What if we declared the rights of avatars? Which makes for an interesting thought experiment. But rights (and much less legislation) have not caught up to the notion of virtual spaces very well. If your local pay-for-play mud operator isn’t providing adequate service, you can report them to the Better Business Bureau there are probably sexual discrimination laws and harassment laws and slander laws that apply equally well in both kinds of space. Now, it’s pretty clear that there are some rights which leak over from the real world into the virtual. There’s a bunch of this that is antithetical to the notion of rights. Even in pay-for-play circles, it is always made very clear who owns the data, who has to sign Terms of Service, etc. That they can choose to eject someone on any grounds whatsoever, can delete a character at a whim, can play favorites and choose to grant administrative favors to their friends. That they have discretion on how enters and who gets to stay. Many mud admins are of the belief that their muds are their private playgrounds. The harder part here is agreeing on what rights are intrinsic to all people everywhere-cultural differences tend to make that hard. Under this far more rigid standard, all those cultures which fail to grant them are benighted bastions of savagery. There’s another theory of rights which holds them to be intrinsic to people. In other words, the guys in charge sign away a chunk of power, in writing, that the populace expects them to sign away. And, of course, especially as long as they are enshrined in some sort of law. They’re inalienable only as long as only a minority does the, uh, aliening. The battleground is not a military one: it’s a perception one as long as everyone is convinced that people have rights, they do. The flip side of this is that unless you continually fight to make that claim true, then it won’t stick. Under this logic, the folks who rose up in France weren’t looking for some king with a soon-to-be-foreshortened head to tell them, “You’ve got the right to live your lives freely.” They told themselves that they had that right, and because they had said so, it was so. They arise because the populace decides to grant them to themselves.

There’s at least one theory of rights which says that rights aren’t “granted” by anyone. PARAGRAPH 3 If a player does not exercise the right to be a frog, or to pretend to be one, other players have a right to pretend it/she/Garlic/he is a frog. PARAGRAPH 2 Should the system the player is on fail to implement the 'being frog' functionality, the player has a right to pretend he/she/it/Garlic is a frog. PARAGRAPH 1 Every player has the right to be a frog. Igor has adopted this bill of unalienable player rights, written by Jacob Hallen aka Tintin:

Here’s a great example of a mud rights document from IgorMUD that I had to include, well, because:

Of course, administrators of any virtual space are loathe to “grant players rights” because it curbs their ability to take action against people, restricts their ability to walk away from it all, holds them to standards they may not be able to live up to. Admins keep liberally applying the word like some magic balm (“oh, you have every right to be upset…”), in every circumstance except the ones where the players want the notion of rights taken seriously. Players keep claiming that they have them. The pesky thing about rights is that they keep coming up. Heck, even over on the non-commercial side of the fence, it’s likely to raise some hackles among hardworking mud admins. No matter what, any answer I give is bound to be wrong, either from the perspective of my employers or my customers. One of those questions that given my position, I shouldn’t write about. Do players of virtual worlds have rights?

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