Uplink
15
The Creative Commons Issue
April 2009
Introduction
Since its founding, Uplink has argued that post-1998 videogame culture has been a hotbed of unrivaled subversion, thanks to its ability to produce, distribute, or otherwise sponsor some of the most productive and searching critiques of neoliberalism ever created. This is in startling contrast to most branches of the culture and media industries, which were either active partisans of market fundamentalism, or at the very least complicit with the neoliberal immiseration of Latin America, Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia (a.k.a. the majority of the human race). Since 2006, videogames have gone even further, by asking two of the most profound questions of our time: how can we replace a deeply undemocratic, polarized, and neocolonial world-system with a democratized, egalitarian, and multipolar world community, and what is the responsibility of the mass media in ushering in this new era?
These questions have become especially urgent given the meltdown of neoliberalism's financial, cultural and political superstructures. The seemingly immutable dogmas of neoliberalism have crashed and burned in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. At least $20 trillion of theoretical wealth (stocks, bonds and other financial instruments) have been annihilated, driving most of the global financial system into state receivership. Industrial production throughout the world has dropped year-on-year by anywhere from 10% to 30%, while gross domestic product, the most mainstream measure of annual economic output, is declining at annual rates of 5-10%.
It has become stunningly clear that the free market is not rational and perfect, that self-regulated markets do not work, and that letting speculative bubbles run your economy is suicidal. Nor is there any quick fix or temporary bailout capable of shoring up the neoliberal status quo for a few more years.1 Radical change is inevitable, which means the world can -- and must -- construct a system better than what we have.
The good news is that we are not fated to repeat the economic and political catastrophes of the Great Depression, for the simple reason that the world has freed itself from the xenophobic nationalisms, autarkic one-party states, despotic colonial empires, and authoritarian mass media systems of the 1930s. The major postcolonial nations have no interest in shoring up neoliberalism, and every interest in industrializing; the semi-peripheries have no interest in fighting suicidal wars, and every interest in trading with each other; and the rising metropoles (the European Union and the core regions of East Asia) have no interest in subsidizing the burnt-out hulk of the US Empire, and every interest in buying the goods produced by those semi-peripheries in currencies of their own making.
At the same time, powerful waves of democratization and plebianization have demolished corrupt one-party states everywhere from Russia to Mexico, and overthrown military autocracies from Brazil to Indonesia. For the first time in human history, the majority of the human race is literate, urbanized, participates in electoral democracies, and is enmeshed in networks of transnational mass media.
What videogames can offer us are three models (in Theodor Adorno's sense of the term, i.e. a set of provisional concepts designed to unlock a complex array of historical constellations) of transnational solidarity. The first and most obvious is a meditation on the digital commons or transnational media. The second is the exploration of post-American identity-politics. The third and least well-understood (though potentially the most interesting of all) is the mapping of the developmental state.
1. Ironically, the current crisis was caused by a series of such short-term fixes, which consistently privileged the dictate of a tiny, influential strata of owners and rentiers at the expense of the vast majority of ordinary citizens. When the dotcom bubble crashed in 2000, the Fed lowered interest rates to 1%, far below inflation. This easy money reliquefied markets and allowed capital to flow out of dotcoms and into a bourgeoning real estate bubble. When real estate prices hit a wall in 2005, another wave of deregulation allowed capital to flow out of highly leveraged, poorly regulated real estate markets and into even more highly leveraged and completely unregulated derivatives markets. The biggest short-term fix of them all was the continuous explosion of financial firm debt in the US economy, which temporarily compensated for the falling real wages experienced by most US workers from 1973 to 2006. Financial firm debt rose from only 21% of GDP in 1980 to an eye-popping 200% of GDP (this is not a typo, the number is indeed two hundred percent) in 2008 (data from the US Federal Reserve's latest Flow-of-funds report: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/Z1).
LittleBigPlanet
Readers of Henry Jenkins' excellent blog know that fan culture has become one of the linchpins of the contemporary media culture. The rise of affordable broadband, the proliferation of cheap telecommunications and computing devices of all kinds, and the spread of the digital tools of media production, distribution and consumption via the open source software revolution have transformed fan culture from an unruly appendage of the customer service industry into a key commons of the digital era. The effects of fan culture are particular noticeable in videogame culture, for at least two reasons.
