Written by a lawyer. Who is also a gamer. Who is also a girl.
Posted in Thursday: Media.
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– September 9, 2010
In addition to the various games I played and cos players I saw, while I was at PAX I also sat through a few good panels and presentations. Some, like the Saturday night concert, have little to do with games, and were pure entertainment, but at least two were tangentially legally related. I missed one that had been scheduled for 9pm on Saturday that could have been interesting, about “Why Gamers should care about Net Neutrality.” There had been a reschedule from the late afternoon to the late evening on that one, and I missed it in favor of standing in line for the concert, instead.
Tales from the Din: The XBox Live Enforcement Team Talks
This panel was third in a series, and featured Stephen “Stepto” Toulouse and a few from his team talking about what they do to enforce the Microsoft Terms of Service, and how the process to evict jerks from multiplayer actually works. There wasn’t much time for a Q&A at the end, but I regret not asking them how they, as people who are paid to observe and enforce the rules of a virtual space, see their roles in that virtual world. They used graphics of police officers in their slides, and referred to their roles as angels in a more fanciful presentation, but those two ideas are not identical.
The role of the police, in the physical legal system at least, is to gather data and arrest criminals, which the team does. They have the ability to ban players instantly if the enforcers are online and observe bad behavior, but if they don’t observe it themselves, they have to evaluate the evidence gathered by other players to determine if it is truly bad behavior worthy of sanctions. In that way,the enforcement team acts more like the District Attorney’s office, in deciding which players should be charged, rather than the gatherers of evidence themselves.
As for the idea of being archangels, imposing the will of an all-powerful entity from above on the unsuspecting jerks at the behest of thousands of praying gamers? Well, the image is not inaccurate, but suggests that the role of the enforcer requires no thought or judgment, and is individually merited, not generally applied. If one does not believe in the angels of enforcement, who is summoned to impose justice?
Legal Issues in Video Game Law
This panel was scheduled dead last at PAX, on Sunday afternoon. Most of the discussion dealt with the upcoming Schwarzenegger v. EMA Supreme Court case, for which at least one of the panelists was helping to write an amicus brief on behalf of the game industry. The case involves the ability of the state to add big “18+” stickers to games with violent and sexually explicit content, much like the music industry. The aspect of the case that worried the panel the most was that the Supreme Court usually only takes on issues where the circuits are split, and not where the circuits are in agreement.
So far, every time a state or city has attempted to regulate the sale of video games to minors, the local courts have struck the regulation down as unconstitutional. Thus, the panelists suggested that either the Court wants to prevent other states from attempting to enact similar laws, lose the ensuing court case, and cost taxpayers money, or that the Court is going to overturn all of the prior decisions, and say that this type of regulation is okay. Another aspect to the California law is that it mandates the posting of a physical sticker on the box, but increasing numbers of games are sold without a physical product at all. How would an online retailer comply with such a law? Would they still be fined for each sale of a violent game within the state without such a sticker? Unsettling questions for the video game industry, and ones that could curtail the creation of certain types of games altogether.
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Posted in Wednesday: Current Issues.
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– September 8, 2010
Isn’t really a problem with the convention, or most of the attendees, or even the natural result of having a multi-day convention. It’s a sudden demand for a service that for other conventions functions adequately without a problem.
In previous years, it was the demand for food that caused problems with the nearby vendors. Subway ran out of bread, Starbucks and Tully’s closed hours before the weekend concerts, much less the last panels, and there wasn’t very much publicity for attendees on where to find alternate sources of food and caffeine.
Like other conventions based around a fan community rather than a professional gathering, PAX encourages attendees to be at the convention location for the entire time it is open. This means that instead of having rotating shifts of people moving in and out of the convention center, moving away to visit the city and network with the other attendees, people who go to PAX don’t want to go further than a block, for fear of missing something or because their entire weekend is fully booked.
Instead of a food shortage or Swine Flu outbreak, this year the problem was wireless data saturation, or the inability to send or receive texts during peak hours, with all that entails. “That doesn’t sound like much of a problem,” you say. Imagine, however, you are a vendor who has spent however much for your table at PAX, and your nifty wireless credit card machine doesn’t work because you can’t dial out of the cloud. Imagine trying to get in touch with friends for lunch and being unable to get their texts until hours later. Imagine needing to check email for work or because of a sick relative, and being unable to get any type of signal within a few blocks of PAX’s epicenter.
Some of the problem may be that the Washington State Convention Center, as a cement building, has dead zones like any older building, where cell tower coverage cannot reach. Some blame may also be due to the exhibits on the expo hall floor itself, as the flashing lights and hundreds of computers and displays produce white noise that interferes with signals for dozens of feet in every direction. More can be laid at the feet of those live-blogging, tweeting, and attempting to document everything they do for those who could not be there to appreciate it as well. And part of the problem is because of the nature of PAX itself. We’re nerds. We’re early adopters, fairly tech savvy, and probably have more electronics per person than almost anywhere else in Seattle. Cram that all into one or two square city blocks, and there will be signal failure on a massive scale.
However, this was also the second year that PAX did “Queue Room Entertainment” by having quizzes, music videos, and other interactions by a company called Get in Line. In practice and in theory this is a great concept, where you have large screens entertaining the several thousand people waiting to get into the convention or other queue, but the form of entertainment periodically contributed to the problem. The shot above is of one of the quizzes, where everyone in the room (1500 attendees, 5 panelists, and at least 25 staffers) attempted to text their choice to a number within 45 seconds of the screen appearing. In the Queue Room, the texters could number over 2000. Saturation of information during the peak times, and then over-saturation during the quizzes.
The official PAX twitter feed did discuss the expected failure of the cell towers before the convention started, and what signal was provided was because of boosts and extra bandwidth provided. In a way, it should be a mark of success that this year, the problem with PAX wasn’t that everyone came down with H1Nerd1 or caused a local food shortage, but that too much information was attempting to escape the confines of the venue. A minor annoyance at the time, but otherwise a sign of a well-run and popular event.
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Posted in Tuesday: Potpourri.
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– September 7, 2010
