I'll Follow the Law

I'm wondering if not many people have the terms ’legal’ and ’ethically correct’ confused. ‘There’s no law against it? Then it’s ok!’ is a very widespread idea.

Maybe it’s just the Swedish people who are very law abiding. I’ll take the smoking ban in restaurants as an example. Many smokers say, in retrospect, that the law is good, that it’s a good thing that people working in restaurants can now work in a smoke free environment.

What is very interesting here is that smoking in restaurants, pubs and clubs was very widespread before the law was passed. Smokers will now go outside for smoking, but what about before the ban? Did the smokers really need a law to change their opinions or open their eyes to it? It was perfectly possible to go outside to smoke even before the ban.

Is law = ethics?

Another example of this, one that is more related to technology, is TV Links. The site provides links to many streamed TV series, old and new. Sometimes the links don’t work (presumably when they sites hosting the video clips have been shut down), which you as a user can report, but most of the time you can watch episodes of The Simpsons, Grey’s Anatomy or Smallville without problems.

In the TV Links FAQ, one of the questions is ‘is this site legal?’ which is answered by a simple ‘we provide links, nothing is wrong with that.’ They also state that they ‘do NOT support downloading’.

I really don’t see the difference between hosting the videos and providing the links, from an ethical perspective. Legally there seems to be a distinction, sure, but is it right? For the user the videos are still only one click away.

If the people behind the site think that file sharing is perfectly fine, I guess there are no ethical problems with providing the links. But something feels weird, at least to me, when you perfectly well know that something is illegal, but support it just until the point where the law says no. When you follow the letter of the law, but not its intentions.

Does Your Reader Know?

A friend of mine had a blog for just under a year about life and love. She has 300 regular readers towards the end, who sometimes commented on what she wrote. The blog talked openly about the goings on in life.

On YouTube, the user Lonelygirl15 added her first video blog in June last year. In the blog she talks about things in her life, like my friend in her text blog. Lonelygirl15’s blog became a huge success and millions of people watched it.

These two blogs have one thing in common in that they are utterly fake. My friend made up a character that she writes about, much like she has always been writing stories. Lonelygirl15 was an actor hired by three aspiring script writers, who wanted to use a new and interesting media to tell a story.

In September, Lonelygirl15 was revealed and many fans were really upset by the fact that it was all a lie. Some comments on the revelation videos are more along the lines of ‘haha, told ya’, but some seem genuinely hurt.

So, the questing is: is it right to lie about yourself in blogs? And if you do, should you ever tell anyone?

I’m not really sure if I like fake blogs. On the one hand, it’s an interesting medium to write in. Most sincere diary blogs are pretty boring, so a fake one could provide more entertainment. On the other hand, people who read or watch blogs can become emotionally invested in the author, who after a while can seem a bit like a friend – those people could be hurt by finding out their ‘friend’ was a fictional character. If you reason from a ‘happiness maximizing’ standpoint, however, the entertainment you give your readers by faking might outweigh the possible anger that could surface if they found out it was all fake.

If you have a fake blog and get a bit tired of it, you have to decide what to do about it. Should you just leave it and never tell any of the readers why you stopped writing? Should you write a “goodbye” post and say you decided to stop writing? And if so, should you in that post ‘out’ yourself?

In the case of Lonelygirl15, when she was ‘outed’, many people were, as I previously wrote, upset. The question is, is knowing the truth better than being blissfully ignorant?

I wish I had a good answer to that. In this case the question might not be very big, or important, but there are many other situations to which the basic question can be applied. I have always in theory leaned towards the harsh truth, but I can’t say it’s always the best choice, or that being brutally honest it is the ‘right thing’ to do.

Ads are Expensive and Free

Wait, a minute, is this actually what it seems to be? A place where users make video ads for reals brands, for free... Something is fundamentally weird about that.

