Sunday, May 11, 2008
What happens when a virtual newspaper covering virtual events runs afoul of a real corporation?
Dec 12, 2003 | In the real world, Peter Ludlow is an academic, a professor of philosophy and linguistics at the University of Michigan whose books go by sober titles like "Readings in the Philosophy of Language," and "Semantics, Tense and Time: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Natural Language." He's well-regarded in his field and engaging enough on the phone, but Ludlow is, even by his own admission, not a very interesting person. That is to say, Peter Ludlow is nothing like Urizenus, Ludlow's alter ego in the virtual world of "The Sims Online."
Urizenus is an unabashed muckraker. In the mold, perhaps, of Walter Winchell or Joseph Pulitzer, he investigates the shady underside of life in Alphaville, one of the game's largest cities, and posts all his sensational discoveries on the Alphaville Herald, a blog that he describes as the only newspaper covering "The Sims Online." In the couple of months since the blog went live, Urizenus has interviewed many of Alphaville's most infamous scammers, thieves, money launderers, prostitutes (some of whom, he says, are minors) and other dubious types, and he's documented attempts by the community to create a kind of governing authority to police the place.
Urizenus and his compatriots at the Herald have also aimed their bullhorn at Maxis, the company that created "The Sims Online" and that runs the place; in blog entry after blog entry, the Herald describes Maxis as being signally indifferent to the needs of people who populate the game, and it documents the many reasons why "The Sims Online" -- which was predicted to be a blockbuster and made the cover of Time magazine before its launch late in 2002 -- has been a money-loser for Electronic Arts, Maxis' parent company.
But the Herald's relentless criticism does not appear to have gone down well at E.A. On Wednesday, in a move that Ludlow describes as arbitrary and capricious, E.A. terminated Urizenus' "Sims Online" account. "While we regret it," E.A. told him in a letter, "we feel it is necessary for the good of the game and its community." Alphaville's Citizen Kane was kicked out of town.
According to Ludlow, E.A.'s move was "clearly censorship," and other scholars of MMORPGS -- massively multiplayer online role playing games, a category that describes the online worlds of "The Sims," "Everquest," "Ultima Online," and new entrants "There" and "Second Life" -- who are familiar with Ludlow's site agree with his assessment. They say the situation underscores what is becoming increasingly apparent in the virtual world: There's a fundamental divergence between the interests of a community (typically high-minded goals like freedom of speech and assembly) and the interests of the corporations that run those communities (typically not very high-minded but otherwise understandable goals like making money and avoiding public association with words like "prostitution").
"[These virtual worlds] are a strange sort of commercial space where communities come to exist, but there's a tension between the communities and the private commercial company," says Julian Dibbell, the author of "My Tiny Life," a kind of memoir about the virtual world LambdaMOO. "It's similar to what you have with shopping malls. They're becoming the last refuge of public space for teenagers, but they're run by companies, and they can kick you out on a whim."
The story also prompts a host of compelling questions regarding the nature of virtual existence. For instance, can something like prostitution occur online? And what about community-based policing -- is that possible, or desirable, in the Sim world? And, finally, does E.A. have any obligation to allow a free press to document how all these issues will play out in "The Sims Online"? After all, it's their world -- why can't they run it how they please, however capricious their rule may seem to others?
Peter Ludlow's abiding interest in "The Sims Online" is, he says, professional. The question "What emerges from a state of nature?" is an old chestnut among philosophers, and Ludlow figured that by observing a virtual world like "The Sims Online" he could get some pretty good clues pointing to the answer. "You can think of these worlds as being like little laboratories in which you see the ways people respond to troublemakers, how they can be resourceful about it," he says. "I'm pretty sure I'm going to write a book on this whole thing."
It's not clear if they're worthy of a book, but the troublemakers Urizenus has found are, at least, good enough for a blog. At the top of the heap -- "Alphaville's most infamous scammer," Urizenus wrote in the Herald -- is a female avatar named Evangeline, who is, in real life, an adolescent male. Urizenus first encountered Evangeline in November, when he'd heard reports of characters "setting up a welcome house, offering assistance to newbies, and then scamming newbies out of their simoleans." (The simolean is the currency used in "The Sims Online"; it can be exchanged for real American dollars on, among other sites, eBay.) Urizenus set up a sting to catch Evangeline. He gave a newbie 30,000 simoleans and had her "seek help" from Evangeline -- and, sure enough, Evangeline and her roommate, Cari, stole the newbie's money. Evangeline is also famous for "caging" newbies and insulting them (she calls the dark-skinned ones "monkeys").
Urizenus has interviewed Evangeline several times, and in her discussions with him, she seems bemused by her exploits, taking nothing very seriously. Ludlow mostly shares that attitude, but he and Candace Bolter, a philosophy grad student at Michigan who works with him on the Herald, were a bit disturbed by one interview Evangeline did with Urizenus in which she describes running a brothel.
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