The ideas in this post have been knocking around for some time, but every so often I’ll see something that is so intriguing, it forces me to consolidate everything that, previously, was only related in the most cursory of ways.

It pretty much goes without saying that I’m fascinated at what goes on at the exact point where real life and the internet intersect. I don’t mean like the jack in the back of the computer, I mean sociologically speaking. As “computer savvy” as some people believe me to be, I really don’t interact with the internet at all. I pull information from it and only in a few very select places, such as this Not A Blog™, do I push information into it. So it’s an endless source of fascination to see how events shift between—for lack of a better term—these worlds.

A perfect example of this recently happened in an online science fiction game called Eve Online. Eve is like World of Warcraft in space: a bunch of people running around doing whatever in space ships. It actually sounds kind of cool, although you’d be hard pressed to get me to participate. Anyway, what happened was that someone was running the equivelent of a real life bank: taking deposits and giving loans, giving interest to the depositors collected from the debtors and skimming a percentage. Exactly the sort of thing regular banks do. He had thousands, if not millions, worth of in-game money. And then he disappeared. In the game, I mean.

Turns out he was a pirate (in the game) who made a new identity for himself (in the game, still), earned peoples trust enough that they’d give him money (right, in the game), and then left with it. Now people who got screwed in the game are trying to sue him not in the game. That is, in real life.

The implications of this are huge. In particular, how much do regular laws effect in-game happenings? There is no precedence set for this. We’re in unknown territory here. If this had happened in real life there’s no question. In real life, real, actual lives would have been ruined. But what is actually lost in the game world?

A certain amount of US dollars are lost, yes. It’s not much, but like many MMORPGs, in-game stuff can be bought for not-in-game money. In addition to this, people also spend real-life money to get access to the game so, to be sure, there is a certain monetary value loss associated with this in-game “crime”. Crime being in sneer quotes because, technically speaking, it’s not illegal in the game.

However, lives aren’t ruined. It sucks for the people who lost stuff, and in a sense it ruins their in-game life, but they’re not really any worse off in real life than they were before this happened. But there is still a great deal of something which was lost: time.

If successfully prosecuted in real life, the pirate will probably owe a monetary settlement. But in what? Real-life money? They can’t exactly make him pay back the in-game money without resorting to a dues ex machina because nobody except the admins knows where he is in the game—not to mention it wasn’t against game rules. But if a real-life payout was made, this money could be used to purchase in-game goods, creating an artificial influx of cash to a (relatively) controlled economy. Besides, in real life, there was little, if any, monetary damage done at all, so this isn’t really appropriate compensation.

The implied precedence here is that it is not a crime to steal people’s money, but it is a crime to waste their time, even if there’s not really a dollar figure associated with the time. This leads to the following rather unusual conclusion.

Traditionally, many crimes can be traced to damaging a person financially. Fraud, theft, deceptive marketing: all these things serve to waste a person’s money. Indeed, they also waste time, but there is a definite dollar figure attached to the goods in each case. But what happens when the money and the time are seperated to the point where a crime committed wastes little to no money whatsoever?

People still want compensation, but they want it for their time. Nevermind that the time has no inherent value in this case. They still feel cheated.

This reveals something fascinating: any non-consensual crime takes away people’s time. In the past, time and money have been so inexorably linked that people could be monitarily compensated for just about anything and it was considered just. Even more telling, when monetary compensation isn’t enough, what do we do? We take away the criminal’s time by putting them in jail. Now that we’ve started to layer environments on top of environments, we find that the money doesn’t translate well from one to the next. But the time still does. This disparity reveals something previously hidden behind our motivations.

A few examples:

  • Murder: takes away a significant portion of a peron’s time alive.
  • Theft, Fraud, etc: nullifies the time spent earning the stuff that was stolen (after all, the goods can be—and often are—replaced).
  • Rape: takes significant time away from the victim, either in carrying a child to term and rearing it, or by the trauma recovery process, which can take years, if people can fully recover at all.
  • Adultery: The time spent by one partner to foster a relationship is wasted when the other partner goes and spends time with someone else.

On the other hand, where the loss of time is not clear, that a crime was committed at all becomes more nebulous. This is particularly evident in so-called consensual crimes where the loss of time is mutually consented, regardless of what the action is. Not to mention we put up with our time being wasted by our superiors, because they compensate us for it in some way, whereas we’re annoyed when our employees waste our time for the same reason: because we’re compensating them for it in some way.

It’s almost as if our morals are guided by the subconscious knowledge that we only have a limited amount of time on this earth; all our laws and the interactions we have serve to make the best use of what time we’ve got, and to protect everyone else’s. Consider also that wealth is not a measure of happiness. The most happy people seem to be those who make good use of their time. What do we consider to be a good use of someone’s time? When they spend their time doing as much as they can to improve how well other people are able to spend their time. Not to mention, what one thing do nearly all religions’ versions of paradise and punishment have in common with all other religions’? The thing we don’t have on Earth: unlimited time.

I could cite hundreds of examples of this, but I don’t think there’s a need. Simply look at the world with this in mind and it becomes apparent in everything.

In the case of Eve Online, the only real crime committed was that a great many people had their time wasted. But to any of us, that’s a crime in itself. As a species, we simply have not recognized this yet.

-Ted