Steven Johnson
Commerce is already ubiquitous in the gaming world: from those scepters and castles selling for real currency on eBay, to the increased prevalence of in-game advertising, to the crucial role of fictional commerce in a strikingly high percentage of games. (Even the sports simulations are like taking night classes in business school: managing budgets, learning to deal with the shifting moods and needs of your employees and employers, setting action items for the coming fiscal year.) I second Henry's idea that we need to keep open the space of gaming as a space of experimentation both for personal identity, and for social and commercial systems. Game space is the last frontier of utopia: a place where alternate social orders can not only be imagined, but actually be simulated. We need to keep it that way.

The ethical issues will no doubt proliferate as well. When someone lets loose a plague in a virtual world, and "kills" thousands of virtual people, what is the status of that act? Ironically, the more commercial the offense, the easier it is to calculate the ethics: if you wrongfully destroy a character that had a resale value of $500 on eBay, then it's easy enough to determine that this is the equivalent of stealing $500 from me in real life. But if you destroy a virtual character whose value lies in my emotional connection to him or her, in my sense of that avatar as an extension of my being, then it's harder to do the math, and more likely to raise eyebrows (or guffaws) among non-gamers. But that's clearly the world we're headed toward.

Steven Johnson
I think one of the most important trends unfolding in the world of games is the normalization of the idea of having an avatar: a virtual extension of yourself who "lives" in an alternate networked world, and who has an entire inventory of possessions: a house, clothes, some form of transportation, not to mention the magic spells and scepters. Tens of millions of these avatars exist now, and they are fundamentally different from the characters that players would temporarily inhabit in earlier games: you got to be Mario playing Donkey Kong and its descendants, but you never felt like Mario was an extension of your personality. Because your avatar persists over time, and because he/she is visible to other people, there's a tremendous emotional investment in these creations. And because they have become so lifelike thanks to the graphics — and the focus on things like facial expressions — they are fundamentally different from our other virtual identities online: our MySpace pages or IM accounts. To date, these avatars have largely flourished in game environments like Ultima or World of Warcraft, but they are migrating out into social spaces that are only tangentially about games — like Second Life and There. And complex social systems are emerging in the games as well. It is inevitable that flirting, romance, sex will flourish in these environments, assuming that the gender balance improves. The question I have is this: as the AI gets increasingly powerful, and your avatar starts to act more autonomously, will avatars develop flirtations on their own? You'll log into your account in the morning, and your avatar will greet you by saying: "I met the greatest guy last night..." click to close

Brenda Brathwaite
Excellent question. Right now, these worlds are self-regulatory with periodic tweaks from their publishers. However, as economies in these online worlds develop and their currencies become increasingly valuable in the real world, we are seeing instances of people stealing currency in game to sell it out of game. At that point, they've crossed some kind of self-regulatory or publisher-regulated line. Is this an actual crime? If I kill your character in an online world and take your gold and sell that gold on eBay, have I committed an actual crime? I'd say I have, but who charges me and with what crime am I charged? Emergent sexual content is also a consideration here. In many MMOGs, players can cyber with one another, and certainly, some of those advances can be unwanted. Ethically, that also presents a significant issue - but can it be regulated? I don't know. And I don't know that I'd want the government in charge of it in any case.

Steven Johnson
I think one of the most important trends unfolding in the world of games is the normalization of the idea of having an avatar: a virtual extension of yourself who "lives" in an alternate networked world, and who has an entire inventory of possessions: a house, clothes, some form of transportation, not to mention the magic spells and scepters. Tens of millions of these avatars exist now, and they are fundamentally different from the characters that players would temporarily inhabit in earlier games: you got to be Mario playing Donkey Kong and its descendants, but you never felt like Mario was an extension of your personality. Because your avatar persists over time, and because he/she is visible to other people, there's a tremendous emotional investment in these creations. And because they have become so lifelike thanks to the graphics — and the focus on things like facial expressions — they are fundamentally different from our other virtual identities online: our MySpace pages or IM accounts. To date, these avatars have largely flourished in game environments like Ultima or World of Warcraft, but they are migrating out into social spaces that are only tangentially about games — like Second Life and There. And complex social systems are emerging in the games as well. It is inevitable that flirting, romance, sex will flourish in these environments, assuming that the gender balance improves. The question I have is this: as the AI gets increasingly powerful, and your avatar starts to act more autonomously, will avatars develop flirtations on their own? You'll log into your account in the morning, and your avatar will greet you by saying: "I met the greatest guy last night..." click to close

