“Hi my name is Gina… I’m nine years old… I brought a prepaid card then some one hacked me for no reason… The username is *****… I used a fake e-mail and I don’t know how to get it back =[ Can you help me? PLEASE!”

I removed the 200 redundant characters Gina had added to the final word, that conveyed the true extent of her desperation. Literate, for such an apparently young US citizen, she also reveals some child-like confusion in causality and logic. Not that most adults could solve her problem: A “recovered” password can only be sent to the email address associated with the account – yet to receive the message, the email address cannot be fake. Further help is locked away on forums which can only be read by users who are already signed in. Signed in, using the password they can’t recover…

For a 21st century child, this is much closer to a science-fiction nightmare than adults might think: Inadvertently being locked out of a part of society by the flaws of an infallible machine. A part of society, because this stuff genuinely matters – often as much as traditional “playground” relationships. Substantial time (and often Dollar money) is invested in a user’s account. Huge networks of friends are built. The ability to start again, or start again somewhere else, is poor consolation indeed.

We can argue that having one’s virtual avatar hacked into is a “rite of passage” into the digital economy. A necessarily painful lesson that, long-term, will make adult activities such as online banking much safer. After all, this is only a childhood game, isn’t it?

Yet Gina’s short plea contains a lot of unpleasant truths, that adult society seems reluctant to address.

This article explores how the law, as experienced by the generation practically born online, differs from law as previous generations have learned it. Worlds where everyone is at least 13 years old, even if they aren’t. Where wrongs are not righted, because they’re not in the contract. And copyright legitimises a new, almost feudal social structure. A selective, but slightly unnerving, insight into a generation that may grow up to believe that law is for something else, because it so obviously isn’t for them. On this page:

• Escape to Everland
• Crime and Justice in Toytown
• Virtual Feudalism

(Small disclaimer: This article describes my interpretation of the behaviour reported by others, as the basis for thought about wider issues. The examples here are not intended to imply any specific breach of law. While I have tended to pick one teen social world, the commentary applies to many similar social platforms and games.)

Escape to Everland

That a 9-year-old is using the internet shouldn’t surprise anyone. Unfortunately, WeeWorld, like many commercial website operators, requires all registered users to be at least age 13. Commonly because the United States Federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act imposes restrictions on younger users – notably, verified parental consent. The costs of administering a COPPA-compliant website is higher, so it’s a lot easier to ask younger children not to register.

Of course, that doesn’t stop a child declaring their age incorrectly. Especially if they really want to use a service.

The result is an “Everland”: An online world where everyone is at least aged 13, regardless of their true age. The opposite of J. M. Barrie’s Neverland – the world of Peter Pan’s never-ending childhood.

The 13-year criteria is not entirely arbitary: It’s the point at which most societies recognise that humans are (cognitively) able to take responsibility for their actions. Historically most obvious in religious “coming of age” rites, such as the Jewish Bar Mitzvah. However, the ability to form social relationships starts to occur much younger. So it seems almost inevitable that socially-orientated internet services will attract people who are too young to officially use them.

The COPPA legislation has the best of intentions, by acknowledging that younger children require greater parental care. The US state of Maine provides an excellent example of the difficulty of balancing rights within child internet legislation: Its Act To Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices against Minors has far broader scope than COPPA, potentially turning almost any form of engagement with Maine’s teenagers into a (expensive) liability. Logically that leads to a situation where teenagers are blocked from substantial parts of the internet, a position some online businesses have already adopted.

(That tendency for the smallest legislature to create de facto (in practice) internet law for everyone, also raises some interesting questions about the structure of governance.)

I might argue that we should focus on parental responsibility, rather than simply trying to make web services responsible for someone else’s children. But in practice, neither group can exercise effective control: Parents often know less about the internet than their offspring. The best website operators can still be deceived. The smartest kid in room is surely the hardest to protect from themselves.

The danger of Everland is not so much that it exists, but that we think it doesn’t. That by reassuring ourselves that everyone is at least 13 years old, the reasons for legislating have been addressed. Meanwhile, any serious problem goes underground, and becomes even harder to tackle.

