Question of the Week: Do You Own Your MMO Character? March 31, 2008
Posted by Kendricke in General Game Concepts, IMGDC, Question of the Week, The Gaming Industry.trackback
In a brilliant roundtable at the IMGDC over the weekend, Richard Bartle lead a conversation regarding government interference in online games, specifically from the point of view of a game development studio. The strong underlying question which was raised again and again throughout the session was “how far is too far” in regards to various areas of typical government regulation of various aspects of game design.
As part of the conversation, the subject of virtual property in online games was inevitably raised. True to the theme of the session, the question was asked regarding how far was too far regarding potential government requirements referencing players owning their own property in online games.
Before I get into describing the actual responses from various game developers (which could truly be its own article in its own right), I’d be interested in finding out how (and why) players feel on the subject.
So, the Clockwork Question of the Week for March 31st is this: Do you “own” your character? How so? Why do you feel that way?
@Tipa: Actually, given that those characters’ adventures and development occurred in the context of interactive fiction and its copyright backplot, it might be argued that any stories about them, published outside the context of that world, have the same status as fan-fiction.
That is, derivative work, whose copyright status depends entirely on the whim of the creator of the originating work.
If I think up a new character in, say, the Buffyverse, I can’t go around freely publishing or selling stories about that character without eliminating all of the Buffyness from those stories and that character – at least not without permission.
I think i do own my characters. No one else can log in and play my characters with out my permission. Yes the company can log in to my characters every once and a while but normally only after i have petitioned that something is wrong with them. So essentially only i can play on them, i can do what ever i want to them. So ya i think there my property.
i do see some vaild point against it. That in the end everything i do is govern by what ever company own the game.
Ogrebears,
You believe you own your characters, that they are your property.
Do you feel you have the right to sell your characters? They are your property, right? Property potentially has value. So, you can sell your property as you wish, right?
What happens when a patch comes along that wipes out your characters? Can you sue the game studio for loss of value on “your property”? Why not?
Why stop there. If you could sue over loss of value for a wiped character, couldn’t you sue over loss of value if your character class is nerfed? What if an item you spent time acquiring was suddenly easy to get – could you sue then because your virtual property’s relative value was reduced?
Even without the lawsuits, what happens when you can’t access your property for any amount of time? Is it really your property if you can’t do anything with it – say when a server goes down?
[...] issue of virtual rights has been raised, first at Kendricke’s blog and then by Grimwell. Kendricke is bouncing off of ideas raised this past weekend at IMGDC, and I [...]
Tipa, I don’t think what you said in comment #9 means you have any rights to your character. It means you have memories of your character, but that’s different than rights.
michael, St. Erroneous is correct, in my I-am-not-a-lawyer opinion. The conception of your character is yours, but it is derivative of someone else’s universe. You can have your memories of that character, you can publish fiction about that character, but you can’t profit from that fiction without running the risk of copyright infringement.
I am with Tipa. In my opinion we own the -concept- of the character, the backstory, etc, but we don’t own the “toon” the actual representation of that character in the game world or any of the character’s in-game possessions.
For the the sake of my argument here, let me establish -my- definitions for “toon” and character” (because I do see them viewed separately). The “toon” is the in-game representation including all of its possessions. The toon has no life outside of the game context. A “character” is the backstory and on-going story of the toon including its personality and interactions. The character can have the game related derivations stripped out and/or modified and still be able to stand apart from the game (or be recreated in another game or genre). The character is, in essence, the concept.
I think, though, that comes down to a roleplayer vs non frame of mind. Roleplayers (even some of those who claim they aren’t roleplayers) do invest a bit more of their own mental concepts into the “character” than someone who just plays pixels on the screen, the “toon”.
I am aware there are roleplayers who use the term “toon” to refer to their character and have just as much invested in them, but I needed the distinctions and the 2 common designations for in-game entities is handy.
A character, if recreated by someone other than the originator wouldn’t have the exact same concept, the same “life”. Kendricke created on Everfrost server by player of Rijacki could appear as Kendricke on Guk created by player of Kendricke but it would be missing the same spark. It would be as much “Kendricke” as one of the professional Micheal Jackson impersonators are the real thing. They may look it, they may walk the moon walk, talk the high-pitched soft voice, they may even have the wonkey nose, you might not be able to see any discernible difference at all, but they still wouldn’t be Micheal, they wouldn’t have his blood rushing through their veins, his actual thoughts running through their heads.
