after things

This is really only a quick reaction, but Robert Bloomingfield over at Terra Nova has a couple of posts talking about in-game property rights in virtual worlds as 'permissions.'

Here's the active question in his second post:

In my last post, I discussed inworld “property rights,” which (to prove that yes, I can learn) I am now going to call “permissions.” Every virtual world grants or withholds a variety of permissions to players, including permissions to transfer, copy or modify inworld objects, to know the attributes and properties of those objects, to enter land and buildings, etc.

In this post, I want to ask readers about the state of contracting in virtual worlds. What worlds have gone beyond the plain-vanilla simultaneous transfer, in which one player gives up a permission in exchange for another (like paying cash for a weapon)?

I've enjoyed (and been frustrated by) reading the debate in the comments, and I'm beginning to see how complicated the idea of 'rights' is.


In my real-life job, I've worked with homegrown software systems a few times. One in particular, was designed to allow people to publish events to the Internet. Certain people were allowed to type in text, others to post things to the web, and still others could do both. Moreover, certain people had the authority to authorize other people to undertake some or all of these functions.

To enable all this functionality, every individual could be assigned membership in one or more groups, which we mapped onto various roles, which were associated with various privileges. At the same time, individual events all had permissions, which enabled people with different roles to do different things. And there were groups of groups and events of events and groups of groups of groups and so on.

Confused? I was.

Online debates about property rights risk getting bogged down in this sort of muddle of permissions, privileges, and capabilities.

At their most basic, property rights guarantee of the ability of an agent to do something that agent can do. The idea then refers to two things:
a) a common conception of what it is that I am entitled to do to something that is 'mine'
b) the system for legally resolving disputes about a)

Specific property rights, I'd argue, arise from the assumptions inherent in a) and the answers to disputed cases to b). (I just read an interesting article--somewhere! argh--about how historically, property rights as a legal concept come into being as a way of resolving questions of inheritance. I'll try to track down a link.)

There are all sorts of issues with b) in virtual worlds: how complex transactions can be implemented in a code base; how non-compliers can be penalized; how contracts can be recorded and guaranteed; etc. Lots of exciting things are happening as solutions to these problems evolve in various communities.

But there are also really interesting complexities with with a). In virtual worlds, agents, items, and abilities are all convenient fictions. Something like what we consider property rights can be implemented by programmers with operations enabled in code base, roles assigned to users, and attributes defined for virtual things, but there's no one-to-one relations. On top of that, there are social conventions imported from the real world and applied to "virtual things" with a different set of valences.

It'll be interesting to see how the discourse changes.