Crime and Justice in Toytown

Such an apparently relaxed attitude to “the fine print” has not diluted users’ sense of natural law. Those who have lost control of their accounts, due to some form of unauthorised “hacking”, both feel a sense of moral entitlement (“worked hard for everything I lost”) and a sense that the crime was unjustified (“did nothing wrong”, “for no reason”). This is, of course, “unfair”. Really:

“I had over 600 friends and over 70 items and I was very happy… until someone hacked me! Now I have no points because I can’t afford them, therefore, no one will talk to me… and my history on Weeworld is ruined!”

In WeeWorld’s consumerist microcosm, points buy you items, and items buy you friends. Such a hack is a lot worse than a bad hair day.

Virtual “theft” is widespread in large online environments, especially games. Consider Frank Pearce’s comment, that a World of Warcraft user account is worth more than a stolen Credit Card on the black market, and you start to appreciate the non-triviality of the issue. Like more traditional criminality, stealing accounts appears to be a lot more cost-effective (for the perpetrator) than spending time earning transferable value yourself. For the world/website operator, such attacks both create unhappy customers and unwanted administrative burdens. Especially frustrating, because security lapses are rarely caused by the operator themselves.

Legally, any offense tends to be against the web service operator, not the user: As the next section explains, a user account is normally just a license to use software, maintained under contract law.

Consequently, the type of justice a child (or more accurately, their parents) might expect in the physical world, rarely happens in the virtual. The wrong of the hacked WeeMee is never righted. At best, the avatar is simply returned to its previous state. Insurance, not justice. It does nothing to allay the fear of victims. This comment was simply signed, “scared like hell”:

“Everyone is getting hacked by this one person and he says I will be next… He leaves a cryin’ face on everyone he hacks… and makes them nude.”

Earlier generations learned to police their societies – to manage social chaos by making people accountable for their actions. It’s a fairly basic requirement of social stability. Yet here we find no retribution, no chance of forgiveness, no nothing. We’ve corrupted what would otherwise be individual rights, into a commercial right. And in doing so, risk overlooking the importance of personal rights – and responsibilities – in maintaining a stable society.

Virtual Feudalism

Adult parents might reasonably assume that buying WeeMee clothing is like buying physical world clothing from a store: That purchase implies ownership. I wonder how many have read the 7000-word terms of service, that their child probably agreed to on their behalf? Full of references to software, license, service. Reminders that proprietary and copyrights do not transfer away from the service operator. That everything may be taken away for any of a plethora of potential breaches of contract (including being 9).

Everything important remains the property of the commercial operator, however much the user may be encouraged to feel immersed in their “virtual self”. Except, of course, for the user’s responsibility for their own actions: Users’ liabilities remain theirs. Cynically, this is taking rights, without corresponding duties.

Software (and similar) are single fixed intellectual property rights. Everything that occurs within them is logically subservient to that single right, since everything is merely a use of the software’s unique algorithm. It’s not quite as black and white as I suggest, although the owner does retain considerable control over what users do. This might be sensible logic for a glorified electronic calculator – something with simple, unchanging functionality. But this might not be sensible logic for a system that supports the complex social interactions of human beings.

The structure emerging mirrors the “feudalism” associated with the Medieval (European) period: A sovereign (state) grants rights (copyright) to a lord (commercial business) over land (social software). The lord then distributes (license) the land among people (users), in return for their vassalage (contract and custom). The activities and “freedoms” of these people to live upon the land are then controlled by the lord, with varying degrees of reciprocity between lord and people.

This modern form of “virtual feudalism” has an important difference: That one person can maintain many allegiances, and potentially vary them over time. While that choice may seem very democratic, it can also become a choice between interacting with the people that make your life (socially and economically) worthwhile, or living life as a hermit. Likewise the concept of ‘net neutrality (the ability to build and operate your own internet service) doesn’t provide the (increasingly) billions of dollars required to develop and manage popular online social platforms, so becomes a largely theoretical freedom for those in mainstream society.

Such a social structure can be achieved without ever passing new legislation: Existing law merely fails to acknowledge that a piece of software has now taken on a significant social role. And in a consumerist environment, owning is over-rated – having is what’s important… Does anyone care?

