A question of ethics in MMORPGs

[kandrathe]

Some thoughts:

--Rights of the gamer vs. rights of the company. (“I paid good money for this game, so I should be able to do this” vs. “You bought our game, you agreed to our rules, you play in our universe, or else.”)

When I was in high school, I was an extreme hacker (in the original sense). Computer time was owned by large companies, schools and universities. PC's were in there infancy, and my first programs were straight ML on kit 6502's and 6809's. My hacker friends and I would use social engineering to penetrate systems, find cool code (and we especially aimed at getting the source code to cool games), and then we would figure them out and then make them better, faster, and more cool. We reverse engineered machine language code into assembly language, added our own comments to document sub-routines for reuse or rewriting. The difference between what I see now and then is that our goal was to leave no footprints, and we did it for free, and for fun. It was wrong, but it was hard to see that when I was that age. But armed with this training and knowledge my friends and I all went straight and went to work for a software publisher and we had our dream job of writing games while we went to the University. Now, the strange thing was that I was using my former skills to prevent what I had earlier perpetrated. My standard for software has always been; "Whatever is on my hard disk is mine to play with as I will." It is not right to hack networks, or hack code for distribution or to give yourself an advantage playing a game. MMORPG's are by definition a network play, and so in my book are hands off. But if you want to take the code and pull it apart to see how it works, then that is fine. Just don't sell it, distribute it, or hack it.

--What is considered offensive matter and material by the designers of multiplayer games, how the designers implement these censors, and tactics used by players to get around them. (Examples: “nudie packs” for Sims Online, profane character and account names.)

In an adults only environement that is not an issue. It would be nice for those who don't want it, to turn it off and not have it forced upon them. When you have an open and free system like Battle Net, you can not insure (as they are not Credit Card holders) of who is actually playing the game. As a parent, I wouldn't want to expose my child to the profanity, but that is secondary to the lewdness of the conversations. Adolescence is the mission of identity formation, so I think the extreme vulgarity has a bigger impact. As Occhi and I have discussed in other threads, the naivity of childhood must be shed at some time. I am one parent who would like to have a little more control over how, and when.

--Which rules apply to whom? (Should everyone be punished when a few people break the rules? A big example is Blizzard’s purge of 131,000 D2X accounts for hacks, including some 3rd party storage programs that weren’t really cheating but fell under the category anyway.)

Yes. I think those who are raking in the profits need to factor in a percentage of it for control. Games require rules, and rules are only as good as their enforcement. I'm one who would advocate extreme measures to ensure fair play.

--Selling items from the game on private websites and eBay.

I think it is stupid for those who buy. But, in a game like DII where the chance of ever finding certain items that you really want is 1 in a billion, I can see where some are tempted. In a way I fault the game designers for this. This is only a game, not a life time venture. I don't believe that any item should be so rare that it will never be found. So, then I wouldn't have any item in the game be so powerful to tempt anyone to want to buy it on e-bay. DII as it is now (v1.09) is flawed because level (skills) are meaningless, and items are everything. Any idiot can almost effortlessly rush a character quickly to high levels, and then spend a few dollars on e-bay to get hacked or duped L337 gear. That takes away one of the prime motivators for many online players, the thrill of growing a character to high levels and to be the best, or most powerful player. Ok, so is it ethical to buy from e-bay? I think not, for the same reasons that Occhi cited. It would be very hard to stop, and if you did it would just go underground. How would the gaming company know that I traded something for money or not.