Ian Lewis' Blog

Holy Crap!!

I just found out about this game called The Sims Online. It's basically a version of the Sims where you control an avatar online. You can chat, run a business, own a house etc.

The most interesting part is that communities have formed in the online world that are quite disturbing. These include bondage and sadomasochism groups, a mafia, and a shadow government. These groups have fund set up to finance activities within the game. Some of their activities within the game include distruction of property in the game, extorting online money (which can be turned into real money on e-bay), and prostitution. And apparently many of the prostitutes in the game are minors in real life.

Around the same time all of these things were forming a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan, Peter Ludlow, created an online blog that was meant as a newspaper for the biggest city in the game, Alphaville. It was called the Alphaville Herald. This dood reported on various happenings within the game but found out about many of the activities going on and started reporting on them.

After bringing many of these things to light Maxis, the developers, and EA, the distributers, banned Peter from the game and removed all references to the Alphaville Herald from the game and banned future mentions of it. They claimed it was for breaching the Terms of Service by linking to a commercial site (the site had banner ads). They gave him 72 hours to fix it and he did by removing the banners on his site (making it non-commercial) but they deleted his account and banned him from the game anyway.

All I have to say is WOW. I, for one, think this has big implecations in for online gaming and censorship. Crazy.