Fieldnotes from the Metaverse — A Declaration of the Rights of Players
In January 2000, Raph Koster pondered the question: “Do players of virtual worlds have rights?”, leading to his seminal essay: “A Declaration of the Rights of Players.”
Setting the scene
Raph Koster was the lead designer for Ultima Online: The Second Age until 2000, when he joined Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) in Austin as the creative director for Star Wars Galaxies.
This was a decade after the “A Rape in Cyberspace”. My Tiny Life was published recently, documenting the importance of governance and enforcement in virtual worlds. A model of participatory governance was quickly becoming the best practice among virtual world designers
Virtual worlds themselves were shifting from text and 2D-based MUDs to -based 3D MMOs with millions of players.
Meanwhile, Web2.0 and the “participatory web culture” raised questions around ownership, for example around sharing and remixing information. Napster launched in 1999 as the first big peer-to-peer file sharing network for digital audio file distribution. It gained a huge following as the de facto tool to exchange commercial music, leading to legal disputes with the music industry over copyright infringement. After losing a wave of lawsuits in 2001, it shut down in 2002. BitTorrent followed as the first big general purpose distributed file sharing protocol, released in 2001.
Lifelogging and quantified selves became a digital cultural phenomenon. Meanwhile social media platforms started aggregating aspects of people's lives: Their friends and social circles, their location, preferences, likes and dislikes. With it came questions around ownership of one's data and online personality.
OpenID aimed to provide an open standard for a decentralized authentication protocol, giving the user more control over their identity. Other platforms went further, aiming to provide centralized user control over which platform has access to which data.
Meanwhile, as Raph Koster transitioned into his new role at SOE, he started thinking about the digital representation of players in virtual worlds: “Do players of virtual worlds have rights?”.
A Declaration of the Rights of Players
The resulting article discussed approaches and contained Koster’s first version of the “Declaration of the Rights of Players”:
The article started with Koster’s reasoning to create such a declaration. He argued that there is at least one theory of rights stating that rights arise because the populace decides to grant them to themselves, continually fighting to formalize and then keep them. Another theory holds them to be intrinsic to people, defining fundamental human rights and branding those cultures which fail to grant them as bastions of savagery. However, there needs to be universal agreement about which rights are intrinsic and which are claimed.
He also conceded the need for some rights to leak over from the real world into the virtual, as demonstrated by “A Rape in Cyberspace”, so rules and rights can’t only be virtual. But which rights need to be brought over and which need to be based on the extended possibilities virtual spaces?
Based on these arguments, he proposed the declaration of the rights of avatars as a thought experiment, stating nineteen articles with topics ranging from access to governance and enforcement to ownership.
Koster knew that even the premise of the declaration was controversial, let alone the content. He thus posted the document to a mailing list for virtual world admins and designers to get their feedback and included the various comments in the third section of the article.
The feedback included designers that saw virtual spaces as their private playgrounds, with players merely being “chess pieces on the board”. Others noted that granting players such rights meant giving them some control over the software and maybe even hardware of the virtual world. And some believed the declaration to be superfluous since virtual worlds were just extensions of the real world and all “real world” rights already applied to them.
In the fourth section, Koster reflects on the entire exercise: His reasoning, the articles, and the feedback.
He notes that, while problematic and controversial, there is a strong need for such a declaration in a future where there might not be any admins of virtual worlds, where the imaginary and real combine into a truly virtual dimension of the real.
An avatar profile might be your credit record and your resume and your academic transcript, as well as your XP earned. On the day that happens, I bet we’ll all wish we had a few more rights in the face of a very large, distributed server, anarchic, virtual world where it might be very hard to move to a different service provider.
Impact
Raph Koster’s own metaverse platform Metaplace used the declaration in 2006 as the basis of their code of conduct. Second Life introduced an updated version in December 2009, adding articles around player IP rights to the declaration.
But even more importantly, the declaration started a long and sometimes emotional debate in the virtual world design community. The discussion divided the designer community into three groups:
- One argued that virtual worlds are separate from reality and that they can fend off attempts to bring reality — and thus player rights — into them.