First of all, the internal culture of game development is remarkably egalitarian. Game coders, programmers, and artists are, as a rule, genuinely respectful of fans. They understand the logic behind fair use and know that fan art, in whatever media, is no threat to sales of the original franchise, but serves as a form of free, community-based advertising. Some videogame studios have gone even further, by officially blessing fan-created game modifications or "mods". A number of top-tier studios have gone so far as to release editing tools to enable fan mod creation (e.g. id Software and Valve).
Secondly, videogame culture is deeply iterative, in the sense that successful games create durable franchises or game-worlds. Over time, the logic of franchises tends to create influential online and offline fan communities. These communities lobby for improved or upgraded games, and are key counter-players in the production-process of new games. (Hideo Kojima, for instance, has acknowledged in numerous interviews his debt to fan criticism and feedback).
One of the most intriguing examples of the power of fan culture is British-based studio Media Molecule's Playstation 3 title, Little Big Planet (hereafter referred to as LBP). The game was released in late 2008 to almost unanimous acclaim from fans, journalists and the industry press. At first glance, LBP might seem to be a cheerful, quirky but ultimately derivative platformer. It is true the game's mechanics lean heavily on Nintendo's classic Mario franchise for its game mechanics and level design. On a typical LBP level, between one to four players run, jump and leap through a series of colorful, two-dimensional maps, which scroll left and right.
Dig a little deeper, however, and it quickly becomes apparent that LBP is everything the accolades suggest it should be. The jumping mechanics are refined, with mid-course correction and inertial dampers to help less skilled players along. Instead of just jumping and running, players can also push, grab, drag or otherwise manipulate various items in the game-world. More importantly, LBP built interaction directly into their game-world, by emphasizing collectibility and fungibility. Players can "collect" bonus power-ups or items by running over them in the game-world. Unlike the classic power-ups of Nintendo lore, which confer temporary powers available only at specific moments in the game-world, these items are designed to be collectible: textures, fabrics, materials, anything in the game world can, in principle, be collected by the player. The flip side of collectibility is stampability: any fabric or texture you collect can be added to your personal toolkit, and used to "stamp" or paint a variety of surfaces in the level. (We'll explain why this is important in just a moment.)
What makes collectibility and stampability so appealing is the fact that everything in the game-world is rendered with exquisite, three-dimensional textures running at high-definition 720P resolution, with appropriate lighting and shadowing. Rather than limiting its palette to the sterile, shiny plastic surfaces typical of previous platformers, LBP depicts a wide range of realistic-looking clothes, textiles, fabrics, wood, paper, paint, stone and countless other surfaces.
Most significant of all, the action takes place in three dimensions -- players can navigate three spatial "planes" or depth layers (that is, move between background, midground and foreground -- there is also a nonplayable, customizable background which serves as an overall setting, rendered in 3D).
It is almost impossible to overestimate the significance of this seemingly minor design decision. In various interviews with the press, the game developers noted they experimented with a range of options for creating depth layers, ranging from a true three-dimensional system with an infinite number of layers, to just one or two layers. They eventually discovered the magic number was three: too many layers made navigation frustrating, while just one or two became too restrictive. Three layers, in short, generated the most productive balance of design complexity and game playability. In essence, LBP borrowed from the toolkit of cinema, by allowing players to create the functional equivalents of the long-distance shot, the medium shot, and the close-up.
All of this, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. Unlike any other platformer ever created, LBP does not end when you hop, skip and jump through the final level. This is precisely when the game begins.
The entire single-player game is an introduction to LBP's online publishing and editing tools. The game is, quite literally, a sophisticated species of level design software. Using nothing more complicated than the Dualshock 3 controller and a few pop-up menus, players can create astonishingly complicated objects, design levels, and access surfaces, fabrics and textures of all kinds. The design tools are not a gimmick or an add-on. Media Molecule not only rigorously play-tested their tools, they made the key decision that every single one of their own internally-produced single-player levels had to be produced using the game's own internal editing tools. As a result, players can literally do everything the game does, e.g. construct platforms, create moving vehicles and other devices, and then retrofit their creations with ambient sound-effects, lighting and proximity triggers (i.e. cause certain things to happen if the player comes close enough). The editing tools are surprisingly intuitive and simple to learn, though the full power of the software does take some time to unlock.
