A Real-Life Debate on Free Expression in a Cyberspace City

[mailin 0]

I thought this was an interesting article. I'm addicted to the SIMS, but only the computer version, not the online version.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/15/technology/15SIMS.html?ex=1075209336&ei=1&en=f3228fb51caee472


January 15, 2004
By AMY HARMON

Peter Ludlow said he was only trying to expose the truth
that Alphaville's authorities were all too happy to ignore.
In his online newspaper, The Alphaville Herald, he reported
on thieves and their scams. He documented what he said was
a teenage prostitution ring. He criticized the city's
leaders for not intervening to make it a better place.

In response to his investigative reporting, Mr. Ludlow
says, he was banished from Alphaville. He was kicked out of
his home; his other property was confiscated. Even his two
cats were taken away.

Alphaville is not a real town but a virtual city in an
Internet game called The Sims Online, where thousands of
paying subscribers log on each day to assume fictional
identities and mingle in cyberspace. Indeed, none of Mr.
Ludlow's possessions existed outside the game. But the
recent decision by the game's owner, Electronic Arts, to
terminate Mr. Ludlow's account - forever erasing his
simulated Sims persona - has set off a debate over free
expression and ethical behavior in online worlds that is
reverberating in the real one.

"To me, it was clearly censorship," said Mr. Ludlow, whom
the Internet magazine Salon.com described as "an unabashed
muckraker."

A Yale Law School student, writing on the school's Web log,
condemned Electronic Arts as "a classic despot" that is
"using its powers to single out individual critics for the
dungeons and the firing squads."

The issues are actually not that clear-cut. But the episode
has called attention to the little-known netherworlds of a
popular computer game genre known as "massively multiplayer
online role-playing games," which now regularly attract a
million or more Americans. In Sims Online, Everquest and
others where the border between fantasy and reality is
increasingly blurry, the games have become more than simply
a source of entertainment. They are also a gateway to a
complex social network that takes on a life of its own.

But in a setting where the point is to play out fantasies,
there is little agreement among players about the
real-world consequences of their online actions. At the
same time, the games' corporate owners are finding
themselves at odds with some subscribers, who want more
control over how the communities they play, fight and live
in are governed.

That repeatedly wielding highly realistic, albeit
fictional, weapons will contribute to real-life violence
has long been a concern about traditional video games. But
players and social critics say the ethical questions
multiply when thousands of other real people are behind the
characters on the screen.

Is it all right for teenagers to slaughter other characters
in Everquest, but not for them to engage in sex chat in
Sims Online? Is it fine for adults in Sims to engage in
private sex chat, but not acceptable to advertise virtual
bondage and discipline services, as dozens of Alphaville's
virtual residents now do?

Within the game world, the 80,000 Sims Online subscribers
are a relatively small group. Electronic Arts has said it
has failed so far to attract the expected audience in part
because it released the game last year before the software
was quite ready. But Sims is seen as the forerunner of a
new game genre whose goal is to let people play in social
environments that more closely approximate real life. In
those worlds, experts say, the overlapping of fact and
fiction becomes both more significant and harder to sort
out.

"Part of the original reason people went to these games was
for a sense of time out," said Sherry Turkle, a
psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
who has studied Internet role-playing. "But as these spaces
get more integrated with real life the kind of boundaries
people want are still being negotiated."

In a Sims city like Alphaville, players see the same
stretch of green pixels on their computer screens, dotted
with cartoon houses and stores. Love shacks, too. They
visit each other. Some hold poetry readings; others pagan
sacrifices. Some vie to be on the "most popular Sims" list,
or to get rich, but there is no way to "win" the game.

The players themselves are represented by animated figures
and become entirely responsible for their own online
identities, which can reflect who they are in real life or
deviate from it drastically. The median age of Sims
subscribers is 28 to 30, and about 60 percent of them are
women. The game is officially off limits to children under
13.

Because they believe that such graphical environments are
turning into important vehicles for communication,
economists, lawyers and social critics have lately begun to
study the world of multiplayer games as virtual
laboratories that can provide insight into familiar
realities even as they breed a new hybrid.

"As more of us spend more time in these environments,
everyone is going to have a stake in making sure their
rules are fair," said Jack Balkin, director of the
Information Society Project at Yale.

