The Right to Play

Abstract:     
A corporation is a fantasy, a fictional person created by law and endowed with certain rights and responsibilities. We create these fictional people because we've learned it is useful and sensible to do so. As we enter an age of ubiquitous make-believe systems, it will useful and sensible to create fictional countries in cyberspace, fantasy lands that have certain rights and responsibilities. This paper argues for a law of interration, parallel to the law of incorporation, that instantiates and, more importantly, protects the fantasy environments we create. They need protection because the encroachments of daily life - taxes, regulations, torts - will surely drain them of any sense of Otherness. And without the sense of Otherness, synthetic worlds will have lost a great deal of what makes them precious and valuable to us.

Keywords: Synthetic worlds, law, play

JEL Classifications: L86

Accepted Paper Series