A Quest for the Legal Status of Avatars in MMORPG
Law & Technology, Published by Seoul National University Center for Law & Technology, Vol. 2, No. 4, July 2006
10 Pages Posted: 8 Feb 2020
Abstract
It is generally accepted view that MMORPG is (just) a game and the nature of the fun resides in consuming the contents ready made by the MMORPG developers or the authors. Suspecting that such perception of a considerable cause for the chaos in MMORPG sphere so far, I categorize MMORPG into a kind of social platform or play association (so I rearrange the spell as GRPMMO) and I think the essence of the fun lies in the operators & players' co-developing, co-creating, and co-playing contents and also in inter-players' evaluating and trading the value of play within the platform.
This is the reason that the avatars, elemental of MMORPG are no longer deemed characters and justly appreciated as super-strings which will clear up the chaos of the Big Bang and form a new cosmos. Awaring that the existing views regarding avatars as characters in novel, animated film or computer-role-playing-games or as personal information like that of identities had some limitation, I carved out the players' personal right that welded on the avatar with the chisel named of "persona" in Carl G. Jung's psychology and Friedrich W. Nietzsche's philosophy.
Keywords: avatar, MMORPG, persona, Car G. Jung, personal rights, platform
JEL Classification: K10
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation