The Ludic Turn in Virtual Law by Professor Greg Lastowka

SYNOPSIS
Current legal research on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) intentionally marginalizes the fact that the majority of these new social arenas are structured around game-like rules. Yet even virtual worlds like Second Life owe a great deal, in their architecture and guiding logic, to social practices of games and play. Legal scholars studying virtual worlds should not ignore the way in which the unique characteristics of games and play shape the rules of virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds are governed, to a significant degree, by rules of play. When we consider the work of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Bernard Suits, and other theorists of adult play, we find a strong consensus that ludic rules are specially crafted toward procedural and hedonic ends rather than instrumental and efficient ends. As a result, the guiding rules and software codes of virtual worlds inevitably diverge in important ways from the guiding logic of law.

This divergence has important practical implications for the application of law to virtual worlds. For example, standard presumptions about property rights, negligence, criminal law, and contract can be wholly inappropriate when applied to the rules of virtual worlds. This is problematic, given that law will not intervene effectively in virtual worlds if it insists on ignoring their true ludic nature. To the extent the law recognizes the ludic nature of virtual worlds, it must take a more modest and more nuanced approach to their regulation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Greg Lastowka is a Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law-Camden. His research focuses on the intersection of the Internet and intellectual property law. His opinions have been quoted in publications such as Nature, The Economist, Scientific American, and the New York Times. He is currently working on a book about law and virtual worlds.

Professor Lastowka earned his B.A. summa cum laude at Yale College in 1991. He earned his J.D. from the University of Virginia in 2000, where he was a Hardy Cross Dillard Scholar and an Article Editor for the Virginia Law Review. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Walter K. Stapleton on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and then was a litigator at Dechert LLP. He served as co-counsel for Ken Hamidi in the landmark case of Intel v. Hamidi.

In 2009, in recognition of his scholarship, Professor Lastowka was the recipient of a Rutgers Board Of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. During Spring 2009, Professor Lastowka was a visiting professor at Columbia University School of Law. In March 2008, he was a visiting artist in residence at the Rutgers-Camden department of Fine Arts. During Spring 2007 he was a visiting professor at the University of Graz, Austria. In 2005-2006, he was a fellow at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis, where he participated in a working group on the interdisciplinary study of intellectual property.