Abstract
This paper focuses on the role of punishment as a critical social mechanism for cheating prevention in MMORPGs. The role of punishment is empirically investigated in a case study of the MMORPG Tibia (Cipsoft 1997–2011) (http://www.tibia.com) and by focusing on the use of bots to cheat. We describe the failure of punishment in Tibia, which is perceived by players as one of the elements facilitating the proliferation of bots. In this process some players act as a moral enterprising group contributing to the reform of the game rules and in particular to the reform of the Tibia punishment system by the game company. In the conclusion we consider the ethical issues raised by our findings and we propose some general reflections on the role of punishment and social mechanisms for the governance of online worlds more generally.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See http://www.mmodata.net for updated statistics about MMOPRGs.
European Network and Information Security Agency.
In our literature review on cheating we consider only contributions related with digital and online games, in order to narrow the focus of the review and concentrate our effort on the digital aspects of cheating. We purposefully avoid to discuss contributions addressing cheating “offline”, as for instance in DeKoven (1978).
Chapter 6 of Consalvo (2007) is an exception which contains a discussion of the anti-cheating industry and the development of anti-cheating tools.
This view has recently been criticized also by Withson (2010).
With botting we refer to the act of using a bot. Later in the paper we use the term botter to refer to the user of a bot. These terms follows those used by Tibia players in their discussions.
Some MMORPGs may tolerate the use of macros and bots, but this is more the exception than the rule. (see Wikipedia Contributors 2010, MMORPGs, bots).
Gamemasters are people (often employees of the game companies) that act as moderator or enforcer of the game rules.
This principle is called the Balance of Justice Standard.
Here the author refers mainly to in-game actions.
With a ban of more than 100,000 accounts in total and the deletion of 3500 of them. These statistics on deletion were updated by Cipsoft until December 2009 (from http://www.tibia.com/news/?subtopic=latestnews&id=1148). Official stats on mass bans are also updated until December 2009 and the number was about 50,000. However further mass-bans have followed during 2010, bringing the number of banned accounts certainly above 100,000.
Tibia Community Forums URL http://www.forum.tibia.com/forum/?subtopic=communityboards. The forum excerpts we present in the paper can be retrieved—if not deleted by Cipsoft, which systematically removes closed threads—using the post-number provided after each quotation.
Data collection and analysis follows the Association of Internet Researcher Ethical Guidelines (Ess and AoIR 2001).
We do not consider here the issue of compensation to the victims of crime, as this is an aspect which did not emerge clearly from our data. The failure of punishment in our case was not a failure of compensation to individual victims for a singular case of offence, as we are analysing the general case of botting in a game.
Shelbz is the name the player used to post on Tibia forums.
Posts to the forums contain many errors. We avoided using sic for identifying mistakes and presented them as they were.
Volunteer gamemasters are de facto experienced Tibia players. They are meant to enforce all Tibia rules and not just those related with cheating.
During 2009 and 2010 Cipsoft reformed rule enforcement in various ways, including the Game masters system.
This thread has reached 250 pages of discussion to date and it is still open, see http://www.forum.tibia.com/forum/?action=thread&threadid=1978162&pagenumber=1 .
Irl—in real life.
CIP stand for Cipsoft.
A single Tibia account allows the creation of multiple characters.
Crime could be too strong a word for botting. However, often players themselves make analogies between botting and real world crimes such as bank robberies. We use this word consistently in the empirical part of this paper, because that is the terminology used by players and this is in accordance with our analysis approach.
Except deletion which happens only after multiple severe violations and against the company’s will to act inclusively.
References
Blizzard Entertainment. (2010). World of Warcraft end user license agreement. http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/eula.html. Accessed 20 Oct 2010.
Achterbosch, L., Pierce, R., & Simmons, G. (2008). Massively multiplayer online role-playing games: The past, present, and future. Comput Entertain, 5(4), 1–33.
Alemi, F. (2007). An Avatar’s day in court: A proposal for obtaining relief and resolving disputes in virtual world games. UCLA Journal of Law & Technology, 11(2). http://www.lawtechjournal.com/articles/2007/06_080130_alemi.php. Accessed 14 July 2010.
Bainbridge, W. S. (2010). The Warcraft civilization. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Beccaria, C. (1764 Trans. 1819). On crimes and punishments. http://www.constitution.org/cb/crim_pun.htm. Accessed 20 May 2010.
Becker, H. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: The Free Press.
Bedau, H. A., & Kelly, E. (2005). Punishment. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/punishment/. Accessed 29 Nov 2010.
Bijker, W. E. (1995). Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Braman, S., & Malaby, T. M. (2006). Preface. First Monday, special issue number 7 (September 2006), http://firstmonday.org/issues/special11_9/preface/index.html. Accessed 22 Jan 2011.
Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge (pp. 196–233). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Castronova, E. (2005). Synthetic worlds: The business and pleasure of gaming. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Cipsoft. (1997–2011). Tibia. http://www.tibia.com.
Cipsoft. (2009a). Where will cheaters go from here? http://www.tibia.com/news/?subtopic=latestnews&id=910. Accessed 1 June 2010.
Cipsoft. (2009b). Tibia rules. http://www.tibia.com/support/?subtopic=tibiarules. Accessed 1 June 2010.
Cipsoft. (2010a). Tibia manual. http://www.tibia.com/gameguides/?subtopic=manual. Accessed 1 June 2010.
Cipsoft. (2010b). Anti cheating measures reloaded. http://www.tibia.com/news/?subtopic=newsarchive&id=1207&fbegind=23&fbeginm=12&fbeginy=2009&fendd=22&fendm=1&fendy=2010&flist=11111111. Accessed 1 June 2010.