This is where the principle of collectibility begins to shine. After finishing a level, players can upload their creation on LBP's servers. This allows the worldwide community of LBP players to download the level, and provide independent commentary and feedback. Rather than forcing users to trudge through dreary menus, Media Molecule hit on the clever idea of posting level icons on the three-dimensional surface of a colorful, cloth-and-fabric globe, roughly corresponding to the physical geography of the Earth. Players move the globe left and right, and click on the level icon they wish -- the level in question is then downloaded or read from disc.
With certain minor limitations (mostly relating to copyright law, about which more hereafter), players can create and share almost anything in the game-world. In addition to making textures and designs available to other players, players can also store bonus items inside their level, in the form of costumes, fabrics, and stickers which are unlocked if a player achieves some special game-play feat (e.g. losing no lives, making a difficult jump, etc.). Finally, level creators are given the option of whether to lock or unlock their creations. This allows other players to borrow from preexisting objects and designs, rather than starting from scratch.
In many ways, LBP borrows from the toolkit of the MMO (massive multiplayer online game), in the sense that community interaction is built into the heart of its game-play experience. After players complete a downloaded level, an automatic rating system pops up, enabling players to give quick and easy feedback to a level (a rating of one to five stars, from lowest to highest, as well as a single adjective, e.g. "quirky", "brilliant", "weird"). This feedback is then collated, giving users a rough idea of how popular a particular level is. LBP also has a full-fledged set of community billboards, a messaging system, and the option of multiplayer online and offline play. Multiplayer can range from competitive brawls, similar to Nintendo's SuperSmashBrothers, to exercises in cooperative team-play, where up to four players must work together to solve puzzles or outwit obstacles. Finally, access to the LBP servers is free of charge via the PlayStation Network, which is open to anyone who purchases a PS3 and a copy of LBP -- there are no periodic fees or monthly charges to worry about.
After just six months on the market, LBP has sold well over 2 million copies, and has spawned a vast and growing digital commons -- an online community which is not policed by the remorseless logic of profit maximization, but emphasizes creativity, sharing, and a collective ethos which maximizes what individual artists can achieve, instead of putting legal or administrative hurdles in their path.
Level Design Comes to the Commons
One of the signal achievements of Valve's groundbreaking Half Life (1998) was its recombination of realistic visual textures, acoustic cues, level design and player actions into a seamless game-world. The sight of rusting metal and peeling paint, the ambient sounds of footsteps and radio static, the hum of heavy machinery and the whine of tramcars transformed the Black Mesa Research Facility into a thrilling science-fiction backdrop. The Half Life fan community subsequently pushed the art of level design even further in freely available downloadable level modifications or "mods", resulting in at least one timeless work of art – Neil Manke's epic They Hunger (2000-2001) horror-survival trilogy.
One of the inherent limitations of the mod community of the late 1990s, however, was the complexity of the tools involved. From a production standpoint, these tools required a reasonably deep knowledge of programming, expertise in visual software platforms, and experience in debugging and compiling game engines. The potential game audience was also limited, due to the necessity to purchase expensive personal computers.
LBP's greatest single achievement is the democratization of level design. Henceforth, character designs, sounds, textures, objects and event-scripts (in-game actions triggered by players) can be created, distributed and critiqued by multiple millions of fans on affordable consoles, all across the world.
This democratization is most visible in LBP's exquisite art-design, which breaks free from the neo-national visual cliches afflicting the platformer genre. These cliches are a legacy of the early history of videogames, when consoles did not have the raw computing power to depict realistic characters or buildings and had to rely on simple visual abstractions (most famously, Mario's signature cap and mustache). To compensate for the inevitable tedium of these abstractions, designers began to create "themed levels" -- for example, a set of snow-bound levels, set in mountains, ice caverns and glaciers. Nowadays, of course, console hardware has improved to the point that there is no excuse for the rampant overproduction of hackneyed European castles, neo-Orientalist temples, windswept spaceships, or fire-and-lava levels, to name just a few of the most egregious videogame cliches.
