This line of games owes its existence to the table top roleplaying franchise in which players would create characters to act and react to a world created by another player, the game master. Players would choose acts and go into places created by the gamemaster. These players acted in an imaginary world all their own, hence "roleplaying". While in the early 80s there were quite a few lesser known role playing games for basic computing systems, Nintendo came onto the scene with its new fangled device that gave video game creators a platform to develop more elaborate games of the genre, Final Fantasy probably being the powerhouse of the video game role playing genre.

Then came the internet. The web/networking existed before the prevalence of the internet as we know it today, very few remember what the net was like before the .com bubble; i.e. usenet groups, Prodigy, etc., but I digress. MMOs actually existed well before the prevalence of the average home user being connected to the big WWW. They began in text form and older gamers will remember these as MUDs, which stood for Multi-User Dungeons. The predecessor to these was a game actually on ARPANET, developed by some MIT geeks. ARPANET was the grandfather of the internet, btw, ran by the Department of Defense and used by University's for research. Yeah, people were using government equipment to play what amounts to Dungeons and Dragons during the cold-war era.

Anyway, point being, MMOs were pretty well known by the die-hard geeks before the commercial blockbuster, Ultima Online. Then came Everquest, which topped UO subscribers, then a few other smaller titles, and then World of Warcraft. I believe WoW just came along at the right time, during a massive cultural and economic explosion of the web and the slow societal transition to the point where being a geek became the new James Dean. Thats right, instead of the leather jacket, slicked back hair, and cigs rolled into the sleeve, the James Dean of the new millennium sported Buddy Holly glasses, corduroy pants, and usually some t-shirt with a reference most people would not have gotten in the 90s (my fav being "Choose Your Weapon" featuring a set of multisided dice).

So that explains the birth and popularity of the MMO, but what problems has this caused in the virtual world of the net?

Well, one doesn't have to read far to figure out that the concept of "imaginary/abstract" property has become more prevalent than "hard" property. Property taking on a shape over your computer that in reality is just a bunch of 1s and 0s. I don't think anyone denies that programmers hold intellectual property rights to their work, but it has been very difficult for legal scholars and courts to exactly determine where the line should be drawn between the creators rights and the users rights.

This turned into a much longer post than I thought, but I thought it a good idea to give some background into where this phenom came from and to understand the cultural force behind it; so for today, I will leave you with a brief problem and the readers thoughts.

The problem occurs when you go to a store and pay real money for a game that allows you to act in a virtual world. The developers of this software understandably wish to protect their rights in a lucrative game such as WoW. Thus, they include what is called an "End User License Agreement" which for simplicity's sake, I will call a contract between the person using the software and the company that you will refrain from certain acts if you use the game. You must agree to this EULA to play the game. Thus, the first question to ponder is, how much of a right is being transferred when you purchase a game such as this. Many people don't look at game purchases in this light, but it is tantamount to someone telling you that if you purchase a car, you are restricted to certain uses. This already disagrees with old property law; as a buyer of property is imbued with the "4 sticks", the right to use, the right to exclude others, the right of transference, and the right of destruction. Those terms are pretty self-explanatory. However, modern EULAs have altered this basic concepts of property law, restricting, and sometimes all together eliminating one or more of these "four sticks". Thus, the question I pose is, what ARE you buying when you purchase a disc containing a bunch of 1s and 0s?

The second question springs from the first. In your opinion, assuming that you hold a certain set of rights in this newly acquired property, how does a "virtual" world; where millions of people interact and create a self sustaining economy that exists on hardware owned by the company that makes the game change the ownership or the "4 sticks" while inside that virtual world?