Not living in the U.S. anymore I get my updates about the hot topics there in delayed, sometimes random, ways. I had heard a bit about the steroid uproar that happened on the heals of Jose Canseco's recent book and now just got a chance to read a review of it. In it the author (Steven Shapin, The New Yorker, 18 April) talks about the how Canseco sees steroid use as actually part of a new era of "clean living" in baseball where steroid use was part of a larger fitness trend where "you saw bigger, stronger, faster, and healthier athletes, instead of those raggedy, fun-down, pot-bellied balls players of previous eras." Shapin also recounts how President Bush dealt with the issue in his 2004 State of the Union address saying that performance drugs are bad because "it sends the wrong message--that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character."
I don't want to trigger a big pro/con steroid debate (though I actually find it a pretty interesting one - indeed the issues that pervade elite sports in terms of enhancement/recupuration/maintence are utterly compelling). But I was struck when reading that Bush quote how much it highlights what I think of as one of the most interesting aspects in the whole eBaying phenom. The issue often gets framed as one of people trying to do exactly what Bush says, take shortcuts (shortcuts that often signal a deeper failure of character). But that quote also highlights an angle we don't often talk about - that some people actually find the performance of play the crucial factor and the (theoretical/design?) focus on the top gear (top bodies?), generally framed as a reward for play, misses where some might put their actual interest and energy. What happens when we shift from thinking of object rewards to thinking about how people focus on, experience, and take pleasure in the actual act, the practice of, play? I've certainly heard of quite a few players who are already at the top-end of their MMOG game buy auction items and in this regard they seem more like someone who, having solid basic skills, invests in their own version of high tech bats, gloves, etc. (and dare we think of paying for trainers/physical therapists/sports medicine/coaches/nutrition?). And what about all the ways opting into the process of play at a very basic level is done? (Maybe Nick can jump in here on some of the surprising "relational" data he has found in his surveys.) I know I'm slip-sliding around the whole fair play debate but I actually want to a bit to at least get things going. Because I do wonder if we fully understand yet exactly the nature of play in MMOGs and the varying pleasures... not to mention pains and rewards... they offer us. Are MMOGs (at least in their PvE instantiations) even good (perfect?) fits for traditional me-against-you-level-playing-field frameworks? Of course, the Shapin review ends by getting back to the fundamental debates of fairness. But along the way he opens up some interesting avenues to think about at least.
Anecdotally, I can comment on the handful of real life friends who purchase in-game money for real world dollars.
It's not about being better than everyone else. These purchases are made because "grinding" for cash is not good entertainment. Building your character is fun; time is more valuable than the current market value of in-game funds.
When I used to play SimCity (the original version) I remember clearly typing in "FUNDS" to get extra money when I was running out--I played SimCity to build a city. I could care less about getting a high score and never considered any goal other than building a city and having fun.
Is participating in the outside market a shortcut? Yes, but it's not always about performance-boosters. Sometimes it's a shortcut around development errors. The best example I know of is mounts in World of Warcraft. If the target market is casual players, the basic mounts are clearly over-priced. If people are writing guides on how to "Save up for..." in your game, you've made a mistake that the outside-market will profit from.
Posted by: Jeff | Apr 28, 2005 at 11:30
Sports doping is an important issue and one whose salience will rise as the notion of performance-enhancement pills spreads from sports to test-taking to daily cognitive activity. Like MMOG inflation, if others are using the workarounds and speedups, you have to, or you'll fall behind. This is true for all decision-makers, too. And this incentive is largely independent of the number of dopers. If no one is doping, and I dope, I get ahead. If everyone is doping, and I do not, I fall behind. No matter who I am, no matter how prevalent the activity is, the incentive is to dope / eBay / cheat. Yet the irony, especially in sports, is that all this doping and cheating has probably no net effect on the outcome. If runner A is faster than B when both are clean, she's probably better than B when both are doped. OK, they run faster. But A still wins. Nothing has changed, except: both A and B are worse off because of the negative health consequences of the drugs.
This case is known as a n-player prisoner's dilemma: a group of rational, self-interested people will rationally and self-interestedly make themselves all miserable, and get nothing for it. The logic appears in many known cases: in overgrazing / overfishing / dust bowl / tragedy of the commons, in sports doping, in SAT test-prep schooling, and in mog RMT.
Thus, this issue is not just about fairness, as TL says. It's also about quality of experience. A game of money-getting is less fun than a game of adventuring. But if RMT goes on uncontrolled and un-designed-for, any game of adventuring becomes perforce a game of money-getting. For everyone. It becomes a core element of play, unless it is designed around.
