selectparks – MMO surveillance questionnaire
Another day, another interesting survey being done. This one is on privacy issues and surveillance — not just from the admins monitoring, but also from players snooping on each other and from parents monitoring their children’s play. Check it out here.
Way back in the day, the first admin I ever fired off a MUD was a guy who was going to work on LegendMUD. It was before we had opened the game to the general public (that didn’t happen until Feb. 14th, 1994) but after it was up and running and accepting logins for anyone who stumbled upon it and was willing to play while the game was in development (which happened sometime in the latter half of 1993).
Many of the folks who came over were people who were checking out other muds at the time — Medievia was just getting going, for example, so a lot of Medievia folks wandered by.
Among the folks who came in were a couple of female players who seemed quite nice and friendly and who mostly wanted to be left alone.
Needless to say, I caught this admin guy spying invisibly on them. When I confronted him about it, he said it was just considered a common perk on the other muds he’d worked on — spying on cybersex, eavesdropping on conversations, and so on. There’s commonly a “snoop” command that lets you monitor every command given or received by a given character, letting you see every private message.
The etiquette we established that day by his firing was that snoop was only to be used for debugging purposes. But I still remember the argument with him, where he just didn’t see anything wrong with what he was doing.
4 Responses to “selectparks – MMO surveillance questionnaire”
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I find it delightful that the lessons we learned as admins in those hectic formative early years of MUDs remain so sharply relevant today, over a decade later. We all had to develop the concept of Law pretty much from scratch, I think, as our communities changed from programming projects to real little socities. One of the many timeless truths we stumbled upon, I think, is that users spend a lot less time worrying about privacy than one would think — until someone does spy on them and they find out, at which time so many of they feel violated at some gut level.
In my case it was IgorMUD, in Sweden — you might recall it, Raph, as the source of the ‘you have the right to be a frog’ enumeration of player rights. We also ended up with a very strong degree of protection from surveillance, but it was never a cut and dried matter, and never easy to enforce.
Leaving aside the question of actual policing by the administration — when your players can so become content creators themselves, with the ability to attach scripts in full-fledged programming language to their creations, where do you draw the line? Is it immoral to build a flying parrot that flies around and picks up scraps of conversation in public places and then randomly echoes them back later? You’d think not, but we had incidents that were astonishingly embarassing for our players.
I think that pretty much everything in the “soft sciences” will remain applicable to virtual worlds going forward. Yes, there’s lessons of scalability, but that’s not very surprising, and there’s plenty of data on scalability of human populations and behaviors from other fields.
That means all the lessons on policing, admin behavior, etc, is going to remain relevant.
The example you give of the parrot is an interesting one; we had the same in UO with the non-scriptable but similar “microphone” system provided by communication gems. People planted them in places to eavesdrop, etc.
The question that arises is whether it’s reasonable to demand that admins provide greater protections than what we see in the real world. In the real world, this is illegal to do, generally, but it’s also hard to enforce. We can in fact do things like say “parrot is in a public place, therefore learn; parrot is on private property, therefore do not.” It might minimize, but not remove, the concerns.
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If one were to indulge a brief ‘cyberpunk’ fantasy, one could imagine that whatever scripting language/architecture one were employing could be given significant powers to interrogate other objects in the world on the details of their implementation. Thus proliferation of snooping devices would be best countered with a counter-proliferation of anti-snooping devices and so on.
In reality, this is probably more an example of programmer’s pipe dream than the kind of world your average common-folk user would want to actually play in. On the plus side it does tap the userbase for clever ways to adaptively supply itself with the tools it needs.