Virtual Crime ...

[Saxif]

Ok, at work we get a publication called New Scientist every week, I am sure you've prolly heard of it, its a non-pier reviewed scientific magazine (I dont think you can call it a Journal).  Anyway I was reading through the issue from 20/05/06 and found an article called "Just a game? ", it had a sub title "With crime in the virtual world beginning to spill into the real one, it's time to decide where legitimate game play ends and law breaking begins, says Tim Guest"

Its an interesting article, and I thought I'd highlight a couple of points for your enjoyment/amazement as thats prolly a better way of describing what I read.

"AS  MURDERS go, it was an open and shut case.  In february last year Qiu Chengwei, a 41 year old man from Shanghai loaned his prize sword, called a Dragon Sabre, to his 26 year old friend Zhu Caoyuan.  Without telling Qiu, Zhu sold it for ?500, pocketing the proceeds.  Qiu complained to the police that Zhu had stolen his sword, but they refused to help.  So early one morning a month later, Qiu broke into Zhu's house and stabbed him to death."

To cut a long story short Qiu was sentanced to life imprison, but it raises the question about how to deal with virtual crimes spilling over into the real world.

Another interesting blurb from the article is ...

"In 2004 IGE, a virtual item trading website based in Boca Raton, Florida, estimated the global market in virtual goods to be worth around $880 million a year and growing."

Thats 2 years ago!!

The thrid story that cuaght my attention which I'll describe briefly as it'll take to long to type out is this.

A dude in Eve who is the CEO of Guiding Hand a mercenary corporation that specialises in destroying other players characters for profit was asked to put thier skills to use against Ubiqua Seraph for 1 billion ISK (about ?350).  A memeber of GH went deep deep undercover (Beverly Hills cop?) and spent four months wooing the head of US until she had hired him and eventually gave him the access codes to her guilds storehouses, thier virtual bank.  In doing this GH had staged raids against US designed to fail and make thier operative look good.  Once the operative had the access codes GH looted 6 warehouses, killed the leader of US Arenis Xemdal, delivered her corpse to the client and kept the stolen property, spoils of war.  The stolen property added up to 30 billion ISK in total, about ?10,000 on the market.

Its said that Eves devs looked favourably upon this action and the story was told far and wide which brought in new subscribers.  After the hiest some players where outraged and sent the guy who played the leader of GH nine email and telephone deaths threats.

The article then has a few more anicdotes and from various games.

Just thought I'd bring this to your attention, as personally I didn't think things had gone quite this far and was suprised to find out what goes on in some games.

Sax.

[Cernos]

I get New Scientist each week and read that article. Was an interesting one. I played EVE for a few weeks on their free trial (excellent game but needs a big time investment) and remember reading about that heist and all the controversy it caused. If you read about the amount of planning, scheming, infiltration and execution that went into the heist, it's quite incredible. Apparently it took them many months of building trust with the victim's corporation and getting access to all the facilities and in-game bank accounts and hangars that was needed. Here's the original thread that announced it, which got locked by the mods due to the way the discussion went, but it spawned many other threads:
 
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=172529&page=1
 
My personal feeling on it is that it was a great thing to have happen in a game like EVE. Whilst such an event wouldn't be very welcome in some other MMORPGs, in EVE it fits the game very well. EVE has a strong roleplay component and is a space opera about space trading, combat and pirates ... and the rivalry between corporations and the risk posed by player pirates is part of what makes the game what it is. It's made clear when you join the game that pretty much anything goes and you have to look after yourself or join a corporation who you can trust. The game gives you very effective NPC protection in high security space and tools for looking after yourself in pirate space. Beyond that, it's down to players to police themselves and the actual motivation for the heist was revenge on a player and 'her' corporation who had been involved in piracy and repeated in-game trade scams. Which is why the EVE devs were happy to see an event like this unfold. It increases the roleplay factor and also makes a great story.
 
A lot of people were upset about the heist on the grounds that there's real people behind the monitors and so real hurt is caused. But in a roleplay game there has to be bad people as well as good, or it won't feel real. It's a whole different ball game to the idiot gankers in a game like WoW who just do it for kicks, there's no roleplay involved in corpse camping someone ten levels your junior. This was something well beyond pirate ganking, it was almost a military operation. I guess much of the fuss is because real relationships were built up and then broken in order to carry it off, and there's something to be said for that. But it's still a game.
 
Then there fuss about the real world financial aspect and whether virtual theft should be considered a real world crime. What nonsense. It's a game. The fact that property or currency in a game has real world value thanks to eBay is irrelevant. It's still just a game. Just like Poker or trading card tournaments, where you enter into the game knowing you might lose money or an item of real world value.
 
Of course, when somone breaks into your house and starts chopping you up for real because you ninja looted their legendary sword ..... well that's something entirely different. Ninja looters beware! :eek:

[Saxif]

I ahven't yet formulated an opinion on this yet, as its a bit of a grey area tbh, but I do admire the lengths they went to in order to bring thier scheme to fruition.  I'll have a read of that thread when I get time after work, I was pretty amazed tbh.

