[Legal Scholars Debate Virtual Worlds]

The lawyers are taking on the virtual.

We've come to define anything that appears on the computer screen as virtual, and made virtual something like a synonym for unreal. But everything we encounter on the screen is real.

A 20 year old recently told me that the most important event of his life occurred at the computer. In "Everquest," an online game that can have several thousand players in an evening, he fought into the wee hours for several nights in a row trying to save a newbie from being bullied and eventually killed. After his hard fought victory, the two became friends and met regularly in the game space. This player's experience was so intense that his mother, now curious, started to play with him. Today she spends about three hours a night in "Everquest," moving among a few regular haunts where she mothers lonely young men who find their way to the game most evenings. Notice I didn't put "mothers" in quotes, since I have no doubt that the mothering is real.

With a tear in his eye from evident emotion, he said said that the experience was a life-changing moment in which he committed totally to helping another person. He empathized, bonded, gave of himself, and had a deep sense of gratification after having saved someone. You're starting to snicker. Don't.

Anthropologists and linguists have argued that culture is communication and communication is culture. But we're often partial and erratic when it comes to designating the reality status of various modes and moments of communication. Is the only real experience I'm having now collapsed to the sensation of my fingers on the keyboard? Is the only reality in my periphery the warm cup of coffee to my left and the tactile response of the mouse to my right?

A gaggle of legal scholars are meeting this week to debate the legal status of virtual worlds. From their Conference notice: "The new environments of electronic games, especially those that are massively multiplayer, are not just game-spaces; they are cultures unto themselves. Like real societies, they grow and evolve as their members create rules and norms. Some norms in games are cooperative and democratic, others are dictatorial and dystopic. This interdisciplinary conference will examine the state of play today in an effort to understand the phenomenon of digital games and the virtual worlds they create and to discuss the complex social, psychological, and legal issues to which they give rise."

From Wired : "A host of questions are on everyone's minds: Are virtual worlds the new Wild West or a legitimate province of the courts? Is game play equivalent to speech as defined in the First Amendment? Is there such a thing as fraud in a metaverse?

"As the game universe becomes intricate, as transactions start to cross the boundary between the game world and the real world, it becomes more complicated as to what you're going to call defamation," says Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School and an organizer of the conference. 'The more closely your life is tied to the game, the more what happens can be construed as injury to yourself ... privacy, fraud, breach (of contract). Maybe you really did break a promise. Maybe you did defame me. Maybe you did defraud me, and maybe that does matter.'

"Beth Noveck, a professor at New York Law School and another organizer of the conference, says those arriving for the three days of panels, discussion and networking are coming to intellectualize about where games and virtual worlds fit into the fabric of their lives.

'We might learn a lot from looking at how laws are made and broken in these virtual worlds,' she says."
So here's a way to build a fortune online in the post-dot.con days. In an online game, build a big office tower with this banner on the front: "Tower of Justice, Space to Rent." Fit out some nice legal office spaces like the one at the right--but don't put in a big fish tank unless you're willing to clean it once a week. Sell through eBay and collect through PayPal. Then put your feet up on a pixel desktop and start dreamin' about retirement. And hope that Red sues Blue.