The details of Mr. Ludlow's case are murky. Electronic Arts
says he was kicked out because he broke one of the game's
main rules by including a link on his profile to his
Alphaville Herald Web site, which in turn linked to sites
that tell people how to cheat. Mr. Ludlow, a philosophy
professor, said he was nabbed on a technicality. Many
players agree that the company enforces the rule
selectively.

"They were out of line," said Mr. Ludlow, who said he
joined the game in part to do research. "There has to be
some responsibility that comes with running a kind of
social common space like that."

Yet some of the game's most avid players also question the
integrity of Mr. Ludlow's reporting, such as it was. Were
13-year-old subscribers really playing prostitutes in the
game, exchanging the online equivalent of phone sex for
simoleans, the game's currency? His source, a boastful
17-year-old player famous for cheating new players out of
their money, has been assailed as unreliable.

Even some of Mr. Ludlow's biggest detractors, however,
worry about some of the same issues he sought to highlight,
particularly whether the range of role-playing Electronic
Arts allows is appropriate in a game open to teenagers. And
they chafe at what they say are unnecessary restrictions
about what they can talk about on the game's message
boards.

"For us to be gagged so we can't criticize other Sims is an
enormous frustration," said Catherine Fitzpatrick, 47, a
freelance translator in Manhattan. "You can't improve this
society without being able to talk about what's wrong with
it."

As competition heats up among game companies, they may be
forced to listen to such concerns. Online games cost a lot
to develop and several have recently failed, but their
economics are luring more entrants: customers, after buying
the software, typically pay about $12 a month to subscribe.


Everquest, the most popular of the games among Americans,
has 430,000 subscribers who spend an average of 20 hours a
week in a vast medieval kingdom. (Its addictive quality has
earned it the nickname Evercrack.) More than two million
South Koreans play Lineage, where princes and elves fight
for control of feudal villages.

And the line between "reality" and fantasy is blurring. The
currency of several online games can now be regularly
purchased for real dollars on Internet auction sites,
allowing people to buy their way into a higher level much
as they might pay to get a child into a better nursery
school. A Sims cheetah, the kind of rare-breed cat that Mr.
Ludlow owned, is selling for $25 on eBay. The high-end rate
for Sims "prostitutes," about 500,000 simoleans, fetches
about $15.

Mr. Ludlow said the fact that fantasy money had lately
taken on a real market value made the notion of selling sex
online more worrisome. And he accused Electronic Arts of
turning a blind eye to sexual elements of the game that
might not be appropriate for teenagers.

But defining a community standard for the game's teenage
players is not any easier than it is in the real world. In
the bondage neighborhood that has sprung up in Alphaville,
for instance (the Black Rose Castle describes itself as
offering "collaring services but not weddings"), most
residences state that players must be over 18 to enter. But
carding the animated avatars that enter poses obvious
difficulties. Many players argue that it is the
responsibility of parents, not the game company, to monitor
their children's "sexual" activities online.

Jeff Brown, vice president for communications at Electronic
Arts, said the company would investigate if a player
reported that a teenage player had adopted the persona of a
prostitute, but added that it would need to respond case by
case. "If someone says that is going on in cyberspace, is
it lost on anybody that it's not actually happening?" Mr.
Brown said. "No law was violated. It's a game."

Sims sex is, indeed, simulated. It consists mostly of
players at a keyboard typing into a dialogue bubble
displayed above the heads of their pixelated characters,
perhaps while using the "slow dance" command or lying on a
simulated bed.

Harassment, cheating and use of obscene language are
prohibited under the game's "terms of service" that players
agree to when they subscribe. If one player is breaking the
rules, another can click a button to alert an Electronic
Arts employee, who may then intervene, suspending or
banning the violator.

That may have been what happened to Mr. Ludlow, who appears
to have had as many critics in Alphaville as he had loyal
readers. But even if Mr. Ludlow could prove Electronic Arts
bounced him because it did not like his reporting, legal
scholars say he does not have a First Amendment case, at
least for now.

Game companies are not like phone companies, which have a
legal obligation to carry all speech over their lines. They
are more like a private club, which can reserve the right
to expel members at will. And the Constitution does not
protect speech once it has been signed away by contract,
which is what players do when they subscribe.