Henry Jenkins
I am enough of a libertarian to hope game worlds can remain a place for social and political experimentation. This was part of the ideals which drove the founders of early MUDS and MOOS — folks like Randy Farmer or Pavel Curtis wanted to see how we would govern ourselves if we stepped outside of our existing political structures, if we created a second life where the price of political experimentation and free expression was lowered. Julian Dibbell's important essay, "A Rape in Cyberspace," described the ways that transgression and democracy emerged as important topics for civic debate in the early days of the multi-player online communities. There were heated debates about whether anything goes in fantasy or whether certain kinds of social contracts need to be maintained in order to make these playgrounds enjoyable for everyone involved. These early experiments, which were in important ways the predecessor of today's massively multiplayer games, could occur because the community helped to define the rules which govern their conduct and had a stake in the outcome. ...read more

Henry Jenkins
I am enough of a libertarian to hope game worlds can remain a place for social and political experimentation. This was part of the ideals which drove the founders of early MUDS and MOOS — folks like Randy Farmer or Pavel Curtis wanted to see how we would govern ourselves if we stepped outside of our existing political structures, if we created a second life where the price of political experimentation and free expression was lowered. Julian Dibbell's important essay, "A Rape in Cyberspace," described the ways that transgression and democracy emerged as important topics for civic debate in the early days of the multi-player online communities. There were heated debates about whether anything goes in fantasy or whether certain kinds of social contracts need to be maintained in order to make these playgrounds enjoyable for everyone involved. These early experiments, which were in important ways the predecessor of today's massively multiplayer games, could occur because the community helped to define the rules which govern their conduct and had a stake in the outcome.

Today's commercial game designers — the Will Wrights and Raph Kosters — talk about their game worlds in very similar ways: they still talk about them as social experiments where the community gets to decide the rules and norms. Yet, they are also commercially-controlled spaces — they have more in common with shopping malls than they do with town squares — and it is clear that minimally some entities — the corporate owners — have a much greater say in what takes place there than others — the individual players or even the community as a whole. Take a look at what has happened lately to Star Wars Galaxies which began with such promise as Raph Koster enfranchised the player community to give him input at every step in the planning process and now is being forcefully retooled over the objections of long time players to attract gamers with very different expectations and desires. This feels a bit more like a factory town where the factory owners can do whatever they like than a community which looks after the rights and interests of its players.

Where does this leave us then? As games become more complex and the scale of their membership expands and they bring together global populations from different cultural and political traditions, one can imagine that the questions of governance will become more and more challenging. Even in the absence of corporate control over these spaces, there will be more and more conflicts as different kinds of fantasies impinged on each other. I wrote a column for Technology Review a few years back describing the elections in Alphaville, the largest town on the Sims Online, which ended in charges of voter fraud and corruption. It turns out in the end that one of the candidates — a young girl thought she was participating in an earnest election which would shape the outcome of her community — and the other — a twenty-two-year-old male was playing at being a corrupt politician under the control of an organized crime family. They were literally playing two different games and yet the conduct of one shaped what was experienced by the other. Who should decide which fantasies can be enacted in these spaces and which should be forbidden?

Where should rules originate to shape these communities? Should they be imposed by real world governments — as regulations on speech or behavior? Should they emerge from the corporate developers and owners of these game worlds as they seek to protect their investments? Should they emerge from the players themselves because they, in the end, invest more deeply in these worlds than anyone else? Can we imagine ways of balancing the rights of companies and of players? Will different games develop different political, economic, moral, and social systems, some of which resemble real world practices and some of which follow rules and processes we could never execute in mundane reality?

