The papers from the State of Play I symposium on law and virtual worlds are now online and also available in a dead tree version. Among them is is Virtual Worlds, Real Rules, a paper I co-authored with Caroline Bradley, my colleague and spouse.
The origins of this paper are amusing. We were in the car one afternoon, driving to pick up the kids from school, and I mentioned to Caroline that I'd come across some interesting facts about Virtual Worlds — that they seemed to be evolving market regulations uncannily like the Uniform Commercial Code (perhaps because the people who wrote the rules mimicked the world they knew). “I know there's a paper in there somewhere,” I told her, “I'm not just sure what it is.”
And, without missing a beat, Caroline told me what the paper was. Which is why she's the lead author.
Although, as Professor Froomkin’s paper notes, MMORPGs rarely allow amendments of the world’s “constitution,” other games exist that do allow such amendments. I’m thinking specifically of the game “Nomic,” invented by Peter Suber. Part of the game is amending the game’s rules. From this core, many different variants have been created and played, in some circumstances evolving into virtual societies with money, legislatures, courts, markets, and other such features. Some games even have had foreign relations with other games.