Guilds do in fact directly affect the social and gaming experiences of players. Much of this has focused on the scale of individual players or of (synthetic) world wide communities, however while only briefly acknowledging the effects of guilds – player run communities within MMORPGs – have on all of these topics. The academic literature thus far has covered a vast amount of ground in exploring issues such as governance, sociality, economics, and identity. These are largely populated, graphical, avatar mediated, online spaces, or to be more precise, game oriented synthetic worlds. Massively multi-player online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, are gaining momentum in both popular cultural and academia. Avatar attachment is expressive of identity and self-conception and should therefore be accorded the moral significance we give to real-life attachments that play a similar role. Arguments against according moral significance to virtual harm fail because they do not reflect participants’ and programmers’ experiences and expectations of virtual communities and they have the unintended consequence of failing to grant significance to attachments that we take for granted, morally speaking. I argue that we cannot dismiss avatar attachment as morally insignificant without being forced to also dismiss other, more acceptable, forms of attachment such as attachment to possessions, people and cultural objects and communities. In this paper I argue that this dismissal of virtual harm is based on a set of false assumptions about the nature of avatar attachment and its relation to genuine moral harm. Participants are often greatly distressed when their avatars are harmed by other participants’ malicious actions, yet there is a tendency in the literature on this topic to dismiss such distress as evidence of too great an involvement in and identification with the online character. ![]() Despite attempts to minimise the likelihood of interpersonal virtual harm, programmers cannot remove all possibility of online deviant behaviour. ![]() Unfortunately participants can also use their avatars to stalk, kill, sexually assault, steal from and torture each other. In these online communities participants can use their online personas – avatars – to chat, fight, make friends, have sex, kill monsters and even get married. Multi-user online environments involve millions of participants world-wide.
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