Do Gamers Need an In-Game Bill of Rights?

Written by: Dan Seitz | June 19, 2012 at 4:58PM

16-bit constitution

Here's a question: if you join a game, and that game's economy is tied to the real world economy, by giving you cash rewards, or allowing auctions of in-game items for money… does that make whoever runs the game a government? And does that mean you have rights, whether the developers want to program them in or not?

That's the premise of an essay in the Atlantic that argues as video games become more complex and time-consuming, and start rewarding you with money or other perks, gamers need to develop an awareness of their rights in the game world.

… sometime next year, Bethesda will release The Elder Scrolls Online, an massive multiplayer online counterpart to Skyrim—a game that lets you get married, buy a house, and work an unsatisfying minimum-wage job chopping wood for gold. … once a virtual online world begins facilitating these sorts of interactions, the developer will essentially have all the same domestic powers that a real-world government holds over its people.

The author goes on to point out that essentially game companies are autocratic: it's their game, they set the rules, so what they say goes and you don't get a vote. True, a horde of angry gamers can make even the biggest companies reconsider some decisions, but angry tweets are not the same thing as votes.

We can definitely see the comparison between games and governments. Both take longer to install than they should; the EULA is full of ridiculous fine print that bites you at the worst possible time; bugs take forever to get fixed and sometimes just handwaved as a "feature"; the mods never listen no matter how much you complain; patches get released at a crawl; and by the time you manage to install the new patch, often it's just as riddled with bugs and errors as the last version.

Of course, there is something gamers can do with a game that you can't usually do with a government: stop playing. This is a point the article never really seems to get into too much, that playing games is ultimately optional and easy to opt out of, while citizenship is a different matter entirely. Generally, MMO makers do not have the right to throw you in jail if you stop giving them money.

But despite that flaw, there is a good point: we do cede quite a bit of control when we agree to that EULA on a game, and if real money starts to be involved, that might be something we should consider before clicking the 'Agree' button. Even just epic gear needs to be considered in terms of its value: if you spend forty hours on raids finding that helm, then it has value, economically, and that has implications neither developers nor gamers may have fully considered.

What do you think? Do gamers need a Bill of Rights for any game they play?

The Atlantic: Gamers Need a Bill of Rights