Design: Several years ago I wrote a paper in the Journal of COnflict Resolution, with Gert Wagner, a German friend, outlining a new approach to controlling sports doping (nb I was Edward Bird then). Instead of banning dope, you allow any drug whatsoever. What you strictly enforce is this: every drug an athlete takes has to be publicly declared in a drug diary. Random tests determine whether anyone is sneaking something extra in. Then, two good things happen:
1. Players, now being able to see what others are doing, can formulate and enforce informal norms against certain really bad stupid drugs, while allowing ones that make sense (Advil).
O ho ho, you laugh. That will NEVER work. Really? Have you looked at how rules are enforced in golf? The rules are incredibly arcane and self-enforcement is very powerful. It works. You just need to have a strong community, which you get by basically allowing players to grief one another while playing. It's a long story, but the point is, griefing tools actually helps golfers enforce the wierdest little things, and they do it voluntarily.
2. With all the drugs being known, the public can turn its attention away from athletes and sports that are basically just pickled *cough* women's gymnastics *cough*. When Maguire breaks another home run record, everyone yawns - they'll know it was drugs.
There are analogies to mog enforcement of RMT and all kinds of hard-to-enforce rules. They're not always impossible to enforce, but just hard to do using centralized command-and-control. Look to golf, I say.
Posted by: Edward Castronova | Apr 28, 2005 at 11:38
Edward Castronova> Instead of banning dope, you allow any drug whatsoever. What you strictly enforce is this: every drug an athlete takes has to be publicly declared in a drug diary. Random tests determine whether anyone is sneaking something extra in.
Isn't this a specific version of the notion that the antidote to corporate malfeasance of any kind is public information?
The theory is: let 'em do whatever they want... but publicize it. Cheat your customers, dump toxic sludge into the nearest river, let your aircraft fall out of the sky, whatever -- but these acts and everything else you do (including the good stuff) gets placed into an easily accessible public information source.
Consumers (the theory continues) can then access this information to make informed purchasing decisions, and in so doing will punish the evil and reward the virtuous. In business terms, those who play by the accepted rules will profit, while those who try to game the system will be exposed as cheaters and go out of business.
...
That's the relatively objective statement of the theory. As for me personally, I've always felt inclined to believe that it would work... but I have doubts about it, too. Would consumers really take the time to educate themselves? How easy does that process of self-information have to be made before people will actually engage in it? And even if they do inform themselves, would having that information change consumer behavior?
Would most baseball fans read up on their favorite players or teams to see if they're shooting up? If they did, would they care as long as their team wins?
Would most gamers read up on who was using RTM to get uber PvP gear? If they did, would they care as long as their avatar won most fights?
--Flatfingers
Posted by: Flatfingers | Apr 28, 2005 at 14:05
Edward wrote: "But if RMT goes on uncontrolled and un-designed-for, any game of adventuring becomes perforce a game of money-getting. For everyone. It becomes a core element of play, unless it is designed around."
I disagree. Even if by some metaphysical magic RMTs didn't exist at all, the same classes of problems of a poorly designed economy would still/and do surface and marr gameplay for many users. Uncontrolled, widespread RMTs are a symptom of a poorly designed game system, they are not the disease.
I think designers should keep that in mind before they start rejiggering their designs to shield their games from this one particular symptom. Otherwise they risk solutions that are merely expensive palliatives, not cures.
Posted by: Aaron Ruby | Apr 28, 2005 at 14:21
Because of the n-player prisoner's dilemma, we have conventions, pacts, rules of play, ToS, etc. These commonly agreed understand create a stable environment that promotes peace instead of mutual destruction. But, there is always the incentive for someone to secretly break the rules.
We can go for the open, self-enforcement policy. But this generally works only if everyone has very similar goals. This works for clubby games like golf (to win) and organizations like OPEC (to manages oil prices), but it's hard to make it work in MOG where people have different objectives.
Command-and-control obviously haven't worked so well (Enron is an example for both the failure of regulation and public disclosure), but even a decentralized model still leads to fat-tail events like mobs or what I called the lemmings effect. For example, the majority may accept doping as part of baseball and then dominate the minority into acceptance.
What may work out better, which may have applications to MOG, is the hubs-and-spoke model where the spoke acts as a defense against the domination of the major… kind of like the internet backbone network.
Frank
Posted by: magicback | Apr 28, 2005 at 14:23
Aaron, RMT could be seen as both a sympton and a disease as it breeds more RMT.
