Virtually Blind Commentary

A stunningly ill-informed staff editorial from Illinois State University’s Daily Vidette says that “online roll-playing games” (Huh? Your avatar is a baguette?) are addictive, unhealthy, and potentially life-threatening. The piece is linked here, but really, don’t bother.

The reason for the editorial? The Vidette claims that “recently, reports have come from people actually dying while playing video games.”

There’s just so much material here. I can’t decide if I should start by pointing out that the referenced reports can’t actually come from dead people (who are, you know, dead), by asking what the hell the Vidette means by, “We can only wonder what the next generation of video gaming systems will bring us, but we are hoping for a message of guilt,” or by debunking the asinine claim itself.

The Vidette editorial focuses on a supposed lawsuit resulting from an incident in China in 2004 when a “13-year-old jumped off a 24 story building, either disillusioned or trying to imitate a move in the ORPG, World of Warcraft.” I say “supposed” lawsuit because while there are breathless reports of this lawsuit all over the place, there hasn’t been any news at all since the initial flurry and it seems likely the whole thing just disappeared.

Tragic? Yes. Actionable? You have got to be kidding.  Next time you read about someone suing a game company over real-world activity that emulates activity in the virtual world, keep in mind this handy, two-word phrase taught in first-year torts classes everywhere: “proximate cause.”

The Second Life Herald reported today that “a felony was committed in Second Life” over the weekend, and suggests that Second Life’s open source viewer may have helped enable the crime.

Allegedly, someone using the names ‘Data Lindman’ and ‘CheckOutThis Hax’ stole over US $400 worth of in-world currency from a vendor refund account for the in-world roleplaying game DarkLife. The hack used to steal the money required access to information that should only be available to DarkLife developers. The SLH reported that the theft occurred while the refund account holder (DarkLife Co-Founder ‘Mark Busch’) was on vacation and away from Second Life.

Besides ‘Data Lindman’ and ‘CheckOutThis Hax,’ the alleged perpetrator has also used several other names in a series of griefing attacks and attempts to hack DarkLife over the last few weeks, including ‘Client Hax,’ and (boldly or stupidly) ‘StealinGoldFromDarklife Allen.’

DarkLife is a roleplaying game similar to Dungeons & Dragons. Players pay L$500 ($2.18 US) for a “backpack” that contains the code and basic objects that let them play the game. They also buy scripted accessories like swords, shields, and wands. Players use these items to battle creatures and earn “experience,” which allows them to improve various attributes of their characters. DarkLife has been around in various forms since late 2003, and is apparently quite popular, with a traffic number around 8000.

In an interview with Virtually Blind today, ‘Busch’ said that the theft has forced them to make the DarkLife simulation available by access list only until they either release a new version of the game or Linden Lab bans the hacker at the IP address level. Closing the simulation to prospective new players significantly reduces sales of DarkLife backpacks and accessories.

Blame Open Source?

The SLH article focuses on whether the crime was enabled by Linden Lab’s recent, somewhat controversial decision to open source its viewer software. But in the initial post in the DarkLife forums on this topic, ‘Busch’ says that the hack required knowledge of the private channel number (one of about 4 billion possible numbers) that DarkLife uses in “part of the shop script that gives back the L$ if the buy fails.” ‘Busch’ notes that Second Life had a bug recently that existed for about seven hours “where everything bought would be copy-mod, including scripts.” This bug would have allowed anyone who bought any DarkLife product while the bug was active to see the private channel number.

In a comment following up on the SLH article, DarkLife Co-Developer ‘Pirate Cotton’ said that “[i]t seems most likely, to me anyway, that the abuse was formed from a combination of the full-access bug introduced a while ago and some cunning tinkering with the knowledge said bug provided.”

Read the rest of the post »

Virtually Blind Commentary

Borderline off-topic, but I’ve just got to link to this. I’ll file it under “virtual crime.” From the blog of eleven year-old Londoner “Ant,” here’s the set up:

On a day full of boredom, I decided to see if the same business strategies used the world today would be as efficient in World of Warcraft. So I tried to monopolize an entire market that was high in demand on my server, Haomarush.

Monopolization is an strategy what was formerly used by a dominant or wealthier competitor to wipe out the entire market. They would completely buy out the entire market, thus allowing them to reset the prices and, consequently, forcing buyers to accept there prices, which could be 200% higher, or in some cases I have come across, 850% higher.

This technique was made illegal in the US to entitle the smaller competitors to have a fair chance, and so the power was evenly distributed. Although banned, this law is often infringed.

The only consequence I predicted was hatred.

You’ll have to follow this link to Ant’s blog to find out what happened.

• A Small Ant in a Huge World: Monopolization.

No hatred here — keep up the good work, Small Ant.

Virtually Blind Commentary

Are massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, like the immensely popular World of Warcraft and the granddaddy of the genre, Ultima Online, “virtual worlds?” They certainly look a lot like virtual worlds. There are avatars, possessions, and lots of social interaction.

Yet some people claim that there should be a distinction between games (which usually involve goal-based accumulation of objects, experience, or territory) and free-form worlds like Second Life. These virtual world purists — typically die-hard Neal Stephenson fans — claim that goal-based games aren’t within the spirit of the term “virtual world.”  I liked Snow Crash too, but I just don’t buy it. Persistent content manipulation is the defining characteristic of virtual worlds, and there’s simply no good reason to exclude game-based worlds from this definition.

So when VB refers to a “virtual world,” we’re talking about all avatar-based simulations where user alterations of the physical or social environment of the world are persistent. In other words, a virtual world is any avatar-based simulation where what one user does can impact another user’s subsequent experiences, even after the initial user has logged off.

By way of example, World of Warcraft is a virtual world under this definition for at least three reasons. First, users can auction off resources that they collected playing while they are offline. Second, guilds have at least semi-permanent presences via in-world chat channels and round-the-clock logins (and Blizzard keeps talking about guild halls).  And third, players have found ways of impacting other users’ long-term experience (sometimes slightly destructive one, like killing all of the non-player characters who give “quests” and thus making part of the game unavailable). Other games, like Ultima Online, are easier to classify as virtual worlds using this definition because users can and have created and heavily modified clustered communities of properties that remain in-world, whether the creators are logged in or not.

Read the rest of the post »