Her 15 Minutes of Shame

Ok, this might be funny, but poor woman... Basically, a reporter for Metro asked some people buying groceries if they knew they could end up at Konsumbloggen, a humorous blog written by a cashier at a grocery store. One of them answered that no, she hadn't thought of that, and now she will and it doesn't feel too good. Of course, this got her on the blog and her picture has then been reposted on many blogs throughout the internet. Funny, yeah, but knowing she said she didn't want to end up on blogs, it's not very nice.

Obee Doo, I Wanna Be Like Me

Now, maybe I have lived in my own little world, secluded from technical inventions, but until this week I had never – to my recollection – heard the term ‘Web 2.0’. Wikipedia’ing it led me to realize that even if I hadn’t come across the term before, I have used many applications that would fall under this category (and the fact that I used one of the top web 2.0 applications for finding this information was rather funny).

One of my first contacts with the web 2.0, according to the Wikipedia definition, was on Amazon. The feature I’m talking about is really basic, the ‘customers who bought this item also bought…’ one. Calling it a web 2.0 feature may be pushing it, as it is pretty old by now, but it fits the description.

So, what would be the problem with this function? Well, to start with, I didn’t really see anything wrong with it at all. Sure, companies make a lot of money by using information about my preferences if I buy something from them, which means they are saving information about me (whether that information is linked to my customer ID or not).

But really, how much do I care about that on a personal level. In fact, it’s probably worth it to be able to easily access for example other books by the same author without doing a new search. On my favourite shopping site, Asos, I have more than once found nice stuff by looking at those recommendations. If I find a nice top, it’s often linked to matching jewellery, or at the very least there’s a good chance of me liking at least some of the suggested items.

But there is a less obvious downside to this as well. If we use those recommendations to a large extent in many aspects of our lives, things might get very boring. If you watch a movie you like, and use Imdb or any other movie site to recommend movies like it, or Allmusic to find music, you might find things that you like. But the better those sites are at recommending things that are very close to what you already like, the less you will be exposed to new influences. It might be exaggerating, but functions like these could make us more predictable and boring.

If you talk about clothes or movies, the risk of you staying with what you like from before might not change drastically with the suggestion function. However, if you used a similar function for looking for political blogs, for example, you could get into the situation of never really hearing some other perspective of the world other that that of you and people who agree with you. And then we kind of lose a point with what blogs could be, and will never really get our thoughts and ideas challenged.

Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye

A central aspect in most MMOs is the concept of guilds. Wikipedia states about online computer game guilds that “they organize group activities, regulate member behavior, exclude non-conforming individuals, and react as a group when member safety or some aspect of guild life is threatened”. While I’m considering delving deeper into all of these aspects in a coming essay, for now I’m going to linger on the situation where a player is transitioning between guilds.

If you are guildless, joining a guild is a piece of cake. Assuming you aren’t lying about your gear, experience or online times, you are free to do whatever you want and no one will think less of you.

If you are already in a guild, things become harder. Leaving a guild in which you aren’t really friends with anyone isn’t hard, and then your situation is the same as for a guildless person. If you, however, are member of a guild in which you have friends who like and rely on you, is infinitely harder.

There are many reasons why you would like to move from one guild to another. Easier access to gear upgrades, friends in another guild wanting you to join the, a bigger challenge playing-wise, an argument in your old guild… as I said, there are many reasons. Analysing the ethics of such motivations is tricky. Analysing the way in which it is done is hard, but somewhat easier and more tangible.

Leaving a guild in which you have a good standing can, as I stated before, be hard. People will ask you why and what you are going to do next. If you left the guild because you didn’t like it there and wanted to play guildless for a while, or just didn’t like it there and wanted to maybe apply to join another guild, people will generally be reasonably understanding. If you didn’t like it you shouldn’t be there. Simple.

One thing that is quite common, however, is that you already know where you want to go. That you like it in your old guild, but that for some reason it is not number one on your list anymore. You might even have been offered a spot in another guild. Here is where it gets sticky.

