Creation vs. Craft, Ownership vs. Exploitation

by Alphaville Herald on 15/06/04 at 10:50 am

In an interesting essay entitled “Living on the Edge: Digital Worlds which Embrace the Real World“, Cory Ondrejka (aka Cory Linden) offers some interesting observtions about (1) the distinction between games which allow users to craft vs those which allow creativity, and (2) the importance of extendending real world property rights in the latter case. The craft/creativity distinction is nice since it illustrates a key difference between tso (without custom content) and Second Life, which enables users to create their own objects, textures, scripts, etc. TSO is like some craft kit that you buy where all the parts are there and you simply put things together given the objects you are handed. Importantly, as creativity is introduced it becomes crucial that the EULA extend property rights to the users for their creations.

Here is a passage regarding the extension of property rights to players.
My hope is that we will see more EULA’s like SL’s, and that players come to insist on EULA’s like these. Otherwise, players are working like so many serfs on the despot’s land.

“Nearly every other game ? whether single player or digital world ? uses its EULA to enforce a licensing agreement between the creators and players (Taylor 2002). In the case of digital worlds, the norm grants the world?s developers all rights to residents? creations, and developers have used these rights. For example, the EULA was used to shut down one of the first commercial exploitations of a digital world, Black Snow?s ?farming? of Dark Age of Camelot, although the legal issues involved have yet to make it to court (Dibbell 2003).

Despite strongly worded EULAs, most current online games offer such limited opportunities for creation that the point is almost moot. However, in worlds like Second Life, where user creation is a major component of the world and game play, a fundamental tension exists between asking the residents to create the world, and then forcing them to relinquish ownership of everything they make. Residents are now starting to recognize this (Terdiman 2003). It is clear that the right choice is to allow residents to retain as many rights as possible to their creations.”

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