Deloitte & Touche, the liquidator of BCCI, has brought the case against the Bank in the hope of winning £1bn in compensation for its remaining creditors.Yesterday Gordon Pollock, one of Britain’s highest paid QCs who is acting for the liquidators, also accused officials at the Bank of lying to Lord Bingham, now Britain’s most senior law lord. The official penned in the margin an amendment to the phrase, saying: “In good standing is a bit of Bankese which might puzzle the odd wog.”In a trial set to take a year and a half and to rack up £50m in legal costs, the Bank is fighting allegations it flouted its public duty by not supervising BCCI, set up by the Pakistani financier Agha Hasan Abedi, more carefully. The court said that because the virtual goods had been acquired
using his labour, time, cash and “wisdom”, they belonged to him
and had real value.. An employee at the Bank of England referred to officials at central banks in other parts of the world as “wogs” who might not understand a basic request for information by the City’s most famous institution. Don’t think that is trivial: right now, one
million simoleans trades for $22 (£12) on the auction website eBay.

Online economies can even intermingle with the real one. Last month, a court
in Beijing ruled in favour of Li Hongchen who sued the operator of the
online game Red Moon after his virtual money and weapons were stolen by a
hacker. Now imagine them living their entire existence within a
computer.

That is essentially what happens with The Sims Online.

It is a self-contained computer game that you can play on your PC and you can
create an entire virtual economy, with all the mobs, tricksters and
prostitution that you get in the real world.

For some people, a life online is better than the real thing, because you can
be more than you are in real life. In June last year, for example, Sim mobs
turned up on virtual doorsteps, demanding protection money – payable in the
online currency, simoleans. He added: “The more an
online game simulates real life, the more the social problems in that game
will simulate real life.”

In other words, it is much more than just a game.

The bewildering world of the Sims

By Charles Arthur

Think of all the people you have “encountered” on the internet, but
never actually met. But
since Maxis isn’t all that good at those aspects, the Herald
censorship smacks more of tyranny for its own sake.”

You can draw your own conclusions about how this relates to the politics of
the real world, but the parallels are there.

Another academic, John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University, has
taken the Sims issue as emblematic of broader lessons to be learned from
online gaming and the proclivities of human nature.

He said that online games were an invitation to young people to act out
fantasies of bad behaviour – especially if the participants were outsiders
in real life, as computer geeks often are. TSO is a positively Brechtian world of violence,
flim-flammery, and low-down dirty tricks.

“On the other hand, Maxis acts like a classic despot, using its powers to
single out individual critics for the dungeons and the firing squads.

The
usual real-world justification for this kind of arbitrary action is the need
for a strong central hand to protect public safety and common welfare. The academics are having a field
day as they see real-life issues of power and control played out in
cyberspace. The very premise of an online game is that it is uncontrollable
– indeed, even the banned players have found ways to sneak back in various
disguises.

That, in turn, presents a thorny set of philosophical problems. How do you
seek to curb the baser instincts of a community of autonomous players? Is
repression the answer? Or do you have to give people incentives to behave
better all by themselves? Such questions have been pondered even within the
august confines of Yale Law School, where one student, James Grimmelmann,
wrote recently: “On the one hand, Maxis is close to losing control over
their game world. Evangeline and the psycho-granny have been disciplined, as
have various mafia syndicates and a parallel city government set up as a
player-based alternative form of authority.

You could compare it to Mussolini’s crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia, or even
to President George Bush’s war on terror.

Publicity highlighting the very dark place that Alphaville had
become was not likely to be good for business, and could even get the
company into trouble over its rating.

Shortly before he was thrown out of Alphaville, Urizenus and his fellow
reporters were openly questioning whether teenage game players should be
allowed to trade in human flesh, albeit virtual flesh, and wondering whether
the Sims Online should be restricted to adults.

Professor Ludlow’s expulsion was only the beginning of a fascinating new phase
in the game. Such is the interest in the
phenomenon that the Sims Online game is to be featured in a California
exhibition, opening today, which will feature a real-life recreation of a
room from the game.

The game is rated “T” for teenager and is sold, according to the
marketing materials, as a “fun-filled” exercise in fantasy
projection. What Professor Ludlow and a
growing band of academics and sympathisers believe, however, is that his
efforts to publicise the tawdry fantasy activities of real-life teenagers
were becoming simply too uncomfortable for Electronic Arts to stomach.

The company wants to draw the maximum number of players to the Sims Online,
one of a growing number of interactive computer games attracting audiences
possibly hundreds of thousands of people. “While we regret it,” Electronic
Arts told him in a letter, “we feel it is necessary for the good of the
game and its community.”

Officially, the reason for Professor Ludlow’s expulsion was that he included
links in his inside-the-game newspaper to outside websites, including one
that gave players instructions on how to cheat.