Sex, Law & Gaming 1

I entered the world of PC gaming during the sem break of AY 2002-2003 via Bioware's Neverwinter Nights, and I was so immersed in it that the PC was on virtually three-fourths of any given day. I hacked and slashed my way as a Rogue through the Docks and other parts of Neverwinter's first Act, and I remember thinking that it was a pity I couldn't convert all the gold and jewelry I could lay my mercenary little virtual hands on into real-time cash.

I accumulated virtual money, lived a life of virtual crime and heroism (depending on whose side I was on as a Rogue with a neutral evil alignment), and breathed PC gaming for a fortnight until law school beckoned once more. While it was only a fortnight, the time I spent playing before I went cold turkey piqued my interest in gaming as an environment of social, economic and legal possibilities.

I never returned to Neverwinter in the three years that followed mainly because

1. Of PC specs and (several) hardware failures.
2. I was scared of getting addicted to the point of neglecting my studies.
3. There was a lot of law school stuff to deal with.

Then, last semester, while banging my head on the wall in frustration after having two topics for SLR virtually rejected for (1) having been done to death and (2) being unique but [the professor was] not sure if [my] concerns [were] involved, I sort of stumbled back into PC gaming when I found intriguing references on the net to the link between law and gaming.

From what I've encountered on the research trail, it's clear that many economists and legal theorists see at least one nexus between online gaming and the law. While there is a connection, they just can't agree on how to view the relationship between the two.

After getting the go-signal from the professor, I got more and more involved in PC gaming from a legal view point, and at the end of the semester, I turned in a 50-page paper entitled Play/Law: Identity, Property and Control in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.

And now, several months after turning in that paper, I find another interesting twist to the online gaming scene. It's funny, really, but not unexpected, to see that nothing is completely asexual. Sex is a subject that screams "relativity", and in online gaming, it's no different.

Do gaming guilds have to be apparently asexual so as to keep the nod of game developers? When the game gods rule adversely against GLBT guilds, can the guild members retort in real time, "F--- you. We've got rights and you're discriminating against us"?

We know that chatrooms can be sex dens, where words at play jog the imagination as well as some other interesting ... uh ... parts, but what about game avatars? When one player comes on to another player in, say, a Guild Wars campaign, and they get on like a house on fire and "have sex", is it sex? If it is sex, is it then an act subject to censorship?

In Newsweekly has this news item on GLBT in the monster MMORPG, World of Warcraft. There are some interesting posts on gaming blog Terra Nova, too, like "But is it PrOn?" and "Virtual Transvestitism: An Introduction". I wonder what's going to be said next?