On the reality of virtual items
By fuchikoma 1 Comments
Here's a little piece I wrote about MMOs 6 years ago. The vocabulary is a little heavy, but I was just coming out of writing reports in college at the time...
Many people dismiss the items as non-real, and leave it at that, yet are unable to explain the phenomenon. I inferred they might be paying real money because to them, these items are real. But instead of dismissing them as crazy, I decided to start by pondering: What is real?
If one person observes something, but others cannot observe or confirm the observations, it is said that the first person is hallucinating. If a few people confirm the observation, it is agreed upon by consensus. At this point, the observation enters into "reality." From there, each person's certainty in it is reinforced by each person who is in agreement with them.
If a small group of people, say, 20-500 reach this level of consensus, they may find themselves so certain in its factuality that they stop seeking confirmation from the world at large. This happens uneventfully all the time, but if their beliefs are extreme and irrational, when exposed to a larger population, it is said that this minority group is a "cult," and their beliefs are considered delusional (hallucinatory) by the majority. At this level, their belief IS reality within the context of the cult, but not in the greater context of all society.
If the vast majority of the population believes the same thing, for example the various scientifically confirmed beliefs existing at any given time, this is as close to reality as is possible (considering that there will always be those who deviate from the norm and disbelieve.) This majority consensus therefore becomes the definition of "reality" as we know it. As our own observations are inherently both limited and flawed, reality is a consensus among society, and without universal omniscience, it can be nothing more.
I will assert a posteriori that human society is formed around the use (acquisition, analysis, transmission, collaboration, etc) of data, both regarding concrete and abstract concepts. One such example of this is the concept of "money." Money is not only almost universally believed in, but most if not all of the most influential societies of our time place money as one of the, if not THE most important thing, despite the fact that most of it exists not even as precious materials or labeled tokens, but in the form of consensually agreed-upon numbers stored in databases. The "money bin" model is an effective metaphor, but the wealthiest among us don't sit on a massive vault of riches guarding them 24/7; they instead entrust their precious number to a team of trustworthy professionals who, if asked, would confirm that yes, they are holding X amount of money on each customer's behalf. It is incredibly unlikely that most banks have half enough money on hand at a given time to cover the whole amount entrusted to them. They keep their data backed up and secure, but if their records were obliterated, the money entrusted to them would be no more. There would be no remains to dig up, unless you could salvage their database and confirm its veracity once again.
Now to a parallel with my first point... Single-player games, while valuable in their own respect for the entertainment they provide (which I count things such as their artistic merit to be a part of) are, by this definition of reality, nothing more than a hallucination used to entertain. No amount of progress in them will amount to any level of influence over anyone else's instance of the game; no more than the thoughts in your own head will, left to their own devices, change the thoughts in another's head. Aside from the immediate purpose of entertaining the single player, progress made in them is wholly irrelevant. (Any popular game has social contexts outside the game, but they are simply that - outside the game.)
Multiplayer games, in this essay defined as games allowing 2 to 100 players at once, would fall into parallel with cult-sized collectives. Though, as mentioned in its respective paragraph, such a consensus is not necessarily radical: It is simply real to a very limited subset of the population. In an instance of a dungeon game, each participant knows that the others are there, and each player may make some progress as far as their respective characters' stats and loot, but when the session concludes, they have only their character's progress and the memory of the event. The players may keep their progress, but the world they were in existed only for them, for only as long as they were there to observe it. To a lesser extent, there is also an instantaneous consensual reality construct in a deathmatch, or other zero-progress multiplayer game: The participants are aware of the instance they inhabit and of the other participants, but in the end, they are left with only the memory of the event. (Player skill increase and screenshots are pretty much universally applicable to games, thus irrelevant for distinguishing game types.)
The MMO supergenre (mostly RPG, but it could hypothetically include more as technology advances) is then the logical parallel to the most concrete of gaming realities, at least as the current state of technology stands. A persistent, backed up online world is run by a company that could in this respect be likened to the gaming equivalent of a bank (and its contents somewhat to real currency, though far more susceptible to collapse of its housing!) The world housed in the servers persists regardless of whether there are 0 players or 20,000,000, and all players play in the same instance of the world (or a select few official servers/"shards.") These facts alone
instigate a significant paradigm shift in the reality of the game:
- There are no longer "save points" allowing one to rewind time at their leisure because gameplay takes place in real time for all players. (Though most incur penalties for death rather than absolute character termination for obvious business reasons. Most players would probably never play again if that much progress were instantly obliterated.)
- Instead of a 1:1000 player to NPC ratio, an MMO will more likely be 1000:1 or greater, removing the feeling (in my experience at least) of wandering a desolate world filled with mission and info kiosks, and event triggers dressed up as people.
- A dungeon-crawl session may result in character progress and memories, but it may also alter the populations of different monster AND player factions in the area, as killing a monster in one area will reduce their numbers by 1 for all people who play the game. Some games will simply respawn them, while others may opt for a more complex ecosystem. Sometimes it takes a while for a monster population to rebuild in an area. Sometimes an area will be full of players, and it will be more viable to choose another spot - much like trying to hunt an an area full of other hunters. Occasionally a company will "migrate" monsters to other places and introduce new ones, and this can even have political ramifications as opposing groups look for new areas to use, and may butt heads in their search.
