Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - Freedom of expression in virtual communities

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Freedom of expression in virtual communities

In the NYtimes there is an article about a gent who was bounced from an online community for transgressions of their end user license agreement (EULA). Should he have been banished? Was his "reporting" the same censorship that is covered by the first amendment? If under 18 teens were online and engaging in cybersex chat, is that legal? There are bunches of questions that this debate can cover.

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January 15, 2004
A Real-Life Debate on Free Expression in a Cyberspace City
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."

I have played many of these games through the years. I have to agree that it wasn't a First Amendment issue. I don't really have a problem with what he did, but they do have a right to enforce their standards. I have been playing Everquest for awhile, and there are people banned all the time for cheating, bad behavior, etc. However the most effective "banning" comes from people who decide that someone can't play the game well, etc. These people are basically shut out of the higher level play areas and kept from advancing since it takes large groups to do so. Not having played The Sims, I don't know for sure what if anything the player community could have done, but I really see this as more of an issue for the player community rather than EA.

There's no constitution in a MMORPG. Freedom of Speech exists only if the creator of the world grants it to the members/participants.

I don't think that EA's choice here was a good one. I became MUCH MORE aware of the existence of this game after the scandalous Alphaville Herald stories came out. They turned off one very vocal source of advertising. Granted he wasn't exactly touting the family-friendly aspects of the game, but... there are those of us whose attention will be grabbed by stuff like that... :rolleyes:

I have never played Sims, but after reading this article I am considering checking it out. I do think that things are getting a little out of hand when real people submerge themselves so far into an online game that they begin to lose site of fact and fiction.

Should he have been banished? Yes. EA was not out of line for banning Mr. Ludlow. They were simply enforcing their ideals of how they want the game to be run. It's their world after all.

Was his "reporting" the same censorship that is covered by the first amendment? No. Sims is a ficticious environment. The creator of the environment has every right to keep things in their control. Much like TFP, is Hal feels that someone is violating the rules and regs of this board, he has every right to boot them out.

If under 18 teens were online and engaging in cybersex chat, is that legal? Now there is a toughy. Is it the parents fault for not monitoring their kids and the context of the material they peruse on the internet? Or, is it the social responsibility for companies like EA to not create an environment where teens under 18 can have access to this kind of material?

It is unfortunate that EA decided to selectively apply their EULA. Perhaps if they were more consistent in its enforcement Mr. Ludlow would not have had any complaint. Regarding EA being a "a classic despot" that is "using its powers to single out individual critics for the dungeons and the firing squads." Absolutely. They created the game and they control it. They can kill off whomever they want. Of course if EA pisses off enough players they risk losing their fan base, but it's EA's risk and no one elses.

Interesting, and here I thought SIMS was just an innocent game. :p

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Originally posted by BentNotTwisted
They created the game and they control it. They can kill off whomever they want.

I have to agree with BentNotTwisted here.

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Originally posted by water_boy1999
Is it the parents fault for not monitoring their kids and the context of the material they peruse on the internet? Or, is it the social responsibility for companies like EA to not create an environment where teens under 18 can have access to this kind of material?

I'd say its a mixture of both. Yes, to a degree it is a parents responsiibility to monitor thier child's activity. However, the reality is that no parent can ever know everything, and a game like SIMS seems innocent on the surface, and wouldn't really seem suspicious. For a game that people under 18 can play, I sounds like SIMS has more sexual content than is really necessary. Perhaps EA should consider taking out the "loveshacks."
I do have to add though that I've never played the game, so I can't claim to have any first hand knowledge of what SIMS is really like. :)

THe length to which these games have gone is disturbing. They have a good business plan, that is true, by stealing people lives, and putting them online, and then charging them monthly to live.

I dont like it, not one bit. Its too unregulated even for me, and that says something.

I really cant put it entirely into words, but suffice to say I am disgusted with the company and disappointed in how this has gone out of hand.

I see freedom not as a natural right but as a function of power relationships.

Freedom is an exercise of power. Those with the least power have the least freedom. All our protestations to the contrary have not changed this simple fact very much. Over the centuries, the powerful have been forced to share some small degree of their power with the rest of us. Again, this reflects power relationships, nothing more.

Issues of freedom are really about human psychology and human groups and the distribution of power relationships.

There's more to this, of course - how power struggles devolve into rhetoric, etc. But, in general, what this example illustrates is the exercise of power. That's what makes the world go around. Freedom is often allowed by those in power. Often it is not.

Issues of right and wrong are self-serving...

I run or help run a few online communities. These are privately run orgs that are paid for by me or my fellow admin staff out of our own pocket, not through a government grant and as such are not subject to any constitution.

It's the same as being in a bar. If you say something to piss off the owner, the owner will remove you. Say something to piss me off in one of my communities, I will also remove you.

"No Private Action is censorship" ~Ayn Rand, one of the true things she said.
EA created the game, and it falls right back to the "management has the right to refuse service" deal. The guy should just get over it and find another way to interact in a community. His rights aren't impugned...EA just won't let him be a troublemaker and shit-stirrer in their community where to do so may iincur profit loss due to pissing off other players.

"The needs of the many outweigh, the needs of the few, or the one" ~Spock.

and maybe he can hire the sim mafia to rough up some of the people there :)

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Justice has its price in Sim world
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 1/14/2004

Alphaville's a tough town, the sort of place where even the street-smart are rarely safe and newcomers are often eaten alive. You can call the cops, but they usually don't arrive in time. That's why so many Alphaville residents seek justice by hiring guys like Jeremy Chase. He runs a band of thugs who'll gladly deal out ugly punishments for the right price. Chase, a 26-year-old resident of Sacramento, runs the Sim Mafia

(thesimmafia.com), a gang of digital enforcers for a digital world. They lay down the law inside the Sims Online, a multiplayer computer game run by Electronic Arts. "Our job is to basically take those complaints from the normal citizens of the game, who can't go to EA because EA won't do anything about it, and do an eye-for-an-eye for them," Chase said. There are many groups like the Sim Mafia inside the multiplayer universe of the Sims Online. Unlike other Internet games, this one is an open-ended experience, a sort of "life simulator" that lets players create just about any kind of environment they choose. And some of the choices they're making are surprising, and disturbing.

