.edu

Abstract. This article uses a notorious incident within the computer program EVE Online to exemplify and facilitate discussion of the metaphysics of virtual worlds and the morality of user behavior. The first section examines various frameworks used to understand virtual worlds, and emphasizes those which recognize virtual worlds as legal contracts, as representational worlds, and as media for communication. The second section draws on these frameworks to analyze issues of virtual theft and virtual betrayal arising in the EVE incident. The article concludes by arguing that, in the absence of countervailing contractual obligations, users of virtual worlds have the same de facto duties to each other as they do in mediated and real environments.

Key words: applied ethics, computer games, EVE Online, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, video games, virtual reality, virtual worlds

What are virtual worlds?

Virtual worlds: a case study

On April 18, 2005 Istvaan Shogaatsu, the leader of a group of mercenaries called the Guiding Hand Social Club in EVE Online, announced that his organization had just completed one of the biggest acts of theft and betrayal in the history of virtual worlds. Members of the Guiding Hand spent a year infiltrating a rival organization before assassinating their leader and stealing in-game assets valued at 16,500 US dollars, effectively shattering the trust within the organization’s social network setting its members back months of playing time.1

Were the members of the Guiding Hand wrong? While those unfamiliar with virtual worlds may be tempted to dismiss any moral query on the grounds that all involved were just playing a game, the ‘‘brutal and devastating’’ psychological impact that the

* This paper grew out of my senior thesis in philosophy at Pomona College, entitled Game Theory: The Metaphysics and Morals of Massively Multiplayer Environments. I am indebted to Peter Kung and Paul Hurley for their critical insights and constant encouragement, as well as the Fulbright program, which afforded me the time and resources to develop this project.

Guiding Hand’s actions had on their victims shows that their behavior was both unexpected and harm-ful.2 And, in the course of describing the metaphysical nature of the EVE universe and comparing the Guiding Hand’s actions to actual theft and betrayal, we will find several reasons to think that the Guiding Hand’s behavior was immoral as well.

A brief history of virtual worlds

Virtual worlds are a recent phenomenon, with a history only a quarter-century old. Their technological predecessors, called Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, were created along with the first computer networks to help networked users communicate in real-time. With the mainstreaming of the Internet, MUDs got a graphical face-lift in the form of chat rooms like America On-Line and instant-messaging services like AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). These multi-user environments became virtual worlds when graphics cards became good enough to render them in three dimensions. The most popular of these early virtual worlds, including Ultima Online (1997) and Everquest (1999), introduced elements of role-playing computer games, even though a significant number of users participated for the social aspects of the med-ium.3 Only recently have programs like Second Life (2003) departed from the computer game format and marketed themselves as virtual worlds in their own right.

Features of virtual worlds

EVE Online is a program that, for a monthly fee of about $15, allows users to access the computer-generated, science-fiction-themed virtual world of EVE, and to interact in real-time in this world with thousands of other users through representational characters they have created.3 4

As with many virtual worlds, EVE exhibits many characteristics of role-playing computer games. A user first enters EVE with a weak character who can pilot only the most basic spaceships, with no specialized skills, and a paltry sum of virtual credits to her name. By flying missions and mining virtual resources, a user can gradually upgrade her character’s virtual spaceship, train her skills, and pad her bank account. These enhancements, in turn, allow the character to venture into more dangerous parts of EVE and take on a greater role in the universe.

The sheer numbers of actual people interacting simultaneously in a virtual world, however, offer a social dimension not found in traditional role-playing computer games. When she has reached a certain level of experience, a user can join a corporation - an alliance of other users - which opens up another range of possibilities within the world. Corporations can make their own charters, elect or appoint leaders, run trade routes, wage wars, share resources, corner the market on virtual items, and generally cooperate to further their collective power within the EVE universe. Users spend much of their time working closely with others in their corporation, and during space travel or even in combat situations get to know each other by exchanging text messages through the EVE user interface. Through these exchanges, users form friendships, romantic relationships, and even marriages, which often expand beyond the confines of the virtual world to chat rooms, instant messengers, and face-to-face meetings.5

Among existing virtual worlds, EVE Online is neither the most popular nor the longest-running. Yet because its administrators have taken a laissez-faire approach to governing the actions of their users, EVE has gained notoriety as a site of corporate warfare and deception, extensive user-versus-user combat, and unforgiving ship destruction and character death.6

Virtual worlds in academic discourse

As virtual worlds are a recent phenomenon, the body of relevant academic literature is still nascent. The first groundbreaking analyses of virtual worlds were journalistic: Dibbell’s A Rape in Cyberspace uncovered the circumstances surrounding the cyber-rape that occurred in an early multi-user environment called LambdaMOO,7 while Peter Ludlow exposed cyberprostitution in Electronic Arts’ The Sims Online and muckraked in Linden Labs’ Second Life.8

