Invisible Walls: Facts and Freedom in Coded Space

This chapter explores the connections between legal systems and video games as frames of compulsorality and constraint. It integrates ideas from analytical jurisprudence and positivist legal theory with critical inquiries into law, culture, and the humanities, and brings this composite juristic perspective to bear on existing theoretical work on video gaming. It moves the attention of digital legal theory past its focus on social behaviour within virtual spaces, towards jurisprudential readings of the interactions between a human player and the coded virtual space itself. Drawing examples from the Japanese role-playing game (JRPG) genre, it probes the tension between player autonomy and the constraints of game design. It explains why a game cannot replicate for the played character the distinctive compulsorality of the human player’s relationship with law, but nonetheless finds instructive jurisprudential resonances in the player’s liminal status as both etic observer and emic subject of game constraints. This position is shown radically to problematise important elements of legal life, exposing the alienation of the legal subject, and the impossibility of paradigmatic change compliantly with formal legal orders.