Property morality, though, is another matter. Ovid identified the creation of private property as the end of the golden age, and I’m not sure he’s wrong. Locke identifies work as what creates ownership — if one puts in the labor to create or process something, one has a claim to it. But this doesn’t trump other morals. A mugger may do harder, riskier work than a college professor, but does that mean the mugger is more entitled to his money? In the game, to invoke morality to say that is “my” wreck because I did the work of wrecking it is to invoke one moral stand on property — work creates ownership — but ignores another — killing people or destroying their property or generally using force to achieve one’s goals in the face of strenuous opposition is wrong. Unless the property-protection moralists become pacifists too, I don’t think their ethics stand up to scrutiny.

Pure miners might have a claim, but there again there are issues. What happens when half the work (mining) is done by one and half the work (hauling) by another? Does half-done work claim ownership? In farming, perhaps, but in mining where publicly available goods are being claimed by one owner, thus denying ownership the rest who might have mined it? And mining often creates public harms for private goods — think of all the accidents Ironfleet has prevented by cleaning up the spacelanes that careless miners have cluttered up.

Finally, there’s the ethical stance that it’s wrong to make people sad, but this has got to be a universal standard, lest it slip into the fun-and-selfish it’s wrong to make ME sad. The fun of someone careless with his jetcans may be hurt when it is salvaged, but the fun of salvagers is hurt when it is not, so I don’t see any ethical imperative growing out of that.

So, if they don’t like the rules, they should complain to the rule-makers, not the rule-followers, even if the rule-followers ruthlessly understand every letter of every rule.

If I jack truckloads of goods in the real world, it’s theft. If I jack hauler-loads of ore in EVE, it’s not theft — because the miner consented in advance. This isn’t just a legal point, it’s a moral one as well. There’s no iniquity to playing a bad guy in a game which offers (as its major selling point and sales differentiation from competing titles!) real live human badguys.

That said, I do still believe in sportsmanship and civility. I don’t understand how being verbally nasty to people is supposed to make the game more fun for anybody.

The steaming, cheese filled, meat topped essence of my point is that the day a governing non-pizza body begins to regulate the actions of players of any game, within the context of that game, that body will be violating civil liberties of free speech that are found in a wide variety of nation-flavors.

On that note, there’s someone willing to trade pepperoni-covered ambrosia for currency at my door.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/nsw/supreme_ct/2008/1292.html

Cute baby dragons with human faces in-breeding, anyone?