On Many-2-Many there is an ongoing discussion about online conversation and communicative technologies. The question for here is, what is the nature of the conversation in the MMOG? This description succinctly captures the social-vw phenomenon of avatar identities as idealized and often stereotypical RL personas, and it certainly speaks to the way in which the drama of everyday social interaction is the game in these worlds.
The ever-connected Alice has picked up on a Shacknews report of a plague hitting TN darling WoW. Players beating a certain boss return home with an unexpected gift for their fellow players. Death, confusion and hilarity ensue. You can tell someone they're falling, and in their imagination they will be, but that's not necessarily going to be as intense as in the graphical case where you're tricking the senses into sending warnings of impending doom to the mind. I get motion sickness in some graphical games, but I don't in textual ones.
Eric Goldman has an update on the case, with NCSoft prevailing on several issues. Our past discussions of the case can be browsed with this link. If I were guilded up on this server I would just get a loan from my guild buddies who are rolling in it: guilds are a good example of player-instituted, financial actors. Apart from their role in raids, they are also a credit union. (Forgive me if this is obvious, but I'm trying to think this through) The thought struck me that I should create (if someone hasn't already) a guild called "Ask me for credit", which would lend to all comers--and of course, advertises just by having its members walk around with guild affiliation lit up above their heads. Is there such a beast? I submit for your comments the idea that the reason many developers have a hard time finding anything of value not only from researchers, but often from their own players, is that they are, in effect, seeing a different world, all the time.
The other category I'm interested in is player market-makers, by which I mean players who vend or otherwise create a market in virtual assets. Again, I mean only those within the world. You see a bit of this in places like IronForge on WoW, with a kind of open outcry model that has been abandoned pretty much everywhere in the real world except Chicago Board of Trade and some other commodity markets. I think that these are, at best, secondary and inefficient markets, since they are trading in the same products that one can trade in using either NPC vendors or the auction houses.
I've become interested in the emergence of financial intermediaries and markets in MMOGs/VWs. So I'd like your suggestions of examples you've seen of this. I'm not so interested in the markets/financial actors which the game devs have created, or in the RMT stuff which we all know about; instead I'm interested in player-created market-makers and financiers. I submit for your comments the idea that the reason many developers have a hard time finding anything of value not only from researchers, but often from their own players, is that they are, in effect, seeing a different world, all the time.
From the original Shacknews post: I submit for your comments the idea that the reason many developers have a hard time finding anything of value not only from researchers, but often from their own players, is that they are, in effect, seeing a different world, all the time. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.
As for how this would play out in MUDs, it is absolutely the case that you have the phenomena there. I can think of a number of examples, including things like feeling vertigo sitting on the edge of a very tall building in an old cyberpunk world, the sense of height when traveling in a MUD helicopter (and being worried about falling out), to one of the best implementations of falling I ever found in a MUD, jumping off the side of the Media Lab building (there was also diving into a pool which was also great). For me, those experiences were central to thinking about how these worlds are never just about identity or community but inhabiting them in an embodied way.
Last year when I was busy in Loch Modan, I stumbled over Stonewrought Dam (pictured at right) which spans its northern edge. Peering over the edge, I succumbed to a primal urge and flung my low-level night elf warrior over the edge. I died, of course -- but it was fun.
Curiously, Sora characters regularly post their own blog messages, leading to the odd feeling that your little virtual mobi-av has been possessed by a young sassy stranger. Sora City is described as a place where you can “be yourself … or who you’ve always wanted to be” with identity selections such as DJ, socialite, athlete, and geek. This description succinctly captures the social-vw phenomenon of avatar identities as idealized and often stereotypical RL personas, and it certainly speaks to the way in which the drama of everyday social interaction is the game in these worlds. In the RL overlap in these MMORPGs, people talk about their medical ailments, financial worries, issues with their family, relationship problems. Sometimes deeply personal stuff. I wonder if any of the key figures in this Eve scam knew each other in Real Life. If so, to what extent might they have also lied and betrayed each other within their Real Life relationships?
But the designer arrogance goes deeper than that, I'd say. This kind of elitist characterization [of users as lacking in skill] itself rests on a rather narrow conception of what "content" is. What do you want to know? Buy SWG Credits from us. A flying mount costs nearly 1k Warhammer Gold.