Ethics and Practice in Virtual Worlds

Abstract

This paper argues that acts that occur in MMOs (i.e., virtual world games), even those which have meaning only in relation to the internal values of the virtual space, can (and in some cases do) have moral content. The paper focuses on arguments presented by T. M. Powers (2003) in Real Wrongs in Virtual Communities, which support acts in social worlds such as LambaMOO having content, but denies that MMOs meet the necessary criteria. It is argued that there is good reason to modify Powers’s criteria for establishing if act, online have moral content, and that some acts in MMOs meet these modified criteria. Powers’s and others’ belief that MMOs are Hobbesian worlds is shown to be a misreading of the highly regulated conflict and game play that they host. Lastly, it is argued that acts occurring in the context of practices that have arisen in MMOs do have moral content only in the case that they meet the criteria set out in this paper and the specific context provides sufficient signaling of norms and the acceptance of those norms, that is that they occur within the context of an identifiable community of practice.