Why shouldn't we be able to enjoy greater freedom in these spaces, given that we can opt in and out of these communities at will, and given that even those harms done to avatars do not directly hurt the players who control them? Ah! But there's the rub since the more we invest in time, effort, and emotion in those avatars, the more the things that are done to them are experienced as the equivalent of crimes committed against us and the more conservative we become about protecting ourselves and our property in this imaginary landscape. It is a bit like the old saying that every twenty year old is a liberal and every forty year old a conservative. The longer we live in a game space, the more we want to preserve the status quo and thus the more we object to experimentation and transgression. click to close

Ian Bogost
A few days ago, parody newspaper The Onion published a wonderful, satirical story about a fictional game created by Take Two (publishers of the controversial Grand Theft Auto). This would-be game is called Stacker, and The Onion called it "a first-person vertical-crate-arranger guaranteed not to influence young people's behavior in any way." The gameplay proposed for Stacker is penetrating: the player moves brown boxes around in a goal-free warehouse environment with no time limit and an ever-full health meter. The joke, of course, is all about the desperate attempts to ensure that whatever games do, they better not be affecting anyone, in any way. That would be dangerous. ...read more

Ian Bogost
A few days ago, parody newspaper The Onion published a wonderful, satirical story about a fictional game created by Take Two (publishers of the controversial Grand Theft Auto). This would-be game is called Stacker, and The Onion called it "a first-person vertical-crate-arranger guaranteed not to influence young people's behavior in any way." The gameplay proposed for Stacker is penetrating: the player moves brown boxes around in a goal-free warehouse environment with no time limit and an ever-full health meter. The joke, of course, is all about the desperate attempts to ensure that whatever games do, they better not be affecting anyone, in any way. That would be dangerous.

Any attempt to build an ethics of games, any effort to decide what is right and wrong to allow in games, must first accept that games can and do influence people. Like all art -- literature, film, sculpture, poetry -- games are created to affect us, to influence our thinking, to change our perception, to inspire awe, to create fear, to say something about being human. To be sure, we have a long way to go and a great percentage of the possibility space of videogames. But for now, the main ethical issue for the medium is really a meta-ethics: acknowledging that games are a medium. They are expressive. They do something to their players. And we want them to do so. click to close

Eric Zimmerman
Is this a trick question? I am going to skip the first sentence and go right to the second half, about commerce in gaming. I'm sure my fellow panelists will adequately cover ethics and regulation.

I see commerce as an incredibly active force in games right now. If we look past the recent phenomena of computer and videogames to the longer history of play and games off the computer (as I suggested in my response to yesterday's question), it is clear that commerce is part and parcel of gaming. Whether it is the sports equipment industry, the complex economies of trading card games, pickup chess played for cash in Washington Square Park, or the staggeringly massive industry of gambling in all its forms, commerce and games have many points of intersection. And that is to say nothing of the recent explosion in new forms of digital game commerce, such as the many eBay markets for MMOG virtual goods, or the growing business of online poker. ...read more

Eric Zimmerman
Is this a trick question? I am going to skip the first sentence and go right to the second half, about commerce in gaming. I'm sure my fellow panelists will adequately cover ethics and regulation.

I see commerce as an incredibly active force in games right now. If we look past the recent phenomena of computer and videogames to the longer history of play and games off the computer (as I suggested in my response to yesterday's question), it is clear that commerce is part and parcel of gaming. Whether it is the sports equipment industry, the complex economies of trading card games, pickup chess played for cash in Washington Square Park, or the staggeringly massive industry of gambling in all its forms, commerce and games have many points of intersection. And that is to say nothing of the recent explosion in new forms of digital game commerce, such as the many eBay markets for MMOG virtual goods, or the growing business of online poker.

However, the notion of commerce in games doesn't have to be limited to money changing hands. Commerce is about the exchange of value and meaning (whether dollars, services, social status, or cultural capital), and part of the reason why games are so rich in commerce is that they traffic in meaning as part of their operation. Sitting down to play chess means that you and I will agree to play in and with a certain set of meanings: Knights move in a particular way; Kings must be defended at all costs; we both play fair and by the rules (well, most of the time). The same is true of computer games: what it means to be in your clan, or an elf, or a newbie, determines how we play together. Playing a game means taking part in the construction of meaning — some of it given by the game, some of it improvised by the players, and some of it coming from culture at large. Economies of meaning are part of games; monetary commerce is just a literalization of this aspect of games.