If you just want to dress up and chat – which neatly summarises the desires of much of postmodern humanity – it probably doesn’t matter. For the rest of us, such feudal structures tend to restrict creativity – especially re-creativity – because users have limited rights to improve the environment they inhabit, export things out of that environment, or really do anything other than participate in a highly interactive movie.

Yet since the Statute of Anne, legislators have cited copyright as a means of encouraging creativity, and ensuring the benefits of such creativity are spread as widely as possible. That copyright law should form the basis of the opposite, is confusing.

Box: Least Bad Solution?
The increasing dominance of large numbers of “small intellectual property rights” in socio-economic activity, is a serious contemporary problem: Legally acknowledged rights that have some value, but not enough individual value to justify actively trying to protect them. Like this article. However, a global system to manage such small rights appears to be impossible. Impossible because accounting for the value of the right costs too much. Impossible because of its inherent complexity: Systems of (intellectual property) rights are fundamental to the operation of increasingly intangible (especially Western) economies. Introduce too many small rights, create too much complexity, and civilization collapses under the burden. A return to more feudal structures might represent a least bad solution to such a potentially crippling problem. Re-imposing greater hierarchy, to reduce the “top-level” complexity of the system. An intriguing counter-point.

The original WeeWorld article attracted a lot of feedback from WeeWorld’s users. One common question was, why do we have to pay for points? Or even, “WHY DOWE HAVE TO PAY FOR POINTS!!!!”

Why indeed?

• WeeWorld has 2 kinds of points: Gold points we buy with Dollars (“monetary rewards”), and green points we earn by doing things in the world (“achievement rewards”).
• Gold points can buy more things in WeeWorld than green points. So the things we want most, tend to be bought with gold points. In other worlds, achievement rewards (like green points) are more important.
• The things we want are things that not everyone has. We want those things because it helps us make friends. To stop everyone having them, those things cost points. If those things were free, everyone could have them, and then we wouldn’t want them.
• Gold points are bought with our parents’ money. So some of our friends have less points, because their parents don’t have as much money. We may want to help them by giving them some of our points. That helps us keep friends.
• Unfortunately, in WeeWorld, gold points cannot be easily shared. So WeeMees with lots of things tend to have those things because their parents’ have lots of money to buy them. This is “unfair”.
• In other worlds it is easier to earn achievement rewards (like green points). This means we could earn our own rewards, instead of our parents earning them for us. But those rewards cannot be shared. That means we cannot help our friends who have fewer rewards. That might also become “unfair”.
• Perhaps gold points would work better if we could share them, and we could earn gold points ourselves?

That’s the simple answer. With apologies for “we” and “our”. This article explains and expands those ideas. On this page:

• Why we Pay for Points
• Points Mean Prizes
• Exclusivity
• Monetary and Achievement-Based Rewards
• Pimp My Mount
• He Thought of Cars
• My Daddy is Richer than Your Daddy!
• Kurtosis of Wealth
• Circle of Equalities
• Death of Altruism
• Towards a Virtual Ecosystem
• Virtual Earnings

Why we Pay for Points

This simple question is like “where does money come from?” The more you understand about the modern banking, the harder the question becomes to answer. Eventually we realise that a currency’s worth is based on our collective trust in that worth.

In this case, you have to pay for points because you want points. If you didn’t want points, they wouldn’t have value, and you wouldn’t have to pay. Simple, huh?

WeeWorld has 2 types of points, gold and green:

• Gold points can be purchased with physical world money – Dollars. Gold points can sometimes be earnt by completing non-world activities, such as commercial surveys.
• Green points are gained by completing activities within the world, particularly for regular activity over days or months.

Comments about “paying for points” seem to refer to gold points, not green points.

Points Mean Prizes

It seems that gold points can be used to buy any item within the world. Green points can only be used for certain purchases. Gold points are exclusively required to buy (non-free) furniture for an avatar’s “room”, and branded “celebrity” goods.

Both sets of points earn money (revenue) for the world operator. Gold points transfer money directly from parents and corporations. Green points earn revenue from the display of advertising.

