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

See all articles by Ung-gi Yoon

Ung-gi Yoon

Republic of Korea - Central District Court

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

Yoon, Ung-gi, 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 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1113604

Ung-gi Yoon (Contact Author)

Republic of Korea - Central District Court ( email )

Korea

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