LBP took a fresh approach to themed levels, by leveraging one of the bedrock tropes of the transnational media, namely transnational regionalism. These regionalisms are very different from those of the past, which were based primarily on imperial expansionism and colonial violence -- e.g. India's links to Britain, or the Philippines' links to the US. By contrast, transnational regionalisms are rooted in networks of trade, investment, tourism, media flows and political rapprochement between groups of neighboring countries. While the European Union is the most prominent example of this tendency, similar forms of regionalism are emerging in contemporary Africa (everything from West Africa's world-class music culture to the African Union), Latin America (UNASUR and the Bank of the South), Central Asia (CSTO and SCTO), the Middle East (OPEC and the Arabic language media), South Asia (the media cultures of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), South East Asia (ASEAN and regional economic and cultural integration), and East Asia (Japanese anime and console videogames, Korean film and online games, Hong Kong film and Cantopop music).1
LBP's levels are sorted into eight groups, each tied to a discrete transnational region. The first group of levels, entitled The Gardens, borrows from the Western European fairytale. It features a bright, bouncy soundtrack (keynoted by the Go! Team's superb Get it Together), minimal obstacles for the player, and lush environments salted with a few iconic Nintendo references (e.g. giant mushrooms and fairy princesses). The second group switches to Africa, in a set of levels entitled The Savannah. These reference authentic African folklore, textile designs and music, including tracks by famed Malian artist Toumani Diabate. There are also sly but unmistakable digs at the neocolonial safari and its mass media analogues -- among other things, a send-up of the Indiana Jones movie franchise, and a fictitious level author who turns out to be a kingly lion named Zola (undoubtedly a postcolonial devotee of French naturalism).
The third set of levels, named The Wedding, moves across the Atlantic to Brazil and Latin America. It is at this point, significantly, that LBP tips its geopolitical hand. The movement from Europe to Africa to the Americas is much more than a set of lines on the map. It is the historic route of colonialism, the very first engine of the capitalist world-market.
Instead of obfuscating or repressing this history, LBP's designers narrate it in a new way, by quoting from multiple national cultures and mediatic genres. The ultimate villains of the African levels, for example, are greedy crocodiles: the symbol of the crocodile is one of the great popular denunciations of Africa's neoliberal comprador elites, as relayed in countless tales circulated by Africa's "radio trottoir" (the Francophone term for radio-of-the-streets, a.k.a. the grapevine). During The Wedding, the player-character must traverse an underground mine and run from a monstrous, sack-eating juggernaut, a transparent metaphor for the violence of colonialism. In fact, the putative author of The Wedding is Frida the Bride, a transparent reference to legendary Mexican artist and radical socialist Frida Kahlo (she married, divorced, and remarried muralist Diego Rivera). Not to be outdone, the level designers rummage freely through the archives of surrealism, the monster film and the amusement park ride.
The fourth group of levels, The Canyons, cleverly blurs the line between the classic Hollywood Western and Fuentes' classic Mexican revolutionary war trilogy. The itinerary includes frontier towns, desert mines and indigenous monuments of Mexico and the American Southwest (Cafe Tacuba's epic Volver a Comenzar, one of the great meditations on the crisis of Mexico after the collapse of the PRI's one-party state, is a special treat here). The fifth group, The Metropolis, pastiches the North American urban action thriller, but wisely avoids trying to copy Grand Theft Auto. Instead, we are given a tour of the urban Latino cultures of the North American cities by a female shop mechanic named Mags, as players navigate auto shops, subways and building sites.
At first sight, the sixth group, The Islands, might seem to be the one exception to this rule, since it is a Japanese-themed level replete with kimonos, sumo wrestlers and robots. However, its concluding volcano level is a savvy reference to Enter the Dragon, the Hong Kong action films.
That said, the final two groups go the furthest in terms of platformer design. The Temples is set in South Asia, while The Wilderness is set in Siberia. While The Temples has some of the most ingenious level design of the game, it is also the most problematic in terms of gender – the stylized bodies of women serve as jumping platforms, while the blue-skinned gurus are overly Orientalized. That said, on the "Elephant Temple" level, players win a piece of white fabric at the end, a postcolonial nod to the textile mills destroyed by Britain's colonization of South Asia. There is a similar ambiguity at the end the The Temples, in the sense that the sumptuous palace of the Magician rewrites the colonial-era Fu Manchu villain into the benevolent South Asian software billionaire.