It's like harmful bacteria multiplying and taking over.
I do agree that new designs should be senstitive to this issue.
Frank
Posted by: magicback | Apr 28, 2005 at 14:26
"you saw bigger, stronger, faster, and healthier athletes, instead of those raggedy, fun-down, pot-bellied balls players of previous eras."
"...some people actually find the performance of play the crucial factor and the (theoretical/design?) focus on the top gear (top bodies?), generally framed as a reward for play, misses where some might put their actual interest and energy."
the reason why baseball players should not dope is that the baseball game is Not about the baseball players. it's about -- for/sold to -- the baseball watchers. those are the paying customers, and they are the ones who don't want to see uneven playing fields. what the baseball players -- hail a_dodger_batter_01, hail a_yankee_fielder_02 -- want is irrelevent, and why the analogy between doping baseball players and ebaying mmoggers does not work.
doping/ebaying, offers two keys: increased efficiency/productivity, and access to events/sub-games previously unobtainable. attaining these makes the game more fun. if the current game design demands these two keys, why punish players for wanting to acquire them, if they are required to enjoy your game?
if your players want phat loot and god-like powers, run a monty haul avatar campaign. if your players want to dope, make a dope league. why is there some need in mmog design that insists that tedium is a necessity, and that rewards can only be obtained at the 500+ hour, level 50+ mark? why is the mmog market generally resistant to the market truism that the customer is king?
bigger, fa$ter, $tronger = more fun. as a developer, if you object to RMT, design a game where killing a grass snake with a rusty sword and tattered rags can be just as fun as killing a minotaur with a vorpal avenger +5 and full sacred plate of the whale. design a game where the first hour of gameplay can be just as fun, if not more fun, than the 501st hour.
there are already obvious solutions to making games RMT resistant, in the software and fleshware markets. more money will not make you better at chess, magic the gathering, counterstrike, the sims online, vampire the masquerade, neverwinter nights, champions of norrath, go, jenga, guild wars, battlefield 1942. these are all games where either the concept of money/trade has been made irrelevant, and/or the pieces in the game are equal/available to all, and the primary variable for winning the game is skill.
there's the proof you can make dope free/RMT-proof games that people want to play, if that is your intent. there is nothing wrong with dope/ebay, if your game is designed for it. if your game is designed with trading in mind, people will play and not cry foul.
if i know there is no worthy fun to be had, i will skip it. if i have done the same 20-hour quest on another character, i will skip it if i can. if i have to sit in the same exact spot to kill the same exact mob that spawns only once every two hours for a 0.3% drop, i will skip it if i can. time sinks like this provide absolutely no enjoyment, fun, or challenge. and i would say the gross majority of mmog players would agree.
do not make a game that forces people to "cheat", just because of poor design and a lack of content, and then complain that your players are cheating. make a game where people actually want to play 500 hours, not grind/buy 500 hours.
hopefully the next generation of mmogs will arrive eschewing vertical time sinks and item/level treadmills in favor of horizontal breadth/variety of play, and promoting "winning" via human skill over items/stats...
Posted by: hikaru | Apr 28, 2005 at 14:42
(the data that T.L. mentioned)
Players were asked whether they had ever bought virtual items/currency. A multiple regression was run using age, gender, hours played per week and the motivational components as predictors.
The best predictors were (in descending order): age (as proxy for disposable income/time probably), relationship (desire to form meaningful relationships), teamwork (soloers prefer to buy) and then advancement (to get ahead, to become powerful).
It's not clear to me why the relationship component comes out as a good predictor (gender not significant, so this isn't a gender difference), but what's clear is that the common framing of the eBay issue along "becoming leet" is not the primary motivation for why players do it. A reader left this intriguing suggestion at the Daedalus Project:
In other words, the multiple regression data suggest very different potential framings of the issue:
- players buy virtual currency to sustain their virtual social networks
- players buy virtual currency to maintain their independence or counteract their constrained play schedules
For these players, RMT isn't cheating as much as what makes their virtual existence possible ...
Posted by: Nick Yee | Apr 28, 2005 at 16:15
Nick Yee wrote:
For these players, RMT isn't cheating
Argh, whether it's cheating is so simple. If the rules say it's cheating, it's cheating. If they don't, then it's not. Cheating is breaking the rules, not breaking what people wish were the rules or wish were not the rules.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Apr 28, 2005 at 16:20
Matt--it's breaking the rules so in the objective sense it is cheating. Period. However, I think the issue is less that it's cheating, period, but rather there exists a group of players who don't consider it cheating and continue to do it for various reasons.