Assume gaining 1 green point triggers 2 adverts to display. Based on current low-grade advertising display rates, awarding 1000 green points would generate around 20 cents ($0.20) of revenue. In contrast, purchasing 1000 gold points costs $2 (commonly sold as $10 for 5000, but there are other methods, including subscriptions). Third parties (such as stores selling pre-paid cards) must be paid a proportion, 1 green point does not always equate to 2 adverts, and the analysis is a bit “approximate”. But gold points still probably have a higher “Dollar” value than green points. That difference helps explain why gold points are still required for certain purchases (although not the only reason), and why green is still the poor woman’s gold.

Exclusivity

I am told that there are no free clothes that “look nice”. To my eyes, visually, they look fine. But that misunderstands “nice”. Nice is based on the opinions of the people around you. Like conventional fashion, it’s an inherently social concept.

But “nice” is not entirely random – if it was, some free clothes would be nice, and we would all wear those. So if everyone had nice things, they’d no longer be “nice”. It’s inherent in this microcosm of consumerist society, that we cannot all have what we want: For an item to be desired, it needs to feel a little bit exclusive.

In Weeworld, exclusivity is controlled by points. Some green, most gold. An item that costs 1000 points won’t be worn by everyone, because not everyone has 1000 points to spend. So “nice” clothes tend to be exclusive items, which tend to cost points.

Box: Dedicated Follower of Fashion
The fashion industry sells the latest “designer” wares to wealthy celebrities at a high price, then over time, cascades down designs as cheaper garments for the masses. A similar gradual reduction in the price of virtual goods, with new items always added at a high price-point, may similarly allow the market for those goods to evolve over time. For the fashion industry, “Fast Fashion” has made “gradual” far less gradual in recent years: Seasons have become weeks, as businesses like Inditex (“Zara”) perfect the very rapid design, manufacture, and sale of garments. They are able to imitate the designs worn by celebrities faster than their competitors. And rapid changes in the clothes sold give customers more reasons to visit their stores, and more reasons to buy their clothes. In the closed economies of many virtual worlds (just one monopoly supplier of all goods), it is easy to control the availability and price of goods. But in a contestable market – where anyone can sell anything – fashionable virtual goods could rise and fall in popularity in days: The only restriction on imitation is design – manufacture and distribution are instant, and use no materials. Is there a limit to the amount of fashion that people can consume without dying of oniomania (shopaholism)? Or could we create a marketplace where the opinion-leaders are dressing up in designer (virtual) garments in the morning, which are copied by lunchtime, the height of popular fashion by the afternoon, and “so 9am” by the evening?

Monetary and Achievement-Based Rewards

Gold points will be familiar to scholars of Real Money Trading. They are a “monetary-based” reward. A degree of transferability exists between currencies, which allows physical world wealth to be transferred into virtual world wealth.

Green points are an example of an “achievement-based” reward. Achievement-based rewards are earnt by an individual’s actions, and are not transferable. They cannot be used for the exchange of goods, but can still be used for the expression of an individual’s accomplishments.

Different virtual worlds place different emphasis on monetary and achievement-based rewards.

The World of Warcraft example below shows the increasing emphasis on achievement-based rewards within that game. While “gold” remains within the game as a monetary-based reward system (transferable between players), gold increasingly does not buy a player anything to be proud of. To attain status among the wider community increasingly means you will actually have to do something yourself.

Pimp My Mount

The Amani War Bear (pictured left, with gnome rider) is a simple example of how an achievement-based reward becomes more valuable than “gold”. This personal mount was available to World of Warcraft players who emptied a particular dungeon (called Zul’Aman) within a time limit. The timed activity could only be completed by well-equipped, well coordinated, capable groups. And after about a year the mount could no longer be gained.

Riding an Amani War Bear soon conferred status within the wider player community. The mount (in theory) was something that money could not buy: It marked the rider out as a capable (“skilled”) and dedicated player.

In practice there were a few ways to buy an Amani War Bear: Either trading the entire account containing the character riding the War Bear, or paying a highly capable group to “carry” a character through the entire activity. A few intermediary websites even appeared, offering to match wealthy individuals to veteran guilds. So World of Warcraft’s implementation of achievement-based rewards is still not perfect, but it is sufficient to ensure items like the Amani War Bear convey status.