By contrast, the final group, entitled The Wilderness, offers an overt critique of neoliberalism. The group borrows extensively from the stealth espionage and action genre, as players navigate through former Cold War military bases, dodge electromechanical obstacles and battle Metal Gear-style giant robots. The action is backed by a bravura sound-track, including a clip of Prokofiev's stirring "Alexander Nevsky", Op. 78. Along the way, The Wilderness transforms toy soldiers, electronic robots, Soviet-era designs and random Cold War bric-a-brac into so many postmodern collectibles.
On closer inspection, though, the group is not really about Cold War science fiction. The very last boss or villain you must defeat is nicknamed the Collector, a double-jointed reference to Benjamin's amateur historian and to Russia's former oligarch class. However, the Collector is not really a villain, so much as misunderstood: "The reason I don't share is that I don't have any friends!". At this point, all the characters we met during the previous parts of the game reappear, and inform us and our new friend that everyone is welcome to play, create and share their LittleBigPlanet creations.
This ending has nothing to do with the feel-good ideology of NGO charity spouted by the neoliberal mass media, which told us for decades that "it takes a village to raise a child" while shamelessly legitimating the looting of the planet on behalf of a tiny elite of Wall Street rentiers. Rather, it manages to tap into one of the deepest tendencies of the multipolar world: the transformation of the one-party states of the Second and Third World into democratic (or at least profoundly democratizing) developmental states. "Play, create, share" is not just the slogan of LBP's publicity campaign, it names one of the constitutive features of the digital commons, a.k.a. the online and offline public spaces of the multipolar world.
-- DRR
1. This regionalism has important thematic associations with the concept of the diaspora, which typically traces the movement of a specific linguistic, ethnic, or otherwise distinct social groups across multiple regions of the globe. That is, regionalism is something like the convergence or generalization of multiple diasporas across a set of national spaces.
LittleBigPlanet and the Digital Commons
The rise of the digital commons testifies to one of the most dramatic role-reversals in world history. The digital speculators, silicon rentiers and Wall Street bubblemeisters who crushed all challenges to their rule, who immiserated vast swathes of the planet for their sole benefit, and who monopolized the mass media, had always assumed they were the ultimate arbiters of history.
Not so. For thirty-five years, the digital commons grew slowly and quietly in the shadows, margins and peripheries of the neoliberal world-system. In place of capital flows, structural adjustment and IMF structural adjustment packages, it spun webs of trust, solidarity and community. Today, it is neoliberalism which has come to an end, while the commons lives on.
For the commons is much more than just public parks, libraries and access to the internet. The commons is, to paraphrase David Bollier, everything bequeathed to us by the past, and all that is worth passing on to the future.
One of the most startling features of LittleBigPlanet is its open and respectful engagement with the digital commons. Nowadays, all online games come with so-called end-user license agreements or EULAs. Typically, gamers are asked to click on these when installing a game on their computer or console, or when signing on to use an online network. The agreement is usually generic boilerplate, designed to render the hosting company harmless for any damage or mischief wrought by the network or software.
At first glance, LBP's agreement seems standard. There are the usual clauses warning players against using copyrighted or trademarked materials, as well as committing other types of fraud (abusive multiple accounts, identity theft, etc.). However, in the middle of section 13 one sentence leaps out at the reader: "SCEA does not claim ownership of any User Generated Content that you submit or make available as part of the game, and SCEA expressly disclaims any and all liability in connection with any User Generated Content."
This is a geopolitical bombshell. Instead of trying to seize control of fan-made content and antagonizing its fanbase -- what Henry Jenkins has critiqued elsewhere as the ideology of Web 2.0, namely "You fans create all the content, and we media firms make all the profits" -- Sony is acknowledging the limitations of market-based or capitalist property rights in the digital era. In effect, user-created content exists as a kind of collective property within an ecosystem of licenses. These licenses permit Sony to post or delete inappropriate or offensive content from its servers, while avoiding the problem of shackling or unfairly exploiting the creativity of fans.
From a legal perspective, licensing is an ingenious end run around the horrible Clinton-era Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), one of the all-time worst pieces of legislation in communications history. In a nutshell, the DMCA was an attempt by the big media industries to lock down and monopolize all digital content for all time (think Microsoft's operating system monopoly, multiplied by one thousand). The attempt failed in spectacular fashion: at least one hundred million Americans routinely circumvent the DMCA, by downloading content, using peer-to-peer software, or simply buying second-hand or used media instead of purchasing absurdly overpriced new copies.