If a player feels his character, or Sim, is being ill treated and can get no justice from the game operators at EA, he can arrange to have bad things happen to rival players, by approaching a local Mafia and ponying up some of the game's currency, called simoleons.

The Sims is a nonviolent game. There are no guns, and characters can't hit one another. But that doesn't mean the Sim Mafia has no weapons. Chase sends instant messages to other members of his group, and a campaign of harassment begins. The target starts receiving a flood of insulting messages. The Mafia members can add him to their "enemies list," a way of affecting the target's popularity rating inside the game. Unpopular players find it hard to make friends and buy new properties, or "lots."

There are more severe punishments, such as the dreaded "lot job," in which a Sim Mafia member gains access to someone's lot, then trashes it, destroying properties the player might have spent months acquiring. But the most severe punishment -- forcing someone to delete his Sim character -- is reserved for Sim Mafia members who've violated the rules of the organization. Chase calls it a "Moe Green Special," in honor of one of the gangsters murdered by the Corleone family in the film "The Godfather."

Chase insists that he and his Mafia are only out for a good time. "This is my break from reality," he said. But there's a dark side to the fun. Chase admits he and his crew have sometimes been little more than "griefers" (troublemakers) themselves, using their skills to attack innocent civilians. And some of the activity sponsored by groups of Sims has been particularly disturbing. There's the Sim sex trade, for instance. "I'm not going to lie," said Chase. "When I first started the game, prostitution was one of the services I offered." Fear that an underage player would visit his digital bordello persuaded Chase to quit.

Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan who's researching a book about online gaming, also runs a weblog, alphavilleherald

.com, that covers Sims Online news. The weblog featured an interview with a man called "Evangeline" who claimed to run a brothel inside the game, one that featured simulated child prostitution. "My first thought was [EA] might want to do something to clean up the game," said Ludlow. Instead, Ludlow was ejected from the game last month for publishing links to his weblog inside the game -- a violation of the rules. Ludlow, who has opened a new account and rejoined the game, claims that Evangeline went unpunished. He has closed the brothel but is now in the business of stealing simoleons from new Sims Online players. He wonders why EA won't put a stop to it. "The only thing that makes any sense to me at all is they don't care what's going on in the game," said Ludlow. "They just don't want people to know what's going on."

Not so, said EA spokesman Jeff Brown. "There's a rule that says no sexual content allowed in the game." But EA doesn't have a Sim police force constantly monitoring the players, so it can't catch every violation. "The only instance where we take action is when somebody files a complaint," Brown said. As a result, "the rules are enforced about as well as the rules are enforced on the Mass. Turnpike."

But many people have to use the Pike; playing the Sims Online is strictly optional. Some players, disgusted by the online environment in places like Alphaville, are having second thoughts.

"I've been cutting back . . . because I'm just fed up with the world that it's become," said Catherine Fitzpatrick, a 47-year-old freelance writer in New York City. Fitzpatrick is particularly appalled by yet another curious Sim subculture -- players who simulate sadomasochistic sexual practices and invite their horrified neighbors to join the fun. "I'm a member of the ACLU," said Fitzpatrick. "I'm not from the Bible Belt. But I'm concerned when it goes too far, when people are touting this lifestyle that involves violence and enslavement."

Fitzpatrick's especially worried because the Sims Online is part of a series of games, beginning with the original SimCity, that have built up a reputation as family-friendly titles suitable for kids. The online version is rated T for teens, but according to Fitzpatrick "there are plenty of kids in the game." She thinks that if EA wants to allow seamy activities on the Sims Online, the company should set up a version open only to people over age 21.

If EA is interested, the company had better hurry. An online adults-only game called Sociolotron, now under development, will embrace behavior that's supposed to be illegal in the Sims Online. Players will be encouraged to act out fantasies of prostitution, drug dealing, and sexual fetishes.

Sociolotron might appeal to the more vulgar Sims Online players, leaving the decent folk in peace. Then again, the Sims Online has been a big disappointment to EA, attracting just 80,000 subscribers, compared to 650,000 for Sony's online game Everquest. The company can ill afford to lose loyal players -- no matter how tacky they may be.

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Freedom of speech is a constitutional right, meaning the government of the united states cannot censor you. This doesn't apply to private online communities. EA can do as they choose as far as this issue is concerned and I support their right to do so.

Maybe they could have warned him first ? Instead they just knocked in his teeth with the Banhammer.

Electronic Arts HAS a constitution, it's called the End User Lisence Agreement, and in it is no mention of absolute freedom of speech in any way. He's being a dickhead to call so much attention. EA owns the game and such, they decide what they feel is appropriate or not.

I am glad to hear some voices that I agree with. It is EA's "world", or at least "interaction". There are no guarantees in there, and the only true goal is for EA to make money. Not enforce ideals.

Besides, I regularly nuke from orbit millions upon millions of residents in my games, many of whom believe in the same constitutional rights granted to all persons that USA citizens do. Their petitions never reach me, nor do I care. If one of them is an on-line player, am I a war criminal?
Let EA do what they want. This whole thing is not a rights issue....It's a marketing issue.

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Originally posted by Spartak
Maybe they could have warned him first ? Instead they just knocked in his teeth with the Banhammer.

The Banhammer. I like it...