Since ancient times, humanity has looked to charts to help make sense of the world around it. The seafarer's navigational chart, to take one iconic example, provides a clear, objective picture of what lies beneath and beyond the inscrutable surface of the waters. The astrologer's astral chart, to take another, provides an ambiguous, open-ended image of what lies beneath the inscrutable surface of the soul and its fate.
Today I started publishing economic charts on my weblog, which is devoted to understanding (and ultimately 0wNz0ring) the eBay market for virtual items from Ultima Online, and I still haven't decided whether they function more like the navigational or the astral variety. Consider my chart of weekly market sales totals, which goes back to mid June:
Note the gentle but steady decline. What does it mean? Is this the smoking gun confirming Dan's hypothesis that Star Wars: Galaxies -- which launched right at the start of this downward slope -- is eating UO's lunch? (Decline or no decline, SWG's sales line will soon cross UO's; at $114,000-per-fortnight, it's just 12% shy of UO and gaining fast.) Or is it just a picture of what the venerable UO trader Markee Dragon assures me happens every year like clockwork: the summer slump?
And even if the line keeps drooping through the fall, how exactly, short of massive ethnographic inquiry, could we be sure that the droop reflects an exodus to SWG and not the terminal cooldown of a six-year-old game or the deflation endemic to MMORPG economies or, for that matter, a cultural revolution leading the UO player base to reject the cash markets once and for all?
Michael Froomkin and others are bold indeed to hope virtual worlds might tell us important things about the real world. I'll be happy if I can figure out what these deeply complex, overdetermined places are trying to tell us about themselves.
Recent Comments