Well, the workshop on Monday on virtual ethics got me thinking. I posed this as a question in the workshop but I thought put a link up to the real-world (or virtual world) event that inspired me. It is a nice illustration of the clash between real-world and virtual-world ethics.
Hope it gets you thinking.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7905924.stm
(edit: sorry I can't get the link to work properly right now, I will try and have it up properly tonight, for now just copy and paste.)
Copy and paste works fine. It's interesting in that it's a game. People shouldn't get worked up this much about a game, but there are many man hours that go into creating all that online capital. I find it interesting to think about charging a person IRL for money for losses online, when really, if you contact the administrators for the game and explain what's happened they can block the person who did wrong, if what they did violated the terms and conditions of the game. In this case they seem to be very hands off and didn't roll the game back, but I don't see why they couldn't create what was stolen again and give it to those that lost out. 4 years is alot of work. But still the representative speaking on behalf of the thieves said it all 'we'll be bastards'.
ReplyDeleteOn a lighter note, my friend playing the world of warcraft (Wow) had his account hacked and all of his items sold. So sure enough he logged on in game and his character was both naked and broke. It took about a week but administrators from the game gave back everything that he had lost, and gave him a few extra items to help lessen the blow. It was assumed that all of his gear was sold off and the gold sent to another account for the purposes of selling in game gold for real world money. Generally when these kinds of things happen, they can try to track down the culprits and block their accounts, but when you can have online anonymity what's to stop them from creating a new account under a different name and trying again?