QUT Verified Signature Acknowledgements A thesis is a substantial commitment, of time, effort and thought. I want to thank a lot of people for helping me through this process, however first and foremost must be my parents – Wendy & Paul – and my sister, Corrie for their support as I moved firstly to Copenhagen and then Australia, and a deep gratitude to my supervisors John Banks and Nic Suzor, without whom this project would not have been possible, and Brian Fitzgerald for his guidance in the early stages of the project. Additionally, funding from Queensland University of Technology and funding & support from the ARC Centre for Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation was greatly appreciated. I’d also like to thank Richard Bartle – who was a big reason for me pursuing game studies from my experiences at the University of Essex, my lecturers & colleagues at the IT University of Copenhagen, notably Gordon Calleja, TL Taylor & Miguel Sicart for their inspiration and support. I appreciate the discussions with Richard Bartle & Ren Reynolds – online & in person - for guiding principles re: game design and regulation, and the advice of Jean Burgess on academic life in Australia, and her detailed feedback on writing and at my final seminar, for which I also thank Barbara Adkins, Melissa de Zwart & Vesna Popovic for their invaluable feedback and suggestions. I also thank Stephen Thompson for his work in conducting a final copy-edit of the document. Finally some friends; Stephanie Papavassiliou for so much at Essex and since; Nathan Connelly, Rowan Pickering & Charlie Knowles who helped me adjust to Australia, and Rachel Driscoll for her help on a Las Vegas trip which explored many of the gambling dimensions of this thesis. Team EVE’s (Kelly Bergstrom & Marcus Carter) discussions in Raleigh helped fill holes in my knowledge of EVE, and I look forward to our future collaborations. Finally, to all the wonderful people in Copenhagen, Brisbane, Oxford, and at International conferences who I cannot name personally; this wouldn’t have been possible without your thoughts and feedback. 2 Abstract There are a number of pressing issues facing contemporary online environments that are causing disputes among participants and platform operators and which are increasing the likelihood of external regulation. These include questions of ownership and value of property held within the environment, intellectual property, boundaries of acceptable play and automation (or botting) to optimally collect resources. These issues raise a number of key questions for the future of online environments. There are the questions of what form regulation should take and what its impact would be on platforms and their participants, including platform operators. And then there is the issue of whether a pre-emptive strategy aimed at developing an alternative governance framework for the industry is appropriate. A number of solutions have been proposed, including industry self-governance, top-down regulation and models of platform self-governance that are emerging, such as Eve Online’s Council of Stellar Management (CSM). However, none of these solutions seem entirely satisfying; facing challenges from developers who fear regulators will not understand their platforms (Bartle, 2006), or players who feel they are not sufficiently empowered to influence the platform. This paper considers case studies of Eve Online and the offshore gambling industry, with a focus on day-to-day governance practices. There are several common factors between these studies, such as the presence of a regulatory gap between company representatives and the legal system. Offshore gambling operators are located outside US jurisdiction but target US clientele, while Eve Online’s Terms of Service refer players to the district court of Reykjavik, making access to dispute resolution expensive, if not impossible, for the majority of participants. Both platforms have strong communities, facilitated by forums and blogs such as Sportsbook Review and Eve News 24, and have seen disputes arise over both ambiguity in terms of service and differences between formal rules and practised community norms. Mediation in the offshore gambling industry offers prompt outcomes based on norms negotiated between operators and participants, with elements of natural justice and contract law underlying the decisions of emergent participant-driven mediators. Those mediators operate through the power of public perception. They are recognised as fair and equitable by the players, which gives them the coercive power to harm companies operating in this space by publicising wrongdoing. Gambling industry participants have often chosen to utilise emergent participant-driven regulation forms, such as Sportsbook Review, in preference to sanctioned governmental bodies, such as IBAS (Independent Betting Arbitration Service) in disputes involving United Kingdom operators, primarily 3 due to the speed of reaching decisions and their track record of operator compliance. While no such similar evidence exists with other online platforms, it seems reasonable to suppose that participants would utilise a proven, fast-acting, dispute resolution system in preference to slow and expensive court procedures, and thus this thesis suggests that such mechanisms are worthy of consideration as the future regulatory shape of virtual worlds. Keywords: Virtual Worlds, Social Games, Regulation, Dispute Resolution, Policy, Cheating 4 Table of Contents 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 9 1.1 The Case Studies ......................................................................................................................... 10 1.2 Findings ....................................................................................................................................... 12 1.3 Chapter Outline ........................................................................................................................... 18 2. Contextualising the Thesis ................................................................................................................ 21 2.1 Game Studies .............................................................................................................................. 21 2.2 The “Magic Circle’ & ‘Pro Gamers’ .............................................................................................. 22 2.3 Cultural & Media Studies ............................................................................................................ 23 2.4 Game Design ............................................................................................................................... 25 2.5 Regulatory Approaches ............................................................................................................... 27 2.6 New Media & Participatory Cultures .......................................................................................... 30 2.7 Norms .......................................................................................................................................... 31 2.8 Norms & Virtual Worlds .............................................................................................................. 43 2.9 Advantage Play ............................................................................................................................ 47 2.10 Summary ................................................................................................................................... 50 3. Methodology ................................................................................................................................. 51 3.1 Environment Scoping .................................................................................................................. 51 3.2 Case Study Methodology ............................................................................................................ 54 3.3 Case Study Selection ................................................................................................................... 57 3.4 Eve Online ................................................................................................................................... 58 3.5 Offshore Gambling ...................................................................................................................... 73 3.6 Ethics ........................................................................................................................................... 75 4. Issues in Contemporary Online Environments ............................................................................. 78 4.1 An outline of the issues ............................................................................................................... 78 4.2 Defining Cheating ........................................................................................................................ 85 4.3 Gambling, Social Games & Financial Addiction .......................................................................... 90 4.4 Terms of Service & EULAs ........................................................................................................... 94 4.5 Categorising Potential Regulatory Issues .................................................................................... 95 4.6 Offered Solutions .......................................................................................................................