People speed, but I doubt if you ask many of them that they say, "Yeah--I break the law every day." There are consequences to speeding just like there are consequences to RMT. I don't contend this is a perfect analogy, but it definitely has a lot of similarities to the issue.
So at that point what do you do? Do you just go all out war on players who practice in RMT? Do you factor that kind of behavior into your system? What issues exist behind the issue? How can you build a system that alleviates those issues thus making RMT uninteresting? So on so forth.
You don't get to any of those questions if you stop at the point that cheating is cheating if it's breaking the rules, period.
/will
Posted by: will | Apr 28, 2005 at 17:24
"there are already obvious solutions to making games RMT resistant, in the software and fleshware markets. more money will not make you better at chess, magic the gathering, counterstrike, the sims online, vampire the masquerade, neverwinter nights, champions of norrath, go, jenga, guild wars, battlefield 1942."
Some of your examples are trivial. For instance, while it's true you can't go out and buy specialized Jenga pieces to make yourself into a 'better' player, even if you could there'd be little incentive to do so, other than perhaps bragging rights amongst your local Jenga group.
Some of your examples are simply wrong. There certainly was a time, and perhaps this is still true, when money did make you a better Magic: the Gathering player. Around the time that Frank Kusumoto's "Dojo" really started becoming popular, all you had to do to do well in a constructed tournament (not necessarily win, but at least get into the final single elims) was read up for a while on the Dojo to see what the hottest 'netdecks' were, go out to your local shop and buy just those specific cards, then play a few games beforehand to get an idea how the deck was supposed to work. Voila - money 'buying' ability, insofar as deck design was considered one of the talents on display in a constructed tournament. I've even been on NWN servers where the folks running them admitted that, if you contributed money to help them keep the server up, they'd shoot you some 'phat lewt' or even powerlevel you in return.
Most interesting, though, is your use of 'better' in a possibly mistargeted way: are people who eBay for items trying to be better 'players', or simply to get better 'avatars'? And is there a distinction? In Magic, for instance, someone who netdecks might end up doing very poorly in 'sealed' play, where you have to put a deck together out of a block of random cards rather than simply being able to go out and buy the cards you want. There can be a distinction made between a 'good player' and a 'good deck'. Can such a distinction really be usefully made for World of Warcraft?
I think one of the reasons players have such visceral reactions to eBaying is that they want to imagine that spending hundreds of hours in front of their keyboard is actually paying off by making them 'good' at something. At the same time, developers who resist the Sony Exchange model might be doing so out of the realization that, if having an avatar with great equipment is basically the only way to demonstrate your 'talent' as a player, that what they've made isn't actually a game of skill, but a game of chance. And if you're going to spend all that time and all that money playing a game of chance on your computer, why not just play poker online, where there's at least the chance you might get some real cash out of it in the end rather than a bunch of virtual 'equipment' that has no value outside of that specific game environment?
If the game is constructed in such a way that you really can 'buy' your way to what the game measures as 'ability', then what really is the point of spending all that time?
Posted by: David Wintheiser | Apr 28, 2005 at 23:12
Argh, whether it's cheating is so simple. If the rules say it's cheating, it's cheating. If they don't, then it's not. Cheating is breaking the rules, not breaking what people wish were the rules or wish were not the rules.
--matt
***
So every time a designer changes the rules -- nerfs a character or fixes a bug -- it's cheating?
Designers keep thinking they make the rules. Or maybe that they ARE the rules.
Designers make the games. Players make the rules.
Playing is breaking the rules, not breaking what designers wish to be broken or not broken. I think you must be thinking about playing NICE.
I'm really having a hard time getting a grip on this argument, since I think they people who do the RMT'ing and the people who are so deadset against RMT'ing have pretty much the same position: RMT matters.
There are other positions.
Posted by: dmyers | May 03, 2005 at 17:38
serial key avg
macaffe antivirus
panda antivirus francais
panda antivirus download
titanium antivirus
avg e mail
antivirus avg en
inoculate antivirus
license avg
crack panda antivirus titanium
avg en francais
netshield
test panda antivirus
avg e mail scanner
avg gratuit francais
panda antivirus online scan
inoculate
panda software online virus
panda software download
panda software panda
panda antivirus fr
utilitaire antivirus
panda antivirus titanium 2005 v4
panda antivirus ligne
patch panda antivirus
Posted by: antiviruscrack | Jan 27, 2006 at 10:16