Being offered a position in a guild isn’t wrong. A guild offering a position to a player that is already “taken” can be compared to someone making a pass at someone else’s boyfriend. Maybe it’s wrong, but it’s not the fault of the boyfriend or in this case, the player receiving the offer.

On the other hand, if the boyfriend actively tried to make the other person make the pass, to see if he could maybe get together with a “better” person, we’d think that was immoral. The analogue in a game would be for a person to contact a new guild while still being in one, with the intention of seeing if he’d get in before making his decision, or with the full intention of staying if he wasn’t accepted. This practice is also considered immoral by most players.

But how come? If you compare it with someone trying to replace his girlfriend, it makes sense. But another comparison which would be perfectly reasonable is that of looking for employment. It’s socially acceptable to be looking for a new job without quitting your old one. Why are the reactions to a person applying to a new guild while still being in his old one more like the reactions of a cheating boyfriend than that of a person changing jobs?

Only one reason springs to mind: it’s because of the relationships you have. In the example with the boyfriend, you are hurting a person. In the example of the job you are hurting a company, which might not even be very hurt if you are easily replaceable. If it’s a small company of friends it would be a much worse thing to do.

A guild is something in between. The “job” side of it is the raiding of dungeons, in which the players are needed to work together to achieve something. There is also, however, a “relationship” side. You have friendships in a guild, which can be pretty strong between people who have played together for months. Not as strong as a relationship between two people, perhaps, but still strong enough to hurt when people are left behind.

Lucy in the Sky with Epics

A few months ago, auction sites were littered with accounts and characters from the game World of Warcraft. This was a while before the first expansion to the game was released, and many of the characters to be sold had more or less the best armor to be found in the game. I had a look at Ebay at the time, and it wasn’t very rare to find characters going for more than 2000 dollars.

Now, when you decide to play the game, you have to accept an agreement stating, among other things, “Blizzard does not recognize the transfer of Accounts. You may not purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, or offer to purchase, sell, gift or trade any Account, and any such attempt shall be null and void.” I don’t know whether this agreement is legally binding, but by signing it by clicking “OK”, you have agreed to its spirit for all ethical purposes.

So, breaking the agreement by selling your account, is that ethical? You could argue that “no, it is not”. That an agreement, whether or not it is legally binding, is ethically binding.

The other reason why it wouldn’t be ethical is that it’s unfair to other players. They have spent a lot of time on their characters, in many cases over a hundred days in total. By selling your account you are making it possible for someone to skip all those days of playing just because he or she has the monetary means to do so.

But are there circumstances in which it could be justified to sell or give your account away?

Say you stop playing, and a real life friend of yours wants to try the game a bit. You let him play your characters for a while, and when your paid subscription runs out, you let him pay for a renewal and continue playing, as it would feel mean to make him start over from level 1 when he knows and likes your old character. Is this wrong? Is it as wrong as selling it to a stranger via an auction site?

Say, in another example, that you feel yourself being addicted to the game. Your girlfriend is getting more and more frustrated, and you suddenly realize you are on the verge of losing her because you are always playing. Deciding she is more important to you than a stupid game, you immediately cancel your subscription. As you know how easy it would be for you to be tempted to start playing again, you sell your character on Ebay. With the money you get, which is a considerable amount as you were dressed in epic gear from top to toe, you sweep your girlfriend off to a romantic vacation to an island in Greece to start making amends for the months of neglect. Is this wrong?

In all scenarios I can think of, I think it is wrong to buy a character. There’s no reason you have to get a character at max level, in the best gear available. The concept of selling is harder. In the first scenario above, it could be nice to know your friend is having fun with your character, the character that you played so long. In the second, maybe the help in saving your relationship is worth breaking your agreement for.

Myself, I can’t really picture selling off my characters. Firstly, I try to honor agreements. Secondly, it would feel strange to know some stranger was running around with the characters I spent so much time on. Giving it away to a friend would be the only option, and then I would think they would be better off learning to play the character by starting fresh from level 1.