Player Rights

I read the essay "Declaring the Rights of Players" by Raph Koster. This essay was published in 2000 and I found it in a book of essays that I borrowed from my professor called "The Game Design Reader: A Rule of Play Anthology". (Sorry I borrowed it for so long!)

This essay started by talking about the idea of giving rights to online avatars. The author wrote up a 'Declaration of the Rights of Avatars' that was based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen approved by the National Assembly of France on August 26 of 1789 with Articles based on the US Bill of Rights. (To say the least, this document was very loftily written and I had a bit of a hard time getting through it.) The author then sent this document to "a collection of the smartest virtual world admins and designers" that he knew. Their responses to the document were rather critical and defensive, like they didn't want to give players written rights like that for fear that their power as admins and such might be taken from them.

So the author revised the document into more modern English (thank goodness), using common words rather than dictionary terms used in laws and such. The document said the same things, just in simpler and more friendly terms that made it seem like guidelines rather than an imposing law. He had some of the same people review the new document and it turned out that they were much more supportive of this revised version.

The author concluded that rather than have the rights of avatars, we should have general guidelines (like the ones he wrote) that are there to hold a standard for admins and have something players can hold admins to in order to ensure fair play.

I thought this essay was interesting. It's a bit old, but I think it still applies to gameplay today. At first I wasn't sure where the author was taking it, or how it would tie into my research idea of community in gaming; but after finishing the essay I realized that it was all common sense and common courtesy. The character, be it admin or not, has a human being behind it. The revised document states this right off the bat: "[Game] players are people. They don't stop being people when they log on." If both players and admins remember this and just treat each other as people, a lot of problems would be solved within gaming communities.

(Pro tip: The same goes for real life too.)