He Thought of Cars

“…and where to drive them; who to drive them with…” [Blur]

The spirit of the Amani War Bear could be seen in British company car culture:

“It used to be so simple. If you were a sales rep you drove either a Ford Cortina or a Vauxhall Cavalier. The better a salesman you were, the longer the badge on the boot – top dog in the company car park [parking lot] was the guy with a Ghia and metallic paint.”

Within one part of one company, reward is tied directly to the activity, in a very visual, but non-transferable manner. The slight differences between individual sales representatives are noticeable. However differences are not radical. For example, poorer performing reps are not issued with bicycles. Slight differences are possibly important because the rewards cannot be transferred: There is no way for that community of sales reps to transfer this form of wealth between one another to counter inequalities (expanded in “Circle of Equalities” below).

While that metallic Cortina Ghia might have been a status symbol, remember that the majority of a sale reps’ wealth was (is) still conventional money. Achievement-based rewards don’t pay the mortgage or feed the kids. And that may explain why monetary-based rewards are far more common in the physical world.

My Daddy is Richer than Your Daddy!

Rich kids impose the “social superiority” of their parents’ wealth directly onto their child peers. Without knowing it. The kid that is chauffeured home in mummy’s Chelsea Tractor, past the kid that has to walk. The child that got the My Little Pony Amusement Park as a birthday present, against the child that had to decorate their own. The only thing the rich kid did to gain this advantage was to be born into the “right” family.

Children will have to deal with the same inequalities and consumer pressures once adults, so perhaps they should get used to now? I suspect, like much of parenting, the answer is “in moderation”. Children that are confined by a utopian ideal, where everyone is equally wealthy, might be unable to survive adulthood: They won’t develop mechanisms to cope with the world. At the other extreme, a child whose peers have everything they cannot have, risks becoming detached from the community around them. Perhaps with a diminished expectation of their role in society (see box).

So, the issue is not whether children should be exposed to inequalities of wealth, but by how much.

The risk is that online communities have a broader “kurtosis of wealth” (explained below) than other communities the child might be exposed to, making them more likely to experience more inequality.

Box: Monetary and Achievement-Based Education
Declining social mobility (reduction in the proportion of poorer families that spawn wealthier children) is much debated in the United Kingdom. In the period after World War II, social mobility increased. Then, my father was educated through the grammar school system: An “achievement-based” education, where children were selected based on ability and given a “higher” standard of education than others. In my family’s case, this allowed a shift from a poor, low-skilled family background, to highly educated, more comfortable position somewhere in the middle of society. I was educated within the private school system – a monetary system, where most students’ parents paid fees that were beyond the means of most “normal” families, including my own. Standards of teaching were probably very similar for both myself and my father, but the community of students would have been very different: The post-war East End of London grammar school would not have been dominated by the children of parents who had made a lot of money in the financial sector… while the 1980s private school system was. Critically, the grammar school environment was full of children that were there due to their own achievement, while the private school system was dominated by children who were there due to their parents’ ability to make money. I was largely excluded from a peer group whose lifestyles I could not share. Had a great formal education, but never learnt anything about people. And was slowly indoctrinated with the belief that I was never as good as “everyone else”, with a complementary down-grading of expectation of my role in the world. A rather personal example of what can happen when not-so-wealthy children are raised with wealthy children.

Kurtosis of Wealth

Kurtosis is a measure of the “peakedness” of the distribution of data. Or in English, the tendency of similar things to cluster together.

You probably live close to people that are like you. Same sort of income, same sort of social status. You probably know the same sort of people. Not always, but probably.

I am aware I share the same planet with super-rich of Manhattan and the rubbish-pickers of Phnom Penh. But I don’t communicate or interact with either. I don’t even see them.

The internet would seem to broaden the range of people you can meet and experience. For example, by creating “communities of interest”, that transcend conventional physical and social barriers.

