Virtual worlds, visiting rights and restraining orders from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog
Great thought-provoking post by Aleks Krotoski here.
…now that I’ve covered the reasons hanging out with people in WoW may be more significant than hanging out in person, I’ll get to my point.
What happens when parents get divorced? Say Parent A is given custody of Child and Parent B has visiting rights at weekends or holidays. Parent A doesn’t play Online Game X but Parent B does, and plays for a couple of hours every night with Child. Does that undermine the judge’s custody decision? Child isn’t spending time with Parent A when s/he is hanging in Norrath with Parent B, so if Parent A losing out on important time with Child while Parent B and Child are experiencing enhanced shared experience, what implications does this have for future custody rulings?
And that’s not the doozy, either. The doozy is the one about restraining orders and what they could mean for virtual world administration.
13 Responses to “Virtual worlds, visiting rights and restraining orders from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
The idea that it’s more significant for a parent to spend remote time in World of Warcraft with his or her child than it is to spend physical time together is absurd, and I don’t believe Aleks has -any- basis for claiming that beyond trivial pop psychology. I’m willing to bet that you’d be hard pressed to find a single reputable child development specialist who would agree with him.
–matt
I wouldn’t agree with that either. But the point is still valid: if time spent hanging out together in virtual space counts at all, which I suspect we would agree it does, then it’s still unbalancing the custody decision.
And as virtual worlds get better — or heck, even telecommunications get better — this could effectively cause even more imbalance. Once a virtual world is like a holodeck, then what?
[…] Comments […]
Well, what about the telephone? If time spent in virtual worlds counts at all, surely time on the telephone counts too. If that’s not been a problem yet in terms of custody, what would lead us to believe another form of remote communication will be a problem?
–matt
The article does raise several issues that the courts are going to have to address.
Better keep the good suit handy Raph. It can only be a matter of time before you are called as Expert Witness to argue that time spent in a virtual world is / is not equivalent to time spent in the real world.
Whether or not time spent in game with the absent parent breaches a custody agreement would initially depend on the nature of that agreement. If one parent has access to the child, say at weekends and holidays, then is the child prohibited from communicating with the other parent?
I wouldn’t expect a custody agreement to have a clause like that in it as it impinges on the childs rights, but I can imagine the estranged parents making it a ‘condition’ of staying over.
I suppose it could come down to whether the judge believes that a person can only be in one place at a time or believes that we co-locate when we enter a virtual world.
Either way lawyers, journalists and Expert Witnesses are going to make a mint 😉
Well it’s still up to the parent currently in custody to allow or disallow playing the online world just as it is their decision to let the kid use the phone or not. So really I’m not sure how much of a problem there is here.
Restraining orders seem more interesting. A lot of restraining orders pertain to risk of physical violence which really isn’t an issue of MMO’s. However, what do you do in the case of a person who has been spousally abused by someone who plays the same MMO as them? It is quite possible that a lot of their support network, the people they need to talk to during their recovery, may be online. If the abusive spouse is also there, then there is a wide potential for emotional abuse to continue through the online media. It is this sort of emotional abuse that makes the greatest impact on whether someone can recover and extricate themselves from the situation. I can certainly see a strong case being made for allowing online restraining orders.
I’m not sure that it would be the MMO’s responsibility to enforce these restraining orders however. If someone violates a restraining order I have on them by approaching me at McDonald’s it is not McDonald’s responsiblity to prevent the breach. I would think that, at most, MMO’s might be required to provide logs verifying whether the order had been breached or not just as an employee at the McDonald’s might be required to testify at court.
It is quite possible that a lot of their support network, the people they need to talk to during their recovery, may be online. If the abusive spouse is also there, then there is a wide potential for emotional abuse to continue through the online media.
My first thought, when I read that, was that the support network would easily pwn said abusive spouse by sheer numbers. Friends of friends and such. A virtual world dedicated to PvP is the worst place to go abusing someone with a support network.
Sadly no.
Abusers are often very charismatic and through systematic/recurring abuse they have usually stripped the victim of most of their self-esteem. In a typical abuse case the abuser isolates the victim socially and convinces them that the abuser is the only support they have (or deserve). People, sadly, often believe the charismatic, confident abuser over the emotionally-battered, unconfident victim. Online it is very easy to shrug off accusations as “exagerations”, etc., especially if the other person isn’t confident to strongly object or has less friends than the abuser. Like any form of “player justice” in online worlds, this is a lot more complex and difficult than you’d think. Sadly, this probably means that even an online restraining order would be of limited utility for a lot of cases. What do you do if the abuser incites other people to harass for him or simply manages to continue the isolation of the victim without talking directly to them? As far as I know you can’t restrict things like this in real life so it’s hard to imagine being able to do so online.
Right. I was going to pose a similar argument based on the prohibition of "abduction". There are physical spaces and there are virtual spaces. These spaces aren’t integrated to the extent that physical and virtual spaces are indistinguishable.
Highly unlikely that any sane person would believe such a thing. From a cognition perspective, yes, players are committing their attention from the physical space to the virtual space; however, the will of players is not restrained to the virtual space. We are not yet at the point where we can enter our entire consciousness into a cyberspace.
The article basically summarizes all of the near term issues many think we’ll be facing. And rightfully so. For how much longer can the profit-centers that make and publish these games not be responsible for what happens in them. We’re seeing this already affecting other forms. For example, what right did Microsoft have to extend the policies of the Chinese government in a service that ultimately reports back to a U.S. based operation? Oh I know there’s lots of legal ways to explain that away, but ultimately it’s the core question: If you’re a company with one set of beliefs, what happens when you want to do business in places with other beliefs? Guided purely by profit you take on their beliefs right? Well then, what’s the point of being a national of anywhere, and why should you expect to have the protections of the nation you’re doing business from?
That’s not to call MS to the carpet. It’s just an extreme example to drive a point. At what point with publishers need to become social engineers such that real social and governed policies have to extend into the games? And who actually does the enforcement? Certainly not the profit centers motivated purely by goals of entertainment and money right? Are we looking at a future where game companies will need political officers to ensure a proper integration and preparation of culture and control from the Fatherland?
I sure as heck hope not.
As to the custody example, it’s a good point, but this again is why such things should be handled by two interested parties. Parenting is hard, and if it means the kid can’t play during the week, well, that’s exactly the rule I grew up with (though because my parents wanted me to focus on schoolwork and get a good night sleep). It sucked, but I see every day examples of what happens to kids who are allowed to play games the moment they get home until midnight, so I’m probably better off. 🙂
Not to mention that the abuser will make full use of those systems in place to protect innocent people in order to protect themselves. The support network hasn’t got any kind of ability to stop the abuser from stalking/messaging/mailing the victim, about the only thing they can do is mass-report harassment, and even that is tricky if the abuser has any common sense. And for all the good friends a person can have online, if every time they logon, within minutes, the avatar of their evil ex-spouse is suddenly lounging against a pillar, leering at them, their sense of security in that online world will quickly vanish, and they may even become anxious about the thought of logging in.
Firstly, I’m a her not a him, Matt.
Secondly, I would (of course) agree that there is a distinction between real and virtual. However, the time spent on the telephone is arguably different than time spent fully engaged in a virtual world because – again – players are doing, rather than just interacting.
I also think the custody element is a difficult proposal as it’s reliant upon the level of, for example, estrangement of the two parental parties. It’s relative, of course.
Aleks