- The first rule of economy in MMOs is usually scarcity = value. Some people play the game for personal progress, some socially, and some to collect all the "rares." The sale of dungeon loot and even acquisition of dropped cash, if applicable, will almost certainly impact the regional, if not global economy of a world. There are offline games that fluctuate their economies to create the illusion of commerce, but in an MMO, it comes quite naturally because there is constant supply/demand, and money and resources change hands. (Though like physical countries' economies, it takes a lot of management to keep the economy stable if not properly planned. Most MMOs suffer from gradual inflation since money is always being minted as monster drops, ore, or whatever the game's industry is based on.)
- PvP player killing occurs not because the game developers decided it would be an appropriate challenge, nor is it a roll of the dice. It now occurs for any number of actual reasons in the psyche of the PK, be it competition for resources, a consensual duel, a war between factions that the respective players are allied with, a show of power to intimidate the target and others, a battle of words between the two participants, a personal prejudice, or even simply the desire to run around killing people.
- This, however, has a much more significant impact on a persistent world. It may trigger retaliation by in-game AI police and bounty hunters, as it would offline, but you may also gain a reputation as a killer, causing people to avoid you, or kill you out of a sense of personal justice. It may also hinder your business dealings as other players lose trust in you, but others may be drawn to your cause, aiding you, and even taking the game in a direction the developers hadn't conceived might happen.
- Progress you make in-game can be used to help friends and smite enemies... a feat possible in multiplayer, but as explained above, the repercussions will be greater, and bear more secondary effects. Most large MMOs, in addition to active economies, have every level of political interaction, usually completely driven by players' motivations and in-game events. This can be at the player, party, guild, race/class, and "alliance vs horde" levels, and anything in-between.
- Incidental player encounters add an incredible amount of depth to the game:
Psychologically-driven PK actions have already been covered, though you may encounter the PK (or anyone) at any place at any time; not just where it is appropriate for your mission or a character of your level.
You will also encounter a large portion (ideally a majority) of interesting people who will chat with you about various unexpected things, real world, gameplay-related, and role-playing in nature, often mixed in a tongue-in-cheek way. This does not shatter the illusion of the game, but rather builds on it, as instead of pretending to be in the real world, the players are aware they are in the real game world. This is also largely optional, as you do not have to chat with them to progress (though it can help!)
You will also likely run into existing friends as you wander the world, and stop to chat and catch up with them as you would in everyday life.
The ultimate interaction in these games is to join a good guild/clan/tribe/corporation/etc... By becoming a part of these often limited-capacity "families," you gain instant access to many people who are your friends by association with whoever invited you. You can then chat with them, ask for advice about the game (or anything really, as their expertise isn't restricted to a few scripted points) or even ask them to help you, with their ability of course being exactly that of a real player. I would even say that the level of camaraderie attained in such an arrangement is absolutely unmatched in offline games, and is very seldom reached by simply multiplayer games. (Though clans can sometimes reach this level offline, due to the nature of most action games, the bulk of meaningful verbal interaction will occur out of game, if at all.)
- Finally, there is the parallel persistent worlds make with another abstract consensual concept - money. Due to the consensual nature of reality, the numerous observers in a persistent massively-multiplayer game world lend credence to the reality of your in-game wealth. During its two years of operation, the "Gaming Open Market" traded an equivalent $2,790,000 USD in 73,625 transactions in the form of either game-to-game currency translations based on current market rates, or game-to-money and money-to-game transactions based on the same criteria.
The leading site for such transactions, IGE.com, trades between 10-20 popular MMO games, and will give instant quotes for how much real money they will pay for in-game money. gameusd.com is an independent MMO market researcher that tracks game currencies against the US dollar. (Not surprisingly, inflation saps the value of most currencies as they usually come into existence to reward game progress.)
Regardless of whether this is moral, wise, or even sane, even if all of my other points are discarded for any reason, it has been absolutely proven by the open capitalist market that MMO game items are no less real than money in a bank. (I note again that they are far more volatile, but this only makes the investment more risky, not less real.) You may always choose to remove yourself from this consensus - personally, I have no desire to interchange game and "real-real-world" currencies - but it will not negate it any more than one person abstaining from capitalism will nullify the value of all items sold.
NOTES:
Some people justify that they are making real-world progress by playing an MMO because of the real monetary gain. This is often cited as justification for compulsive play, though it is technically true. The unsaid portion is that the monetary value of game items is generally far lower than any widely-known currency of any industrialized country, and a traditional job would usually pay much better. Then again, games are for fun, and if they do that, they've succeeded.
As a side note to this discussion, "private servers" are an effective way to get a taste of an online world, but for reasons already covered, so long as one private server does not become the host to the majority of players, it will always be a simulation of the "real" world of any given game. In my experience, this shows blatantly as the population is usually far too thin to reproduce the same community as the real instance of the game.
These are not persistent worlds, but in South Korea, many popular online games such as Gunbound and Albatross 18 (Pangya) are completely free to download AND play, and are even quite functional when playing for free, but various character customization items are sold for real currency via accounts with the game's operators. Expect to see more of these in the future, as they seem to be growing healthily despite their radical business model.
If that wasn't enough to ponder, here's a bonus that I'll leave completely undiscussed: Technically, in almost every case, the ultimate owner of every item is the game company. How rich does that make them? Well, Sony Online Entertainment takes commissions on items sold on two EQ2 servers now...
12/2005
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