Meta Ethics for the Metaverse: The Ethics of Virtual Worlds

MG 2009 Proceedings, 2009

In synthetic worlds, such as Second Life, World of Warcraft, or SIMS, the dichotomy between reality and virtuality still remains one of the unsolved philosophical inquiries of our time. There remains skepticism regarding the value of virtual experiences versus those of real life. This research presents a starting point for an ethical discourse on the technology of virtual worlds and addresses two questions: What are unique affordances of virtual worlds? And, what are the ethical implications that emerge due to these unique affordances? Four ...

2008

This paper investigates the ethics of the appearance and behavior of avatars in massively multi-user online communities, in particular, avatars created for virtual business interactions in Second Life. The ethics of research conducted with avatars in 3D online environments is also discussed.

2022

Online multiplayer games present players with vast opportunities to interact with one another in rich and interesting ways. However, this freedom also allows players to interact in harmful or ‘toxic’ ways, from trolling, griefing and disruptive play to abusive chat and player harassment. This toxicity is problematic because it can cause significant harm to players and because it can drive players away and deter new players from joining games. This has led to calls for more ethical play and design. However, ethics in the context of multiplayer gaming is a nebulous concept. Literature suggests that the context of an in-game act can heavily dictate how it is interpreted in a specific game and community, and that different players can hold very different moral views about the same in-game act. This presents a problem: If there are multiple ways of understanding in-game ethics, what does it mean to ethically play and design multiplayer games? This thesis addresses this question through a comprehensive, contextualist, empirical examination of the ethics of multiplayer gameplay and design. It investigates the ethical understandings of gaming communities from the bottom up, examines how these understandings are tied to ethical disagreements within these communities, and explores what ethical design might look like in these varied, shifting and morally complex contexts. In doing so, this thesis adopts a qualitative, constructionist and reflexive methodological approach. It presents three studies encompassing analysis of hundreds of online comments, 40 in-depth interviews, and 3 focus groups with both players and game industry professionals as two key groups making up gaming communities. The first study examines a morally important case study of groping in a virtual reality game. Thematic analysis of over 300 online responses to this particular incident demonstrates the ways that commenters attempt to make sense of this act by comparing and contrasting it to other physical and in-game acts amidst a tense sociomoral context. The second study analyses 20 individual interviews and 3 focus groups with players to formulate the ‘apathetic villager theory’ of player amorality, which suggests that players’ apparently morally disengaged stances can disguise a variety of attitudes towards in-game acts, including a sense of helplessness in the face of disruptive behaviours, as well as an active valuing of disruption. This study also presents a novel framework of ludomorality that captures the main concepts that players draw on in their ethical deliberations—in particular, it highlights the importance of the ludic and digital context in shaping their ethical judgments. The third study presents a reflexive thematic analysis of 21 interviews with game industry professionals. It highlights the wicked problem that this group faces in the design of multiplayer games, and puts forward a set of design considerations to address these issues. Through these three studies, this thesis contributes a nuanced theoretical perspective on multiplayer ethics. Rather than understanding players and industry professionals as amoral, this thesis emphasises the multiple layers in which the ludic and digital context influence ethical deliberation. It finds that rapid developments in games and gaming communities, as well as wider discourses around ethical practice tied to technology, produce conflicting understandings of what it means to play and to play ‘right’. This complex social context, along with current industry structures that emphasise a game’s functionality and profits over ethical governance, produce a number of difficulties in designing multiplayer games in ethical ways. Based on these findings, this thesis introduces the ISA principles (Information, Specificity, and Agility), which aim to assist designers and researchers in navigating multiplayer design in ethically divided contexts. In doing so, this thesis advocates for a contextualist approach to multiplayer ethics and design that both responds to and challenges the ambiguous ludomoral contexts at play.

2012

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS Papers Session Travellers Of The Art, II Summit of Latin American Art by Museum Karura Arts Centre (MKAC) 1 An Exploratory Research Agenda for 3-D Virtual Worlds as Collaborative Learning Ecosystems: Extracting Evidences from Literature 8 A Pattern-based Classification Model for 3-D Virtual Environments: From 'Building Blocks' to Religious Buildings 18 Beginning to explore constructionism in virtual worlds 27 For a Definition of Cyberformance 31 Language Learning in Virtual Worlds: The Role of FLA and Technical Anxiety 36 ...