Some of the most interesting works concerning virtual worlds have arisen as academics have begun to evaluate them from their own disciplinary perspectives. Edward Castronova, for instance, applied an economic analysis to the virtual economy of Everquest, and calculated that its GNP per capita rivaled that of some European countries.9 More recently, Beth Noveck’s State of Play conferences and anthology have drawn prominent cyberlaw scholars, academics, and software developers together to answer the legal questions arising from the first court cases involving virtual worlds.10

Like representatives of other disciplines, philosophers are now in a position to give to and gain from the ongoing study of virtual worlds. The metaphysics of virtual reality has been with philosophers as long as Descartes’ demon, and contemporary metaphysicists can now virtual worlds into the fold. Acts of theft and promise-breaking have long been the domain of moralists, who can compare these acts to virtual thefts and mediated deception. in exchange, virtual worlds provide us with challenging real-world thought experiments and case studies against which we can measure our erstwhile speculative thought experiments and theories.

The metaphysics of virtual worlds

Understanding virtual worlds: a new analogy

For a long time, programs like EVE were labeled massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), an unwieldy moniker that essential-ized them as trumped-up computer games. only recently have theorists begun using the term virtual worlds, suggesting that there is more to EVE than meets the eye.

While EVE certainly contains elements of roleplaying computer games and to a large extent resembles them, users do not simply log on to EVE and play a game. They are also experiencing a virtual reality, negotiating sets of explicit and implicit legal and normative contracts, performing improvisational role-play, producing a collaborative work of representational fiction, and making use of a communicative medium.11 The virtual world is the environment in which all of these activities occur. We should therefore think of virtual worlds not just as games but, more broadly, as virtual spaces, fantastic three-dimensional locations in which users can socialize and role-play as well as entertain them-selves.12

Here the analogy to a theme park is useful in understanding virtual world creation and participation. Like theme parks, virtual worlds are designed primarily for commercial purposes, and seek to attract the greatest number of users multiple times to maximize profit from entrance fees. One way a virtual world can attract users is by providing a fantastic, interactive, exciting, and visually stunning world to explore - the theme of a theme park. Another is by filling out this world with compelling characters and a narrative back story - the costumed cartoons and fairy-tale castles in Disneyland. A third is by offering games to play against both the environment and other users - the whack-a-mole and laser tag games found in the arcade. A final way is to provide spaces for socialization, away from the competition of games - the food courts and park benches.

Whereas users log on to virtual worlds for all of these reasons, the frequency of their visits - an average of 20 hours a week13 - distinguishes their participation in virtual worlds from that of the occasional theme park visitor. While families can only explore a small corner of Disneyland in an afternoon, virtual world users can, over many months, chart the details of entire continents.14 While theme park visitors are watching poorly-scripted plays in which oversized cartoon characters rehash tired movie lines, virtual world users are improvisa-tionally role-playing their characters in order to collaboratively expand upon the fictional back story of their universe. When arcade goers redeem hard-earned tickets for overpriced novelties, users are continually re-investing the virtual credits they earn into their characters’ equipment and skills so that they can access higher-level content within the world. Whereas park visitors may spend a day with their friends, virtual world users spend months making friends, as well as pursuing romances, holding board meetings, staging protests, and securing venture capital.

Metaphysical paradigms: an overview

Because of the different kinds of activities in which virtual world users participate, it should come as no surprise that they have different understandings of the nature of virtual worlds. Yet users and researchers alike recurrently invoke several paradigms to make sense of their own and others’ virtual existences. The remainder of this section establishes a metaphysical framework in which to understand the immorality of the Guiding Hand’s actions, first by identifying and evaluating each of these paradigms in turn, and then by demonstrating why two of them are the most appropriate.

Figure 1 outlines the paradigms we should consider in our evaluation of immorality within virtual worlds. Although they resemble games and may

Figure 1. Analytical frameworks

include several of them, user behavior is not bound by rules or referees like those that regulate traditional game players. Virtual worlds more closely resemble amusement parks, as they are essentially expansive virtual realities or spaces within which users can interact. Before they can access these environments, users must agree to certain terms and provisions, usually contained within a legal document called the End User License Agreement (EULA). To the extent that these provisions specifically allow or prohibit certain kinds of user behavior, users may have a moral obligation to abide by be these provisions. However, when the agreement is vague or silent concerning these matters, they must look to the nature of the virtual world to determine what behavior is appropriate. specifically, we can understand that users in virtual worlds are simultaneously engaged in two distinct kinds of activities: They are collaboratively producing fiction through role-playing characters within a representational world, even as they are communicating with other users through text messages. The specifics of each of these