Which brings us to an interesting design question: if playing with games is to take part in commerce, is there some way to create a game that would play more radically with structures of commerce and exchange? Could a game be made that would playfully unmake commerce as we know it, inverting and reinventing systems of consumerism and capital? I'm not sure, but if anyone ever makes it, I'd love to play a round or two. click to close

Rob Levine
Commerce in online gaming is already here — it's just not allowed yet. In all the big online games, like Everquest and World of Warcraft, people sell virtual goods (they only exist in the game) for real money — sometimes quite a bit of it. Most of the game makers take the position that everything in the game belongs to them, and they take some steps to shutting this trade down. But it never gets very far.

It's an interesting legal question. If you build something, put invest your creativity and hours of work, it makes sense that it belongs to you — Microsoft doesn't own what you write with their word-processing software. On the other hand, game companies cannot put themselves in the position of being liable if people lose virtual goods that are worth real money. And too much commerce can wreck a game: In Star Wars: Galaxies, a game from Sony Online Entertainment, so many people paid real money for high-level characters that other players started calling them "eBay Jedis." ...read more

Rob Levine
Commerce in online gaming is already here — it's just not allowed yet. In all the big online games, like Everquest and World of Warcraft, people sell virtual goods (they only exist in the game) for real money — sometimes quite a bit of it. Most of the game makers take the position that everything in the game belongs to them, and they take some steps to shutting this trade down. But it never gets very far.

It's an interesting legal question. If you build something, put invest your creativity and hours of work, it makes sense that it belongs to you — Microsoft doesn't own what you write with their word-processing software. On the other hand, game companies cannot put themselves in the position of being liable if people lose virtual goods that are worth real money. And too much commerce can wreck a game: In Star Wars: Galaxies, a game from Sony Online Entertainment, so many people paid real money for high-level characters that other players started calling them "eBay Jedis."

This gets at a larger question: How closely do we want our games to follow real life? It's only natural that a virtual world will have some form of virtual economics. But if real money starts to change the course of the game, it might not be as much fun anymore. At that point there's going to be regulation, because the companies that make these games will feel that their investment are at risk. These online games are extremely expensive to create and maintain, so the companies that own them will take action to protect their investment.

Could there be some form of external regulation? I doubt it, just because players forfeit any rights to what they create when they sign the user agreement. They might complain about it and violate it, but they sign it, so I have to imagine the courts would uphold it. click to close

Katie Salen
One of the most interesting things that has come out of the growth of virtual-world spaces like Everquest, A Tale in the Desert, There.com and others, is the almost ethical responsibility the creators of the game have to their community of players. Persistent game spaces have come to be understood almost as living things that their creators have a responsibility to keep alive and to nurture in a way that allows them to continue to grow and evolve. When There.com shut down, there were communities of players, for example, that were bereft at the loss of a space they had become deeply invested in. When it disappeared, there was a palpable sense that the company had acted unethically in destroying a world where people "lived." There has been a lot of writing done on this topic by people like Raph Koster and Ed Castronova — designers are really beginning to examine the ethical role they inhabit as designers of virtual worlds. The question of whether this kind of thing needs regulation is something else entirely. I am not sure what you mean by commerce in gaming, but there are many forms of economic exchange already happening in games. People make real world money selling goods, services, and land in places like Second Life, there are companies paying employees to level up characters for players to buy, turning game play into a full time job. I believe there will be more and more models of commerce established within games and that games are in fact spaces of innovation for models of exchange, be it social, sexual, or economic.

Katie Salen
Gamers that are thirty are of the Nintendo generation, they are babies of the digital sphere, and they grew up with games as something they did every day. Games have always been integrated into their lifestyle. For most gamers, it's an important part of how they define their leisure time, how they stay connected with friends, how they learn new things, and simply, how they play. It would never occur to them that this is something to be given up once someone enters "adulthood." I think it's silly to think of games as something that only children play and that one would only begin to play again as some form of midlife crisis. Historically adults have always played games, long into adulthood, be it chess, bridge, poker, golf, etc. There is no reason to think that the desire to play games goes away just because the games themselves have gone digital.  n° click to close