There are still significant income and literacy barriers to using the internet, particularly for more immersive virtual worlds that require extensive use of a computer. And English-speaking internet users are unlikely to mix with most of the residents of Phnom Penh, because of underlying language and cultural differences.

But in theory, poorer kids are more likely to meet richer kids on the internet than in the physical world. This awareness of inequality might breed less content children.

Of course, if the gap between rich and poor becomes to large within a community, the group may fracture. Being poor in a wealthy group, doesn’t feel like “fun”:

“Everything is so dang expensive!! … I’m starting to not like weeworld anymore.”

So, which is the dominant force? The one that brings us together, or the one that splits us apart?

Circle of Equalities

Not seeing or directly experiencing inequalities may explain why we are prepared to accept them. The rubbish-pickers of Phnom Penh aren’t in my immediate social circle, so I’m not especially concerned about their welfare.

Within groups, humans become more Egalitarian – wealthier members of a group tend to give some of their wealth to poorer members of the group:

“Subjects reduce and augment others’ incomes, at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative behaviour to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of income alterations are strongly influenced by inequality. Emotions towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases, and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average earners’ incomes and to increase below-average earners’ incomes.”

Or in the words of Taylor (and several others, who made similar comments),

“How does another weemee give some of its points to their friends?”

Death of Altruism

There are 2 apparently contradictory desires within Wee-society:

1. To buy “nice” clothes (that by definition, everyone cannot have), and thereby gain lots of friends and “social standing”.
2. To normalise the wealth of friends, reducing inequalities between them, and thereby allowing everyone to buy nice clothes.

The only method of transferring wealth I could find within WeeWorld was the option to send a gift (an item) to another WeeMee.

Many virtual world operators seek to prevent their customers using virtual currency as a method of exchanging physical world wealth. Not least because national governments tend to regulate such activities as banks, or in the case of China’s popular QQ Coin, restrict how the currency can be used (possibly for fear that a secondary economy might develop in the country that was outside the direct control of the state).

Without the ability to transfer wealth, the dominant desire is to buy “nice” clothes. So in the WeeWorld example, not only is inequality within the world being driven by the use of monetary rewards (that allow physical world wealth to be transferred to the virtual world), but limiting the ability to transfer wealth within the virtual world suppresses the natural desire to reduce those inequalities within the our communities.

In Why Have Gold Anyway?, Raph Koster suggests that transferable currency in online games is intended to foster a sense of altruism:

“A core philosophy of a world with transferable stuff is that you can help out anyone, anywhere.”

I never expected to conclude that the reason we have money is so that we can give it away. Have we become confused about the role of monetary currencies? By picking and choosing specific aspects of the transferability of currency, do we risk creating a less altruistic society?

Towards a Virtual Ecosystem

Looking at the theoretical differences between achievement and monetary-based rewards (used without restrictions), 2 themes emerge:

In the first case, achievement-based rewards tend to result in greater inequality. And in the second case, monetary-based rewards tend to result in greater inequality. So while it might seem “fairer” to have to earn your own social status though achievement-based rewards, transferrability of wealth gives flexibility: Wealth can be inherited, not earnt. But that wealth can also be transferred to offset the inequalities created.

Virtual Earnings

Perhaps the choice of reward system is not so important? Perhaps we are confusing the concept of non-transferability of wealth, with the ability to earn within the virtual world? Maybe the underlying weakness is still the lack of “parity of earnings” between worlds: It seems easier to earn wealth in the physical world than in the virtual. And so “the problem” with virtual goods becomes the lack of an underlying virtual economy.

“I keep searching on google for a weeworld moneymaker but there is no one!!!!”

While there are some limited methods of earning virtual currency to buy the “nicest” clothes, such as undertaking surveys, the system primarily relies on wealth creation outside of the virtual environment.

Should tween-focused worlds allow children to earn money? I suspect the answer is “in moderation”. The virtual equivalent of a lemonade stand or newspaper round, not sweatshops or pornography.

If we are moving towards an economy based on nothing, eventually wealth generation will primarily flow from “virtual activities”. But it is perplexing that virtual worlds still tend to be a place to spend money, not to earn it. Still rooted in entertainment and learning, rather than doing.