It should be emphasized that while the LBP ecosystem is largely free of commercial constraint, it is by no means a completely deregulated, lawless or unaccountable space. One of the paradoxes of any commons is that conditions of access and usage require a great deal of careful, thoughtful, and historically-informed regulation. This runs deeper than the truism that my freedoms ought not to trample on the freedoms of others. Rather, the very concept of freedom is meaningless without democratic forms of citizenship and collective accountability. For example, Section 7 of LBP's license regulates the online conduct of players, and includes prohibitions on disrespectful behavior such as harassment, intimidation, or "...creating any other content that may be racially, ethnically or religiously offensive, sexually abusive, obscene or defamatory". The other significant prohibition here is "using content that is commercial in nature such as advertisements, solicitations and promotions for goods or services".1 Media Molecule and Sony have thus officially banned commercial advertising, racism and xenophobia from their game-world, a decision which requires the work of a full-time staff to moderate LBP's text chats, system feedback and discussions.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of LBP is what it suggests about the future of the digital commons, given that the worldwide broadband audience is likely to double from about 1 billion people today to around 2 billion in five years. Here are a few quick observations, meant to spur further debate and discussion:
1. Licensing is the new collective ownership. One of the most intelligent and far-reaching achievements of the open source movement was to create "creative commons" licenses, which give artists, programmers and creators the tools the power to release their material for non-commercial purposes. Not only would LBP be unthinkable without such licensing, future games are likely to extend this principle even further, in ways we cannot yet imagine.
2. Feed the commons, and the commons will feed you. One of the most important side-effects of LBP's success is that more studios, game companies and media professionals are waking up to the power of the digital commons. In several interviews, LBP staffers have noted that despite the limitations of copyright law -- Sony is obliged by law to take fan-made levels offline if copyright holders complain about the appropriation of a trademark or brand -- a number of prominent media firms have privately indicated to Sony that they understand that LBP is a non-commercial space, and therefore will not pursue copyright infringement claims on fan-made levels. While the names of these firms are not publicly known, people in the industry with whom Uplink has contacts confirm that they include some of the biggest players in the industry. This is a hopeful sign for the political maturity and social responsibility of the media industry.
3. The community link is mightier than the monetary bond. The videogame industry is unlike other mass media, in the sense that final purchases by consumers make up 95% or more of industry revenue. By contrast, television and radio stations depend mostly on advertising revenue, while Hollywood films depend on vast pools of private capital for their financing. Thanks to the internet, videogame fans have tremendous power to influence their favorite games and franchises, in ways impossible for television fans or film audiences to duplicate. As Peter Parker's uncle noted, with great power comes great responsibility, and fans should understand this responsibility. Given the rapid growth of broadband, it's very likely that fan communities will become far more transnational, multilingual, and representative of the planet than ever before. These communities may also have a significant effect on local game industries, particularly in nations with long histories of indigenous mass media, such as Brazil and India.
-- DRR
1. The full clause reads as follows:
7. Online conduct. When you play, you agree to be respectful of your fellow players and never to engage in any behavior that would be abusive or offensive to other players, disruptive of the game experience, fraudulent or otherwise illegal. This includes but is not limited to:
(a) harassing or intimidating other players;
(b) using language, selecting user, character, clan or team names or creating any other content that may be racially, ethnically or religiously offensive, sexually abusive, obscene or defamatory;
(c) selecting as a user, character, clan or team name any word, symbol or combination of words and symbols which is identical to or substantially similar to any character, team, weapon, vehicle or other element which appears in this game;
(d) using content that is commercial in nature such as advertisements, solicitations and promotions for goods or services;
(e) falsely representing that you are an employee of Sony Corporation, SCEA, or any other affiliated or related company;
(f) disrupting the normal flow of chat;
(g) making a false report of user abuse to SCEA Consumer Services;
(h) violating any local, state or national law;
(i) using a cheat code, cheat device or any device that modifies the executable game code or data. For a detailed explanation of the SCEA policy on cheating, visit www.us.playstation.com/onlinecheating.
(j) any attempt to deliberately alter, damage or undermine the legitimate operation of this game, including but not limited to exploiting the ranking system by creating "dummy accounts".
Stay tuned for Uplink 16, the Fire and Ice Issue