MMORPG Justice

The legal system in most MMORPG worlds is a rather clunky affair, with banning as the only possible punishment. Could that be improved?

Now this discussion is pretty meaningless if you consider a MMORPG to be just a game, a form of entertainment. If you behave drunk and disorderly in a cinema, you get kicked out, and most people would consider that an appropriate way to deal with the situation. But if you consider yourself to be "living" in a virtual world, as 20% of Everquest players said they did (in page 22 of this pdf document), that sort of justice seems kind of harsh. And if somebody paid a 6-month subscription and gets banned early in that period, he might resort to real world legal action to get his money back.

If seen from the view of a "resident" of a MMORPG world, banning is kind of a death penalty; you are being removed from the world you live in. There are certainly crimes which deserve such a penalty, but being put on the virtual death row for repeated use of swear words is overkill. Other kinds of punishment must be possible.

One very easy case is people breaking the naming rules. In the past, people have been banned after years of playing for using a stupid name like Cupid Stunt. But this is a case where there already has been some evolution. Nowadays you are far more likely to be renamed by a GM for such an offence than get banned. And that is a much better response.

Another case of letting the punishment fit the crime can be applied to people using offensive speech in public chat channels. They could simply be muted for a number of days, as if all players had set that player to ignore, and thus can't hear anything he says for the time of the punishment.

We had a big discussion a while back on SWG banning people for receiving duped credits. The real criminals had duped credits and then given a part of these credits to both accomplices and random players with the /tip command, against which the receiver has no defense. SWG reacted by banning all people that had come into contact with that tainted money, with the possibility of an appeals process, which was long and complicated. One would have thought that if they were able to trace the duped money, they could just as well have deleted it, and determined who was guilty of duping and who was just an innocent bystander later.

In response to the bannings of these innocent bystanders, players decided to stage a protest rally. The GMs saw that the protest was causing serious lag in the city where it took place, thus disrupting the game of other players. As a result, the GMs of SWG actually invented an unpopular but creative form of punishment: they teleported the participants of the rally to random points of the universe, which got them made fun of by Penny Arcade. But at least the response was more appropriate than banning.

Other forms of MMORPG punishments are certainly possible as well. Your character could be stuck in a jail cell for some amount of time. Or your ability to gain xp, skill points, money, and items could be blocked for a specified period. Just as the laws of physics don't apply to virtual worlds, justice could be a lot more creative than in the real world.

There are few games which offer a player-run justice system. You could call unlimited PvP a form of justice, but that is only some sort of wild west lynch mob justice, and thus not a real improvement. A Tale in the Desert has a player-run legal system, which even allows the players to vote on the banning of another player. But that obviously only works for rather small communities. How is a player supposed to vote on a proposal for banning somebody for griefing if he only gets to hear the accusers story?

Will we get advanced justice systems in the future? Unfortunately that is not very likely. The current trend in MMORPGs is for them to become more game-like, and less like a world to be inhabited by residents who have rights and obligations. Residency in MMORPGs is more fleeting, with so many alternatives around. A player who has decided to cancel his account anyway could very well decide to have some sort of dangerous "fun", not caring how that disrupts the game for the other players. And how would you want to punish that? But it seems game companies are well aware of the problem.

This article published on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 1:18 PM Permanent Link