Law, Order and Conflicts of Interest in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

This paper examines how conflicts and social norms operate in massively multiplayer online games, using the fantasy MMORPG Everquest as its case. Its central argument is that in large online worlds, the rules governing player behavior arise from two sources: the rules set by the publisher and the norms that players develop among themselves over time. The authors propose a conceptual framework for analyzing conflicts of interest that distinguishes between private, micro-public, meso-public, and macro-public levels of collective rationality, arguing that tensions between these levels are productive entry points for understanding how virtual societies function.

The empirical basis is an ethnographic study comprising roughly 400 hours of gameplay conducted between February and April 2004, supplemented by in-game interviews, detailed logging of gameplay events, and analysis of two Everquest discussion forums, including Sony's official forum. From this material the authors identify several recurring objectionable behaviors: kill-stealing, pulling monster "trains" to populated zone lines without warning, camping spots, twinking and power-leveling, automated play through macros, and virtual commerce in items for real money. Most of these are regulated through informal social sanctions rather than formal enforcement, and the effectiveness of such sanctions depends heavily on the individual player's susceptibility to social pressure.

The analysis frames these behaviors as social dilemmas in which individually rational choices undermine collective welfare, drawing on the prisoner's dilemma. The authors also examine the powerful role of guilds, which in some cases demand high levels of commitment that can conflict with players' offline obligations. Drawing comparisons to pre-modern medieval guilds and communities, the paper suggests that guild structures in MMOGs revive small-scale, high-commitment group dynamics, and that offline traceability is a mechanism for enforcing accountability. The authors note that the game publisher plays a limited role in upholding order, a parallel they associate with weak central authority in pre-modern societies. The paper is explicitly exploratory rather than exhaustive, and it positions its framework as a foundation for future research.