But that could change as virtual worlds increasingly
intersect with the real one, some legal experts contend. It
is considerably more painful to switch game worlds,
abandoning pets, property and friends, than it is to switch
phone companies, they note. Games may come to be regarded
in the same gray area as shopping malls, which several
state courts have ruled can be forced to uphold free speech
rights despite being private property.

For now, Mr. Ludlow has been reduced to sneaking back into
the game under other players' accounts and publishing his
findings on his Web site, www.alphavilleherald.com. He
still keeps track of Alphaville doings on a blackboard in
his office, he said, in an obsession he likens to law
enforcement officers trying to figure out the structure of
a mafia crime family.

"You almost get this sense that, well, I can't just leave,
that it would be irresponsible," Mr. Ludlow said. "People
come to me and I can help them. It gives me some - possibly
illusory - feeling of playing a role in the community."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/15/technology/15SIMS.html?ex=1075209336&ei=1&en=f3228fb51caee472

Arianna Frances

[quade 4]

Do you see any emerging trends or parallels to say, dropzone.com?

We don't have a currency, but people bicker and there is a certain amount of control exerted via the moderators.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[mailin 0]

Yes and No.

the SIMS gives a person control over a certain aspect of the 'game', where as no one really gets control over any part here (other than the moderators)

I think people obviously can be addicted to both.

What shocked me the most about the article was the presumption that there are young teenagers involved in sexually mature things with adults, and there is mostly no way to know. Granted, I wasn't online as a young teenager, but I find it disturbing that parents would give their children the freedom to become involved in activities where their their innocence may be compromised.

Jennifer

Arianna Frances

[quade 4]

Quote

What shocked me the most about the article was the presumption that there are young teenagers involved in sexually mature things with adults, and there is mostly no way to know.

Well, that's also an issue here on dropzone.com.

We know for a fact there have been completely fictional "skydivers" here. Unless a person is known in the skydiving community, posts here and there is then independent confirmation that the person really exists, how would anyone know?

Also, come to think about it, there is a certain "currency" here on dropzone.com -- credibility. With some known users having more of it than others and some counterfeiting it by creating fictitious life experiences.

Quote

Granted, I wasn't online as a young teenager, but I find it disturbing that parents would give their children the freedom to become involved in activities where their their innocence may be compromised.

That, of course, is true anytime the parents let a child out of their immediate sight whether it's a skate park, school play ground or cyber space.

At a certain point you have to trust that you've taught the kid some values. If you haven't then perhaps not letting them out of your line of sight is a good idea, but I don't think that's the answer, because ultimately, most kids leave home.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[mailin 0]

Quote

We know for a fact there have been completely fictional "skydivers" here. Unless a person is known in the skydiving community, posts here and there is then independent confirmation that the person really exists, how would anyone know?

This is true - but due to that fact that skydiving is an 'adult' sport you will very infrequently find someone 13 years old here.

Quote

At a certain point you have to trust that you've taught the kid some values.

Very true. Then again, at 13 years old I remember testing my parents on everything they taught me. I took up smoking pot and hanging with the 'wrong crowd' because I wanted to see if what they were telling me for years was what really had to be. Thank goodness they were able to reinforce (in ways that are no considered illegal of course ) their teachings and I was able to leave the 'wrong crowd' alone. Then again, I think alot of those experience have shaped me as a person - as with all people, that time period is one of tremendous personal growth.

Jennifer

edited for spelling

Arianna Frances

[quade 4]

Quote

This is true - but due to that fact that skydiving is an 'adult' sport you will very infrequently find someone 13 years old here.

Yet, within our own limited dz.com population, which is less than say, SIMs online, we think we've seen it once or twice.

As a matter of fact, what am I saying, we get kids that wander onto dropzone.com -all- the time. It's a fascinating subject for them, an "attractive nuisance" and if someone was out there with ill intent . . . anyway, we don't need to go into that too much, I think you can figure that out for yourself.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[mailin 0]

Quote

I think you can figure that out for yourself.

Yes I can.

Thank you for the discussion - its refreshing, as I don't feel I can have conversations like this with folks at my work (they don't look at it with an open mind), or my husband (as he usually agrees with me, so what fun is that?)

Jennifer

Arianna Frances

[indyz 1]

Quote

What shocked me the most about the article was the presumption that there are young teenagers involved in sexually mature things with adults, and there is mostly no way to know.

I've read this guy's interview with the cyber-madame. I'm pretty convinced it's a teenage girl.