A reader brought the story at http://tinyurl.com/4ztwb to my attention, an odd post of back and forth about who “owns” a character created in a virtual world. This isn’t, actually, the first instance of this argument, it has been an on going thing. I can remember the [Dark] Elf Controversy when it was covered at Game Girl Advance a while back. Also around this time was the “I have the right to sell my toon” arguments, surrounding DAoC and Anarchy Online. An oh so interesting argument.

On the one hand, the company that produced the game, very clearly, owns the world. It is their world. It is. Really. But a world without anyone in it is… not the same. It is lifeless. It has no character. No spark. You wouldn’t want to stay there, even for a day or two. It would be Narnia without any of the characters. Think about how interesting it is to camp a zone completely, utterly by yourself day in, day out, and ask yourself if you would really play that game.

And so we see that a lot of the world, in fact I would venture to say most of the world comes from the people that inhabit it. They are goverened by the laws of the group that owns the world… for the most part. They also have some stake in their characters because without them - those characters wouldn’t BE those characters. It’s not as if these games ask you to ‘play Superman’ - where Superman’s abilities and character are already known and well understood - they ask you to create a hero within a framework of statistical formulae, the exact blend of powers is up to you. MUCH more importantly, and what the [Dark] Elf Controversy tells us is that it is the character of the hero that is up to you. No two people will make every decision, every dialogue, every nuance of that character the same, it is an individual expression.

Who is legally “correct”? Well, you won’t like this: I’m not a lawyer. What I do know is this: companies regularly put things in EULAs that may or may not stand up in court - they are banking on never having to truly defend it (there was a spoof out there that I wish I could find now from a year or so ago where a shareware developer refused to remove “I am the King of All for Eternity” from the EULA just to make this point). A EULA is only as good as what stands up if challenged. At the same time, players probably don’t completely ‘own’ everything there is to do with their character, it is created only through the use of the game, a game you don’t own, a game you bought a license to use for a bit. The one thing that IS clear is that the current laws on the books are woefully inadequate to deal with virtual property in virtual realms.

What a fun time to be watching!