I personally don’t recreate characters in successive games, I like to explore the new, but my boyfriend does and other people I know do. So, if they didn’t own the character (the inner concept), how could they do so? How could Tipa exist in both EQ2 and WoW unless player of Tipa owned the concept, the character?
In-game stuff, the toon and its possessions, though, is fully owned by the game company and can be done with as they wish. You can’t take that Sword of Swooping Swickery from LotR to WoW to EQ2 to Vanguard to EQ2 to SWG to Guild Wars to CoH to…. the character would have to be created (or recreated) in each “there” and obtain it, or its equivalent, in the means open to the character there.
Selling…
Yes, I could sell the character, as the concept, to someone else but it would be the concept alone without any link or derivation from a game. I could sell Rijacki in the form of stories (sans in game references) penned by me (or even penned by someone to whom I’d granted the rights).
No, I can’t sell the in-game toon or its possessions unless directly authorised by the game owners (i.e. EQ2’s Exchange service). And, as long as my character is solely tied to those in-game trappings, I couldn’t sell it as well.
I think at least part of the issue is that current MMO’s do little to discourage the idea that players own thier characters, and so a good portion of the player base at least feels like they do, even if they know it isn’t true.
After all the more connected I feel to my characters, the more I want to keep adventuring with them. If we didn’t feel a sense of possession or ownership in everything we had done with these characters, there wouldn’t be any reason to keep going after that next best piece of loot, or that cool looking hat. I know deep down that I don’t own my characters and they could be deleted at Sony’s whim, yet it isn’t something I have really considered a possibility.
After all how many of you would keep playing your game of choice if your main character was deleted and the company that runs the game told you that you weren’t getting it back? I know that I would be gone and all account cancelled about 5 minutes later.
I know this is off subject.
BUT THAT WOULD BE COOL!!!
If you can take that Sword of Swooping Swickery from LotR to WoW to EQ2 to Vanguard to EQ2 to SWG to Guild Wars to CoH.
If you could take equipment from one game and apply it to another another game.
Rijacki you might have something here. But I dont think we’ll see it happen…gosh darn it.
@Tipa, very well thought out answers. I totally agree. I think you almost over-covered it. Good job
Owning the “concept” and owning the “character” are two different things.
1. Do you own your character?
Similar to Kendrike’s hypo, for all of you who think that you own your character, consider this: assume that several years from now, eq2 is no longer profitable for SOE. SOE decides to pull the plug on the servers. What happens to your character (property) at that point? SOE has directly denied you access to your property, without any due process. Does SOE have to compensate you for your loss?
Your character exists only as bits on the SOE server. Even if you improve your character by leveling, acquiring mythical armor, etc., you are still only “improving” something that exists solely on the property of the SOE server. Go ask your lawyer what happens if you make an improvement to your neighbor’s house without their permission (hint – that improvement isn’t yours any more, you don’t compensation, and you can’t take your improvements back).
Copyright or Trademark law isn’t going to save your toon. You can only enforce a copyright assuming that you actually own the original. So you basically come full circle – Is your character actually your property? If not, then you have no rights to stop anyone from copying the character. (Also, you can’t copyright names & short phrases, so that pretty much eliminates your character name from consideration).
As far as trademarks go, what goods/services are you providing? Trademarks are a source identifier, to prevent public confusion about the origin of goods and services. What goods/services does your character provide? And again, if you don’t own the character, you have nothing to enforce.
IMHO, no, you don’t own your character. You “lease” your character (or the space on which your character is saved) from SOE. You can exclude others from using it, but you can’t transfer the lease (not without permission) AND, at the end of the lease, you get nothing. Any improvements to the character (or the space on which it is saved) belong to the owner.
Do you own the “concept” of your character?
Maybe, but here is the catch on that one: any adventures that you have with your character in EQ2, once exported, arguably become a derivative work from SOE’s copyrighted work, EQ2. Rijacki nailed that one – you better make sure ANY reference to SOE’s copyrights is removed. Otherwise, you are going to be paying some big royalties, or enjoined for the duration of the copyright.
Again, IMHO, this situation is more akin to leasing property, than actually owning property. You have the rights that are granted to you by the owner (which is why the EULA is inescapably tied to this discussion), and nothing else. At the end of your lease term, you have nothing.