Jack Balkin

To be sure, what falls within the rules is sometimes disputed. Players are enormously creative, and often come up with new strategies and devices that platform owners could not have foreseen. As a result, internal norms arise in many virtual worlds to regulate what players may do in the spaces; people can shun or punish people who misbehave and some players have created in-world tribunals to adjudicate disputes. The platform owner can also regulate behavior in the game space by altering the code or the EULA. The platform owner can sanction or expel players who hack into the game to give themselves special abilities, or who otherwise violate the rules or the spirit of the game. When platform owners do this, they are invoking their real-world contractual rights. To this extent, state regulation is always involved in the governance of the game space.