- Another argued that although virtual worlds are separate from reality, in practice reality is frequently brought into them. Thus, remediation is required for these occasions.
- The third simply saw virtual worlds are part of reality and denied that they can ever be independent realities themselves, thus requiring governance and player rights from the start.
All three perspectives hold to this day, although they manifest themselves in designers and operators of distinct types of virtual worlds: Theme park designers tend to fall into group one, while sandbox designers tend to fall into group three. Operators tend to fall into group two for practical reasons.
There is not only a lack of consensus on the content of such a declaration, but whether it’s desirable or required at all.
Afterthoughts
As part of the Web3 narrative, many people started musing about the rights of inhabitants, centered around property and IP rights: How do I own a digital item? It treats digital items and owners like physical items and owners. It does not venture into the extension and exploration of owners as digital entities, nor does it transcend what an item is. This is because the Web 3 discussions are driven by stakeholders that want to replicate traditional ownership models in digital form, creating artificial scarcity with it, instead of building on digital principles.
There is a separate recent discussion around morality and decency in the Metaverse, with articles proposing a general code of conduct. This is equally shortsighted as it assumes all Metaverse experiences are the same and for the largest possible audience. However, every Metaverse experience has its own set of rules and desired player behavior.
The article linked above tries to establish that it’s not OK to be rude in virtual worlds, however right now it’s perfectly fine to fine to shoot a friend in the face and laugh about it in Fortnite. Touching and nudity is fine in virtual worlds around exploring sexuality. And breaking the “laws” (of a virtual world) and stealing might be a part of competitive, rogue-like virtual worlds. So, none of these rules can be generalized. This concept is usually called “The Magic Circle” in which the virtual world designers lay out expected, accepted and punishable behavior — but these are experience and context specific, not generic.
The Declaration of the Rights of Players offers a different approach: It treats avatars as digital representations of real identities in virtual worlds, and it defers the specific world governance and enforcement to the operators of the respective virtual worlds. It is fundamentally about accessibility, equitability, and safety of the inhabitants of virtual worlds, not about specific governance that would be better defined by the individual virtual worlds / experiences.
Earlier this year, Dr. Richard Bartle published “How to be a God” (PDF), in which he argues that creators and operators of virtual worlds have a responsibility to ensure the safety and equality of inhabitants, since they are literal gods of the space. He discusses the history of virtual world governance, different perspectives, and design approaches to defining rights and responsibilities of players.
Recently, virtual world veteran Abi Bar-Zeev noted that “The Metaverse” Needs Ethics”. In his article he went through some of the history around ethics research and practical approaches in virtual worlds and spatial computing and proposed a “new group for professionals in the field of XR dedicated directly to the development and adoption of ethical principles”, launching the XR Guild:
The XR Guild is an association of professionals in the field of XR, Spatial Computing, Metaverse and web3 (and related) who support a common set of ethical principles, providing resources and mentorship to make the most ethical decisions and to achieve the best outcomes for our members, their employers, and consumers overall.
Like the Declaration of Rights of Players, this is fundamentally about accessibility, equitability, and safety of the inhabitants of virtual worlds and their real representatives. It talks about intentionality, not about implementation, which is the right approach to ensure that creators take accountability for the environments they create.
Here is an episode of the Ethics and Video Games podcast with Dr. Richard Bartle in which he discusses the moral choices that would come with being a video game god. It even expands on the topic of player rights into the area of non-player rights.
About the series
The term “Metaverse” is currently claimed by many groups, driven by different incentives. Some groups attach the term to specific technologies (for example VR, AR, XR, Digital Twins or Blockchains), others see it as a future vision or narrative (sometimes dystopian, sometimes utopian). Some groups talk about the coming Metaverse, others argue that it already exists.
“Fieldnotes from the Metaverse” is a series that discusses the history, visions, perspectives, and narratives of the Metaverse: Specific milestones, their immediate impact and how they shaped the discussion going forward. The goal is a holistic and inclusive view of the Metaverse space, separating visions, signals, trends, and hype.
