Do players of virtual worlds have rights?

One of those questions that given my position, I shouldn’t write about. No matter what, any answer I give is bound to be wrong, either from the perspective of my employers or my customers. Heck, even over on the non-commercial side of the fence, it’s likely to raise some hackles among hardworking mud admins.

The pesky thing about rights is that they keep coming up. Players keep claiming that they have them. Admins keep liberally applying the word like some magic balm (“oh, you have every right to be upset…”), in every circumstance except the ones where the players want the notion of rights taken seriously. Of course, administrators of any virtual space are loathe to “grant players rights” because it curbs their ability to take action against people, restricts their ability to walk away from it all, holds them to standards they may not be able to live up to.

Here’s a great example of a mud rights document from IgorMUD that I had to include, well, because:

>HELP RIGHTS ========================================================

Igor has adopted this bill of unalienable player rights, written by Jacob Hallen aka Tintin:

PARAGRAPH 1 Every player has the right to be a frog.

PARAGRAPH 2 Should the system the player is on fail to implement the "being frog" functionality, the player has a right to pretend he/she/it/Garlic is a frog.

PARAGRAPH 3 If a player does not exercise the right to be a frog, or to pretend to be one, other players have a right to pretend it/she/Garlic/he is a frog.

========================================================

There’s at least one theory of rights which says that rights aren’t “granted” by anyone. They arise because the populace decides to grant them to themselves. Under this logic, the folks who rose up in France weren’t looking for some king with a soon-to-be-foreshortened head to tell them, “You’ve got the right to live your lives freely.” They told themselves that they had that right, and because they had said so, it was so. The flip side of this is that unless you continually fight to make that claim true, then it won’t stick. The battleground is not a military one: it’s a perception one; as long as everyone is convinced that people have rights, they do. They’re inalienable only as long as only a minority does the, uh, aliening. And, of course, especially as long as they are enshrined in some sort of law. In other words, the guys in charge sign away a chunk of power, in writing, that the populace expects them to sign away.

There’s another theory of rights which holds them to be intrinsic to people. Under this far more rigid standard, all those cultures which fail to grant them are benighted bastions of savagery. The harder part here is agreeing on what rights are intrinsic to all people everywhere-cultural differences tend to make that hard.

Many mud admins are of the belief that their muds are their private playgrounds. That they have discretion on how enters and who gets to stay. That they can choose to eject someone on any grounds whatsoever, can delete a character at a whim, can play favorites and choose to grant administrative favors to their friends. Even in pay-for-play circles, it is always made very clear who owns the data, who has to sign Terms of Service, etc. There’s a bunch of this that is antithetical to the notion of rights.

Now, it’s pretty clear that there are some rights which leak over from the real world into the virtual. If your local pay-for-play mud operator isn’t providing adequate service, you can report them to the Better Business Bureau; there are probably sexual discrimination laws and harassment laws and slander laws that apply equally well in both kinds of space. But rights (and much less legislation) have not caught up to the notion of virtual spaces very well. Which makes for an interesting thought experiment.

What if we declared the rights of avatars?

I’ve based what follows on a couple of seminal documents: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen approved by the National Assembly of France on August 26 of 1789; and the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States, perhaps better known as the Bill of Rights. This is, perhaps, not the best basis from which to begin a stab at this hypothetical exercise, given our multicultural world today; some have suggested that a better starting point might be the United Nations Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I admit that one reason for choosing the version I did was its language, not its content per se.

So let’s give it a whirl. This is all still hypothetical, OK?

A Declaration of the Rights of Avatars

When a time comes that new modes and venues exist for communities, and said modes are different enough from the existing ones that question arises as to the applicability of past custom and law; and when said venues have become a forum for interaction and society for the general public regardless of the intent of the creators of said venue; and at a time when said communities and spaces are rising in popularity and are now widely exploited for commercial gain; it behooves those involved in said communities and venues to affirm and declare the inalienable rights of the members of said communities. Therefore herein have been set forth those rights which are inalienable rights of the inhabitants of virtual spaces of all sorts, in their form henceforth referred to as avatars, in order that this declaration may continually remind those who hold power over virtual spaces and the avatars contained therein of their duties and responsibilities; in order that the forms of administration of a virtual space may be at any time compared to that of other virtual spaces; and in order that the grievances of players may hereafter be judged against the explicit rights set forth, to better govern the virtual space and improve the general welfare and happiness of all.

Therefore this document holds the following truths to be self-evident: That avatars are the manifestation of actual people in an online medium, and that their utterances, actions, thoughts, and emotions should be considered to be as valid as the utterances, actions, thoughts, and emotions of people in any other forum, venue, location, or space. That the well-established rights of man approved by the National Assembly of France on August 26th of 1789 do therefore apply to avatars in full measure saving only the aspects of said rights that do not pertain in a virtual space or which must be abrogated in order to ensure the continued existence of the space in question. That by the act of affirming membership in the community within the virtual space, the avatars form a social contract with the community, forming a populace which may and must self-affirm and self-impose rights and concomitant restrictions upon their behavior. That the nature of virtual spaces is such that there must, by physical law, always be a higher power or administrator who maintains the space and has complete power over all participants, but who is undeniably part of the community formed within the space and who must therefore take action in accord with that which benefits the space as well as the participants, and who therefore also has the rights of avatars and may have other rights as well. That the ease of moving between virtual spaces and the potential transience of the community do not limit or reduce the level of emotional and social involvement that avatars may have with the community, and that therefore the ease of moving between virtual spaces and the potential transience of the community do not in any way limit, curtail, or remove these rights from avatars on the alleged grounds that avatars can always simply leave.