Ethics and Information Technology (Forthcoming), 2024

Debate over the normativity of virtual phenomena is now widespread in the philosophical literature, taking place in roughly two distinct but related camps. The first considers the relevant problems to be within the scope of applied ethics, where the general methodological program is to square the intuitive (im)permissibility of virtual wrongdoings with moral accounts that justify their (im)permissibility. The second camp approaches the normativity of virtual wrongdoings as a metaphysical debate. This is done by disambiguating the ‘virtual’ character of ‘virtual wrongdoings’. Doing so is supposed to provide illuminating ontological distinctions that inform ethical aspects of the debate. We argue that each approach faces its own set of issues, and as a result, motivates consideration of an alternative. The alternative we suggest turns inquiry concerning the normativity of virtual wrongdoings into a distinctively conceptual question. Rather than asking whether some action is right or wrong, or whether some virtual phenomenon counts as a particular action at all, we argue that research into the normativity of virtual wrongdoings may be guided by reflecting on whether a concept that originated and developed within a non-virtual context should be exported into a foreign virtual domain. We consider this approach and several objections.

2009

Thomas and Brown / Why virtual Worlds Can Matter 37 Virtual worlds are persistent, avatar-based social spaces that provide players or participants with the ability to engage in long-term, coordinated conjoined action. In these spaces, cultures and meanings emerge from a complex set of interactions among the participants, rather than as part of a predefined story or narrative arc. At least in part, it is the players themselves who shape and to a large extent create the world they inhabit. While many virtual worlds provide the opportunity for that kind of world to emerge, game-based environments such as World of Warcraft or Eve Online illustrate it best because of the intense degree of coordinated action and co-presence among players. This sense of “being with others” and being able to share space, see physical representations of each other, and communicat e and act in that shared space provides a very specific set of affordances for players. This article is an effort to trace out and...

This article considers two related and fundamental issues about morality in a virtual world. The first is whether the anonymity that is a feature of virtual worlds can shed light upon whether people are moral when they can act with impunity. The second issue is whether there are any moral obligations in a virtual world and if so what they might be. Our reasons for being good are fundamental to understanding what it is that makes us moral or indeed whether any of us truly are moral. Plato grapples with this problem in book two of The Republic where Socrates is challenged by his brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon. They argue that people are moral only because of the costs to them of being immoral; the external constraints of morality. Glaucon asks us to imagine a magical ring that enables its wearers to become invisible and capable of acting anonymously. The ring is in some respects analogous to the possibilities created by online virtual worlds such as Second Life, so the dialogue is our entry point into considering morality within these worlds. These worlds are three dimensional user created environments where people control avatars and live virtual lives. As well as being an important social phenomenon, virtual worlds and what people chose to do in them can shed light on what people will do when they can act without fear of normal sanction. This paper begins by explaining the traditional challenge to morality posed by Plato, relating this to conduct in virtual worlds. Then the paper will consider the following skeptical objection. A precondition of all moral requirements is the ability to act. There are no moral requirements in virtual worlds because they are virtual and it is impossible to act in a virtual world. Because avatars do not have real bodies and the persons controlling avatars are not truly embodied, it is impossible for people to truly act in a virtual world. We will show that it is possible to perform some actions and suggest a number of moral requirements that might plausibly be thought to result. Because avatars cannot feel physical pain or pleasure these moral requirements are interestingly different from those of real life. Hume’s arguments for why we should be moral apply to virtual worlds and we conclude by considering how this explains why morality exists in these environments.

2014 IEEE Games Media Entertainment, 2014

In this paper, we will propose CINDR, a video game ethics framework, and use it as a semantic context for examining and classifying several example video games that represent various video game genres. Consequently, we will discuss ways in which the gaming industry could, in the future, create games while seriously considering the ethical issues virtual worlds can cause for players and their communities.

Frontiers in human dynamics, 2023

Many philosophers hold that the human risks associated with the development and use of metaverses arise primarily from their status-they are unreal in ways that make the experiences within them meaningless and thereby less prudentially valuable. This purported unreality is not merely a result of the virtual or intangible nature of metaverses. Rather, it arises from the idea that, regardless of the experiences, interactions, and a ordances of metaverses, what we do in these spaces is somehow di erent and impoverished compared to what we do in the physical world. Those who think this believe that our behavior and interactions within metaverses are inferior to our behaviors and interactions in the physical world in a way that confers less value on the lives of those engaging regularly within metaverses. Some commentators worry that repeated exposure to these impoverished virtual experiences will somehow dehumanize us or make us worse at o ine interactions, and certainly reduce the amount of time we have for more meaningful real-world pursuits. If true, this would be a serious concern for metaverse-evangelists and users. However, in this article we will argue that it is not so-in fact, metaverses are morally relevantly similar to the physical world, and capable of providing most of the experiences and interactions we find in the physical world-whether positive or negative. However, metaverses are not without risks. We claim that the real ethical problem with metaverses arises, in their current instantiation, from the risks involved in their development as commercial enterprises, locking users into particular infrastructures and placing power over the continuation or termination of the metaverse in the hands of a corporate entity that has goals and motivations independent of those of the users of the metaverse.