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Sara Andrews, the guild’s creator, made a stink and embarrassed Blizzard (the game’s parent company) into reversing the decision. In 2004, a player in the MMO EVE Online declared that the game’s creators had stacked the deck against him, called EVE “a poorly designed game which rewards the greedy and violent, and punishes the hardworking and honest.” He was upset over a change in the game dynamics which made it easier to play a pirate and harder to play a merchant. The player, “Dentara Rask,” wrote those words in the preamble to a tell-all memoir detailing an elaborate Ponzi scheme that he and an accomplice had perpetrated in EVE. The two of them had bilked EVE’s merchants out of a substantial fraction of the game’s total GDP and then resigned their accounts. The objective was to punish the game’s owners for their gameplay decisions by crashing the game’s economy. In both of these instances, players — residents of virtual worlds — resolved their conflicts with game management through customer activism. That works in the real world, too, but when it fails, we have the rule of law. We can sue. We can elect new leaders. When all else fails, we can withdraw all our money from the bank, sell our houses, and move to a different country. But in virtual worlds, these recourses are off-limits. Virtual worlds can and do freeze players’ wealth for “cheating” (amassing gold by exploiting loopholes in the system), for participating in real-world gold-for-cash exchanges (eBay recently put an end to this practice on its service), or for violating some other rule. The rules of virtual worlds are embodied in EULAs, not Constitutions, and are always “subject to change without notice.” So what does it mean to be “rich” in Second Life? Sure, you can
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