Cipsoft. (2010c). Tibia extended service agreement. http://www.tibia.com/support/?subtopic=legaldocuments&page=extendedagreement. Accessed 02 Sep 2011.
Consalvo, M. (2007). Cheating: Gaining advantage in videogames. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Consalvo, M. (2009). There is no magic circle. Games and Culture, 4(4), 408–417.
Cragg, W. (1992). The practice of punishment: Toward a theory of restorative justice. London: Routledge.
De Paoli, S., & Kerr, A.. (2010a). The assemblage of cheating: How to study cheating as imbroglio in MMORPGs. FibreCulture Journal, Issue 16, http://sixteen.fibreculturejournal.org/the-assemblage-of-cheating-how-to-study-cheating-as-imbroglio-in-mmorpgs/. Accessed 10 Sep 2010.
De Paoli, S., & Kerr, A . (2010b). “We will always be one step ahead of them”: A case study on the economy of cheating in MMORPGs. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 2(4). https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/download/865/630. Accessed 10 Sep 2010.
de Zwart, M. (2009). Piracy versus control: Models of virtual world governance and their impact on player and user experience. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 2(3). https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/663/511. Accessed 16 June 2011.
DeKoven, B. (1978). The well-played game. New York: Doubleday.
Di Chen, B., & Maheswaran, M. (2004). A fair synchronization protocol with cheat proofing for decentralized online multiplayer games. In Proceedings. Third IEEE international symposium on network computing and applications, 2004. (NCA 2004), pp 372–375.
Ess, C., & AoIR. (2002). Ethical decision-making and Internet research. http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf. Accessed 4 March 2009.
European Network of Information Security Agency. (2008). Virtual worlds, real money security and privacy in massively-multiplayer online games and social and corporate virtual worlds. ENISA Position Paper. http://www.enisa.europa.eu/pages/02_01_press_2008_11_20_online_gaming.html. Accessed 1 June 2010.
Ferretti, S., & Roccetti, M. (2006). AC/DC: An algorithm for cheating detection by cheating. In Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on network and operating systems support for digital audio and video (NOSSDAV ‘06) (pp. 1–6). New York, NY: ACM.
Fields, D. A., & Kafai, Y. B. (2009). Cheating in virtual worlds: Transgressive designs for learning. On the Horizon, 17(1), 1–20.
Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Penguin.
Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. London: Sage.
Hoglund, G., & McGraw, G. (2008). Exploiting online games: Cheating massively distributed systems. Boston: First Addison-Wesley Professional.
Humphreys, S. (2008). Ruling the virtual world: Governance in massively multiplayer online games. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11(2), 149–171.
Johansson, M. (2009). Why unreal punishment in response to unreal crimes might actually be a really good thing. Ethics and Information Technology, 11(1), 71–79.
Kerr, A. (2006). The business and culture of digital games: Gamework/gameplay. London: Sage.
Kimppa, K., & Bissett, A. (2005). The ethical significance of cheating in online computer games. International Review of Information Ethics, 4, 31–38.
Kücklich, J. (2007). Homo Deludens—cheating as a methodological tool in digital games research. Convergence, 13(4), 355–367.
Kücklich, J. (2009). A techno-semiotic approach to cheating in computer games: Or how I learned how to stop worrying and love the machine. Games and Culture, 4(2), 158–169.
Latour, B. (1988). The princes for machines as well as for machinations. In B. Elliott (Ed.), Technology and social process (pp. 20–43). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacKenzie, D., & Wajcman, J. (Eds.). (1999). The social shaping of technology (2nd ed.). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Morrison, B. (2009). The game design canvas: Punishment and rewards systems. http://thegameprodigy.com/the-game-design-canvas-punishment-and-reward-systems/. Accessed 22 Jan 2011.
Nardi, B. (2010). My life as a night elf priest. An antropological account of world of Warcraft. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Rousseau, J. J. (1762). The social contract. Available at http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm. Accessed 10 Oct 2010.
Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Sicart, M. (2009). The ethics of computer games. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Smed, J., & Hakkonen, H. (2006). Algorithms and networking for computer games. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Smith, J. H.(2004). Playing Dirty - Understanding Conflicts in Multiplayer Games. 5th Annual Conference of The Association of Internet Researchers. The University of Sussex, 19-22 September, http://jonassmith.dk/weblog/uploads/playing_dirty.pdf. Accessed 15 July 2010.
Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Taylor, T. L. (2006). Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Wikipedia contributors (2010). MMORPG bots. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MMORPG_bots&oldid=363989084. Accessed 29 November 2010.
Withson, J. R. (2010). Rule Making and Rule Breaking: Game Development and the Governance of Emergent Behaviour. FibreCulture Journal, Issue 16, http://sixteen.fibreculturejournal.org/rule-making-and-rule-breaking-game-development-and-the-governance-of-emergent-behaviour/. Accessed 15 October 2010.
Yan, J., & Choi, H. J. (2002). Security issues in online games. The Electronic Library, 20(2), 125–133.
Yan, J. Y., & Randell, B. (2005). A systematic classification of cheating in online games. In Proceedings of 4th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on network and system support for games (pp. 1–9). New York, NY: ACM.
Acknowledgments
This research received the support of the Irish Higher Education Authority under the PRTLI 4 programme and their partners on the ‘Serving Society: Future Communications Networks and Services’ project (2008–2010). We would like to thank Brian Conway for reading early versions of this manuscript and Cristiano Storni and Dmitri Botvich for their comments on this work. Stefano wishes also to thank the <ahref Foundation for supporting the writing of this manuscript. We also would like to thank the Ethics and Information Technology reviewers for their comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
De Paoli, S., Kerr, A. On crimes and punishments in virtual worlds: bots, the failure of punishment and players as moral entrepreneurs. Ethics Inf Technol 14, 73–87 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-011-9281-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-011-9281-7