[Lasiien]

The negative view on EVE is that CCP being a fairly small company just did not have the time and were unable to put in the effort for enough in game security for corporations. Also they didn't want to deal so much with player complaints arsing from individual issues (like escrow scams, whereby fairly new players were duped into buying worthless items for a large price - to them anyways). EVE's Devs came up with an interesting solution to say that everything in game is legal.

This is however harsh to be on the recieving end of i think. That the game mechanics allow everything to be stolen by any one individual (even the GM) is a bit scary, and whilst i do kinda like the role play argument i still think more protection should have been in place through the game tools themseleves. Reading that post you can see that many EVE corps now store things in private hangers distributed over many individuals - so the end result is that people don't trust the in game interfaces that are intended for the corporations.

Whilst the role play aspect of that is indeed fun, you can't help but feel sorry that a group of peoples work over a long time was destoryed so easily because they trusted another individual and used the intended corporate/guild interfaces. The same happens to a lesser extent in other games though, such as running with a guild in WoW and ninja looting an uber item that comes up, or even stealing from guild banks etc in DAOC. You can understand why people would get pretty worked up (imagine if WoW had been a corpse looting game, I think we would have all quit!).

On the plus side from what that thread seems to say the guy was a thief himself, so perhaps he did get his commupance However, his whole guild/corp will have also suffered.

To go off the original subject slightly on Cerns point about real world money and games, I disagree. Anything that has a time factor (and perhaps skills factor) in obtaining equipment and items can easily be translated into real world money.

A real world example is that i could hire some decorators to come paint my house - they are more skilled perhaps and as such may get the job done quicker and efficiently, plus i don't have to invest my time in order to get my house painted. The same is translatable to buying equipment/charcters/houses/money in the online economies, it's my time thats being saved (and perhaps I could not have obtained the items myself either due to raid content etc). I can see why an ebay demand exists and I (personally) don't think you can deny the correlation between the real world cash and time/know how invested.

...though that's not a good thing. I've had the money myself to be able to buy such things and can see the logic to an extent, but have never done so. Mostly because it takes away the achievment factor for having done it yourself I think. The really scary part is in a few years time I see additional revenue streams for the creators of MMO's in directly charging you for such things. Want a level... ?5, want a sword of destruction - ?15... Want 10000 gold - ?50. It's already starting to happen, check out Sony's tentative steps Station Exchange - they aren't selling stuff direct yet i don't think, but it's ebay endorsed by Sony.

Of course, right now we'd say we won't buy stuff like this and shun any company that does this kind of thing, I'm just worried it's the trend and if you love the games and want to stay competitive it might start to become the norm.... scary in my opinion

[Saxif]

Games should be games, and I dont endorse or agree, or approve of the buying or selling of ingame stuff period.  If a game where to come out that did endorse the buying and selling of stuff to a serious degree, I'd prolly stay clear as would most ppl, I think there is a balance to be struck in this.

Though I see the fact there is a balance to be struck I still dont like it, I'd prefer a game where buying and selling was banned, I just dont think that is realistic, hell even back in the day (2000) for me when I was playing AC I heard of ppl selling there lvl 80+ toons and getting big bucks for them.  The complaints that went around about some newb running a high lvl toon and not knowing how to play that character.

Money > all as always

[Cernos]

The problem with real world value of in-game items is who is held liable should anything get stolen. If you condone it or actively promote it, then surely there's some liablity if people steal or lose things due to a failure of in-game mechanisms. You can't put a get out clause in the T&Cs and hope that covers it.
 
Some games companies say they don't allow real world trade of game items and money and attempt to police it in varying measures. Blizzard claim to do so, but a quick check of eBay indicates otherwise.
 
Most games companies seem to nominally say they don't allow real world trade but turn a blind eye to it, the Mythic approach.
 
Then there's those like CCP who don't seem to mention it in their T&Cs at all and operate a total hands off approach. Whilst this seems ok for EVE such an approach won't work with games with a less 'anything goes' theme.
 

In the future we may see games which actively encourage trade and even sell official game upgrades for cash. This takes things to another level. The impact on gaming will depend on if the official bought upgrades are merely fluff (fluffy dice for you in-game car) or meaningful (a turbo charger for your in-game car). And then the whole liability can of worms is opened.

If a games company promotes the concept that in-game items have real world value, then if any theft or loss is due to game flaws or bugs there's a real world lawsuit inbound. And how do you deal with virtual theft when it happens within the games allowable mechanisms? This has to be policed in some way, not all games have an allowable piracy theme. If you're actively condoning/promoting real world trade then an incident like the Guiding Hand one in EVE takes on a very different perspective. As I say, a can of worms.
 
Personally I don't have a problem with in-game items having real world value as long as the game experience of regular players isn't affected by it. I don't mind if someone who can't play 24/7 wants to spend a bit of their hard earned cash to buy some in-game gold to speed things along (bit like Las's decorators). The trouble comes because in most games it does impact the player experience and tends to lead to farming, camping and looting issues. MMORPGs of the future have to address this as game items are always going to get sold in the real world, like it or not. Games need better mechanisms for handling it.