Ethics at the crossroads of the real and the virtual

I know, that's a very long title for a blog post -- it started out even longer. The more I look at it the more pretentious I feel.  Seriously, who am I to write about ethics.  I posted on Facebook and received interesting responses.  I determined that I needed to explore the conundrum I was facing in a longer form -- and fair warning, the post is long as well.

Background
I play a virtual game created by a real company (Zynga) with real employees.  This Zynga game allows you to dig for treasure, perform quests, decorate your island, and interact with "friends" in a virtual world.  It isn't Second Life, but like any business model, Zynga needs to make dollars to pay their employees (my research showed it to be somewhere around 1300) and one of the ways they make money is to sell virtual cash that can be used to enhance or speed up the game experience.  In a blog post on How Zynga Makes Money the author showed that micro transactions, pennies a day, added up to big business over the millions of users playing Zynga games.  Virtual Cash is big business.

Setup
The game I play sometimes has bugs.  I do find the Zynga game slightly more buggy than some of the others that I play, but generally I ignore the bugs and keep on playing.  However, to counteract negative reputation, Zynga has 24 hours customer support through chat, and when I hit a snag, I use that support.  That's what I did when I experienced a play stopping bug on Monday night.  I was working on a quest and completed half of it when the window identifying the required steps disappeared.  I waited about an hour, and when it didn't come back I went to support.  I have found all the customer support agents to be very pleasant.  They are probably very heavily scripted, but that doesn't mean they respond inappropriately or robotically.  I explained the situation and after investigation, I was told that a bug in the quest had caused it to complete.  I pointed out that if it had completed where were my rewards, and the agent told me he would add them to my account if I waited.  So I waited, and sure enough, after a refresh, there were my experience points and my food.  There was also supposed to be approximately 7400 in gold coins, but since I have over 9 million gold coins 7000 more or less is not really noticeable to me.

Conundrum
I went back to playing the game, and it wasn't until about 30 minutes later that I noticed that instead of being credited with 7400 gold, I had been credited with 7400 virtual cash.  This is a LOT of cash.  In "real money" terms, if you didn't buy on sale (and virtual cash is almost always on sale) it would cost about $1000 dollars to buy 7000 virtual cash!  The most I have ever had at one point is about 100 and that took forever to earn.  The question is, what do you do under the circumstances?  Do you say YAY and immediately start spending?  How do we look at a totally virtual commodity in an ethical way?  (More about the ethical questions in a little bit.)

Personal decision
My immediate reaction was that this cash did not belong to me.  I went to my email where I had received a report on my chat session and (as directed) replied to the agent explaining the situation and then I waited.  Unfortunately I didn't get an email reply immediately, or even during the next day.  The situation continued to bother me throughout the next day, and that night I went back to chat support and explained the situation to a new agent.  She removed the additional island cash, thanked me for being so honest, and left me with about 7% of the previous total as compensation.  I felt much better.  500 virtual cash is still more than I have ever had, but it isn't the crazy number I had before.

Ethics in a  virtual world
This is where the questions of ethics and morality come in.  I received interesting comments, serious and facetious, in response to my Facebook post.  Would keeping the money have harmed anyone?  Would keeping the money have been illegal?  Was this considered a virtual transaction? Was the decision to return the cash ethically (and morally) necessary?  Do immoral, unethical, or illegal acts performed in a virtual world not "count?"  What do our reactions to the question tell us about ourselves?

I am not a philosopher, and I suspect a philosophical person might have a different take on the questions - or might ask different questions.  The ones that hit me most are first whether illegality or immorality "counts" in a virtual world, and second whether this transaction at the crossroads counts as a virtual transaction or a real one?  In answer to the first, I think the answer is "it depends."  If you are playing World of Warcraft and you aren't willing to kill, you won't be a very good player.  Many computer games, especially first person role playing games, rely on murder and mayhem for the primary storyline.  Other games, as discussed in the blog on how Zynga gets rich, rely on cooperation, responsibility, and reciprocity.  While you do get to blow up the occasional item, it isn't on a neighbor's island, and you can only make positive choices with respect to neighbors and friends.  Clearly, where there is computer code there are hackers and hacks, but in most of the gaming situations I have experienced, hacks are frowned on, ignored, rejected, and frequently reported.  A hack can get you permanently banned from a game. 

So here we had an honest mistake.  If the agent had given me extra gold coins, experience points, or food for my backpack, I would probably have done nothing.  These are truly virtual commodities.  They cannot be converted to real dollars, nor can they be directly purchased with real dollars.  You cannot convert gold coins to virtual cash.  However, virtual cash is different.  While you can occasionally dig or win one or two virtual dollars, it can take a long time to amass enough to buy some of the treasures for sale.  I always made my decisions about how to spend virtual cash carefully.  So even though you can buy virtual cash for real dollars, is it the same? 

• If you went to a supermarket and the cashier gave you too much change, would you give it back? 
• If you went to the supermarket and the cashier didn't charge you for an item, or undercharged for an item would you point that out? 
• If you ordered one item online and received three, what would you do?
• If the item you ordered online was a game, or a piece of a game, and you received extra, what would you do?

The first three questions have easy answers for me.  In the first, I would give it back.  We all know those kind of mix ups come directly from the cashiers pocket at the end of the day.  In the second I would point it out.  We would expect the store to make it good if the error shorted us.  Why shouldn't we make it good if the error shorted them? (If your lucky the store will give you some sort of break for your honesty, if not, think karma.)  In the third, I would immediately contact the online company and figure out how to get their merchandise back to them - not on my dime, it wasn't my mistake - but presumably if they want it back they will take that hit.  Again, who knows, they may tell you to keep the product :-).  So what do you do with the fourth example, really just the third example expressed with virtual merchandise?  I was involved in a non-cash transaction (getting credit for a game bug) and ended up receiving something with monetary value, even if it wasn't transferable to real money.  Should I have ignored the transaction and kept the funds? 

Each one of us operates with our own moral and ethical code.  For some of us, the ethical code is situational.  What applies in one situation does not apply in another.  Bribe an official in the United States and you could go to prison.  Don't bribe an official in some third world countries and you could go to prison.  Even my ethics are clearly situational.  If I found a twenty dollar bill on the floor in the metro with no one standing nearby I wouldn't try to find the owner.  However, if I found a cell phone on the ground in the ballpark, I would definitely try find  the owner and get it back to them.  If you were reading carefully, my virtual ethics are also situational.  If I had received slightly more than expected of truly virtual goods, I would not have mentioned it.  In this case, however, my ethical radar went off, and my personal ethical code forced me to return the virtual merchandise. 

Feel free to tell me I was silly, but I feel much better about playing the game today than I did yesterday with my ill-gotten gains.