Publishers as Government

March 30, 2006 on 10:27 am | In MMO (Live), General Gaming, Industry

It's been a crazy month, and as a result, I somehow missed this entry on the very same blog I just learned about Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom. Unlike that news announcement though, the "Virtual Jail" entry brings up a more socially abstract aspect of MMORPGs, something that hasn't been discussed in awhile as far as I can tell:

Publishers and Government.

In the entry, John talks about an event that resulted in SOE banning a players account, and touches about the public outcry that resulted. Neither this genre, nor SOE, is a stranger to public outcry, so that part is of just passing interest.

The bigger part though, the part that puts SOE GMs in a tough spot, that is the interesting part.

Companies have to protect a number of different things in MMORPGs:

• Player information privacy
• Code and assets
• Other intellectual property (brand, out-licensing, etc.)
• Social conditions

That last part is the tricky one, the most slippery slope. On the one hand, there's no real Rules of Play. On the other though, there's only some loosely defined guidelines for social conduct, stuff normally buried in Terms of Service or End User License Agreement. The application of those guidelines, and the potential need for penalty, fall to a company's staff.

Various attempts have been tried throughout the years, from EQ1's "Play Nice Policy" to public punishment as recently noted in Roma Victor. But these appear to be a hodge-podge of ideas with no commonality.

This is not some new revelation. Heck, Wired was talking about this two years ago, and the luminaries at Terra Nova a year before that. In the former, Wired referenced Edward Castronova's idea of internation, "game companies would choose terms of service from among a set of templates that would then be clearly laid out at a game's inception so players could be certain about what they could and could not do or say. In return, the companies would receive limited liability from litigation".

However, to date, I haven't read of anything that even remotely resembles this. This is particularly poignant given John's closing statement in the Virtual Jail blog entry:

But I sure do wish we could create a virtual “jail” that all of the different MMO companies could send people’s characters to. It would be nice to make sure these idiots didn’t just get banned from our game and move along to harass players in another MMO, but that their characters would be “behind bars” for a good long time. Maybe even the death sentence for avatars, but without the whole prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment

I agree completely.

There are undesirables in these games just as there is in life. However, in life, there are some social conditions that exist to keep undesirables out of incompatible locations. And there is jail too, flawed though it is in its inconsistent implementation.

Nothing like this exists for games though. As profit centers, this is understandable. How could one convince the bean counters to sign onto a service that would purposely keep players out?

Well, to me, the answer lies in experience, and some choices.

First choice is how much information a company wants to collect from a user. Right now, it's mostly a credit card and valid email address, with the assumption that the former comes with a valid street address. Obviously there's holes in this system. Some could be plugged with requests for a Social Security number, but I have no idea what level of complexity that would add to the data collection, record retention policies and security systems that are already pretty rough. Another idea could be to require the entry of two different credit cards, since even bank cards function as them nowadays, but I don't know what percentage of the potential customer base can do this.

The point here is to collect additional information that would allow a company to truly ban a person if need be. A SS# cross-referenced with a street address cross-referenced with two credit cards could result in a higher probability of preventing that person from joining other games in that system.

But aside from the levels of complexity that adds, there's also the question of benefit. To truly keep undesirables out of these games, either through monitored suspension or indefinite banning, would require this sort of extra collected information be shared. And the structure of that sharing is where things go from messy to entropic.

That's the second choice: how much information to share.

In terms of player policies, the genre is still pretty young. Occasionally an event will occur where people start wondering about more rules, but for the most part those seem to be infrequent enough (or people learn of them infrequently enough) that no real effort is pushed. General politics here, and project management. Why change what ain't broke, or even perceived as broke?

So not only would a single company need to change their position on this, a host of them would, enough to form the loose alliance needed for the sort of information sharing that could create a better way to manage players.

This goes back to an occasionally-mentioned Consortium idea, where instead of these companies just looking at themselves as discrete profit centers, they realize the social roles they play and come together to do a better job at it. But making this leap is unintuitive. For the most part, there's no way to monetize this role.

Worse, companies that would want to elevate themselves in this regard could run into problems with the entities already charged with it: real world governments. Imagine the pickle a U.S.-based company would have shouldering social responsibility in mainland China for example.

So ultimately, while I agree with John, and have with Edward, and with anyone that talks about the need for deep and broad discussions about company reform to drive player reform, I am, perhaps like them, struggling with how that could actually happen in the business world.

Unfortunately, if the events of 2005 have shown anything, it's that when businesses don't voluntarily hold themselves to higher or different standards, state and federal-level governments will begin openly talking about forcing them to do so. I doubt that is the last we'll hear about attempts to strengthen or supplant the ESRB rating system with something containing more punitory teeth.