The Ethics of Reverse Engineering for Game Technology

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how legal concepts, accepted practices, and research in reverse engineering (a process of disassembling a system to understand how it works) can provide ethical and legal outlets for end-users. The game industry has influenced reverse engineering law and practice, challenging ethical practices in industry, academia, and with end-users. Although these communities supposedly rely on legal precedents, actual laws are often misunderstood, ignored, or just unknown. The communities continually struggle to balance the protection of intellectual property with consumer freedom, and reverse engineering demonstrates this conflict. We demonstrate how a variety of communities embrace reverse engineering through a series of case studies involving current commercial games and technology. The case studies include the modding community, massively-multiplayer online game community tools, digital preservation, and reverse engineering education. Although a clear ruling on legality eludes the field, we conclude with suggestions on dealing with ethical and legal aspects surrounding this issue.