It’s typical when playing an MMO to refer to your avatar as yourself, as in, “I visited Ironforge.” or “I just killed Leroy!” The reality, of course, is that you did not do those things in any literal manner. What you did was send input to a server that moved some bits around in a database, and sent info to your client, which displayed some text and/or images. Within the fiction of the world, ‘you’ are not doing anything either. Your avatar-character is.

I was reading a blog post today (find it here), and I got to thinking, though not about the article itself. At the very end of the post, the author writes, “After all, Anshe Chung herself started out as a virtual whore.” After I finished chuckling to myself, I started thinking about defamation and the nature of identity in virtual worlds.

What if I started off this post by claiming, “Anshe Chung is a Prostitute.” What am I saying? Am I saying that Ailin Graef, the person who uses the Anshe Chung avatar is a prostitute? If so, I’m surely committing defamation. Or am I stating that Anshe Chung the avatar is a prostitute? In this case, that’s probably not particularly controversial insofar as the Anshe Chung avatar has apparently engaged in prostitution-like activities inside of Second Life. Within the fiction of Second Life, Anshe Chung is a prostitute. On the other hand, in the “real” world, Anshe Chung is not a person and is not capable of committing prostitution. This brings up a whole raft of identity questions for me:

  • Can an avatar be defamed? It seems to me not, but IANAL of course. (Can brands be defamed? Since Anshe Chung is reasonably a brand within Second Life, is it possible to defame Anshe Chung the avatar-brand in a way that’s not possible with an SL user that isn’t famous?)
  • If someone alleges that an avatar committed a crime (such as rape), is anyone being defamed? The avatar cannot, of course, actually commit rape, since rape cannot take place in a virtual environment any more than murder can. Would the person playing the avatar have cause for a defamation claim? What about if the avatar is typically controlled by multiple people. Would all of those people have cause for a defamation claim? What if the avatar committed what is referred to in-fiction as rape?
  • If it is defamation against the user controlling the avatar when an avatar is falsely accused of committing an action in-fiction (which seems incredibly unlikely to me), wouldn’t that mean that we’re free to accuse anyone whose avatar has ever killed a sentient being in a video game of being a murderer?
  • If it isn’t defamation to make false accusations about an avatar, what’s to stop thinly veiled defamation against famous users via their avatars? For instance, imagine a situation, like Anshe Chung, where everybody knows of the link between the real person (Ailin Graef) and her avatar, Anshe Chung. She’s likely got the single most famous avatar in the history of virtual worlds, so she’s a good example. Again, leaving aside the fact that Anshe Chung is incorporated as a company and is a real brand (just using her name because it’s familiar), couldn’t someone very effectively defame Ailin by just accusing Anshe Chung of regularly committing fraud?
  • What if someone uses their avatar’s name as a general pseudonym? Prokofy Neva comes to mind, for example. Does this affect the ability to defame via attacks on the avatar?
  • Am I going at this from completely the wrong angle? Does it come down, instead, to the motivation on the part of the defamer? (Ie if I clearly mean that by Anshe Chung I’m referring to Ailin Graef rather than the avatar.)

I’m certainly not a lawyer and don’t have any answers to the above, but I think they’re interesting questions. If anyone reading is a lawyer, I’d love to hear your opinion.