You mean, like, you can make money at this?

Who woulda thunk it?

Comments

[Walker Spaight]

1.

It may be old hat around here and in the halls of academe, but to the Times and to most of the people who read the Sunday business section, it's a very surprising and new idea. The Times isn't known for being too far ahead of the curve (or even for keeping up with the curve, sometimes), but it is known for reaching a very large and mainstream audience -- the kind of audience that VWs will eventually need to reach if they're to fulfill their vast potential.

[Mark Wallace]

2.

(Sorry, I didn't mean to post that last comment under an avatar's name.)

It may be old hat around here and in the halls of academe, but to the Times and to most of the people who read the Sunday business section, it's a very surprising and new idea. The Times isn't known for being too far ahead of the curve (or even for keeping up with the curve, sometimes), but it is known for reaching a very large and mainstream audience -- the kind of audience that VWs will eventually need to reach if they're to fulfill their vast potential.
--Mark Wallace

[Jessica Mulligan]

3.

It shouldn't be a surprise to NY Times readers; they've done at least 4 feature articles about it since 1999.

[Mark Wallace]

4.

The Sunday business section editors apparently thought it would be interesting enough to their readers to warrant another. Anyway, you can never have too many articles about MMOGs, if you ask me. :)

[Lee Sheldon]

5.

350 massively multiplayer games?

[Peter Ludlow]

6.

wow, 4 articles since 1999. That's like 1 every year and a half! What kind of tard would have missed that.

Oh, by the way, did *all* of those articles mention the 100K earners in SL?

Maybe its time to pull the broomsticks out of behinds and recognize that some things are worth saying more than once, and that when we have new stories about new people doing something that's been done in some form or other before, that that could actually be interesting to the non-broomstick enabled.

[Barry Kearns]

7.

I suppose the next logical question is whether the broomstick was earned, or came as part of a commodified purchase... =)

[Richard Bartle]

8.

NY Times>He owns virtual real estate

Isn't the point that he owns real virtual estate?

Richard

[Tobold]

9.

Quote from the article: While most game companies do not encourage the buying and selling of virtual goods, none have found a way to stop it, and most simply ignore it. Many players dislike the practice, saying that it gives those with more money an unfair advantage. But game companies are beginning to accept "real-money trade" as a fact of life. Sony Online Entertainment recently began a service that allows players of its EverQuest II game to buy and sell items through a Sony site.

I felt that the article was glossing over the problems. The article sounds as it you could legally make money by selling virtual items in World of Warcraft (which is explicitely mentioned), when in fact that isn't true. While problems of fraud etc. are mentioned, nowhere does it say that in many games you would be virtually condemned to death and expropriated (aka banned) for this activity.

[Peter Ludlow]

10.

Or banned for even linking to sites that link to sites that advertise virtual trades.

[Peter Ludlow]

11.

Oh and Barry is right about too many broomsticks being unearned and coming from broom farmer internet sites. I would have mentioned it, but there was a paragraph on it in PennySaver News about a year and a half ago, so I assumed it would be old news to Terra Novians. And you know the TN motto: "Say something once? Why say it again? Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa..."

[Edward Castronova]

12.

O lay off Peter, You know we're just mad because we didn't get quoted or cited. :)

Seriously, there's something analytic going on, I think. It's in the nature of viral distribution of information. If we were talking here about, say, a new cure for cancer, that would hit the NYTimes once and spread so far and so fast, that the next article in the Times would indeed seem passe. The sense I get is that this topic doesn't enjoy that viral spread. It doesn't get the add-on effect. At some point, people here the news bit and they then sit on it.

I have a theory as to why.

The cure for cancer meme improves the sender's reputation with the receiver. it serves the sender, socially, to do the sending. same thing with the meme of 'nanobots are going to eat us alive'. sure, it's a sorceror's apprentice, chicken-little thing, but it works well enough to go out virally.

not so with synthetic worlds. every sender is telling the reciever 'the line between play and real life is blurring.' that message is threatening in an existential way. it's not threatening in a chicken-little way, it's threatening in the same way as 'this is not a drill' is threatening to a nuclear submarine captain. its fucking scary. it recolors all of existence. 'you mean people are going into fantasy games and LIVING there? Holy fuck. tell me again why i am a married insurance executive with three kids, instead of the Arch-Wizard of Numenor. Tell me why I am not Y.A. Tittle. Tell me why I am not sleeping with Cleopatra this very minute. Fuck.'

it's even deeper. our culture predisposes to LOVE new information about new technology, even dangerous technology. but it predisposes us to hate the blurring of lines between play and not play. when someone tries to get you seriously interested in his game, you get pissed, not interested. and when you're playing a game, and someone takes it too damn seriously, again you get pissed off, not interested. this topic invokes fear and fascination like many new-tech topics. but the other ones (nanotech, blogs, the genome, AI, whatever) doesn't invoke anger.

and i think anger is what shuts down viral spread. at some point, links in the chain say 'umm, this messes too much with the foundations of my existence. it makes me recalibrate meaning. so, no, i am not going to tell my bowling buddies about it. it needs to die. now.'

when greg and dan and cory and the whole crew were at the ABA, (and correct me if i am not remembering this right) i noticed that after cory's intro of SL, few people left, but after greg's bit, that really went into the whole play is real stuff, a big bunch of people bolted. and it COULD NOT have been because greg's stuff was not interesting. i think it pushes people over the edge.

i am in a somewhat lucky position because i have numbers that dont lie and cannot be denied. RMT is a hard proof. it turns the whole thing into an assertion that is harder to ignore.

but people want to ignore this. yes they do. more: they want to kill it. it's too damn scary.

so, yes, let's have more and more articles.

[Peter Ludlow]

13.

Good point, Ted, and its worth noting that of the numerous complaints that we get at the Second Life Herald, by far the biggest has to do with our failure to respect the border between play and reality. It creates a "sense of discomfort" as one person put it. At times people have charged it is a species of bad journalistic ethics to blur the boundary. Whether that sense is motivated by fear I don't know, but it is certainly "real", and it is probably responsible for the lack of uptake of this basic idea.

So again, I agree with you that this idea will not have the luxury of memetic propagation. We are going to have to repeat it over and over and over again and most people still won't buy it.

Sometimes worthy ideas require this kind of repetition. As the great generative linguist Morris Halle once said after being charged with repeating what was known to some in the audience: "I didn't come here to bring you the news. I came here to bring you the truth."

[Mike Sellers]

14.

A friend of mine, Charles Cameron, writes a blog called DoubleQuotes described by him as "pairs of quotes which cause interesting ripples when the two of them are dropped into the mind-pool together." Charles is probably known to some of you as the developer of Hipbone games, a thoughtful and insightful instantiation of Hesse's Glass Bead Game.

I can't post the graphic (due I'm guessing to sensible limitations against posting images via html here), but here is a DoubleQuotes bead Charles came up with recently that juxtaposes the NY Times article on sales in SL with another NYT article about making money via other "virtual" means. RMTs indeed.

[Aryoch]

15.

Edward, thanks for sharing that very interesting analysis. I had never thought about the issue in that way and what you say really rings true.

I have noticed a certain negative reaction when non-gamers/VW-types hear significant details about VW/MMOs. For that reason, even when our neighbors and friends ask us about our business, we are usually light on the details. I'd like to say we work hard to instruct people that VWs/MMOs are here to stay, but we like getting invited to the neighborhood cookouts and having friends for our daughter to play with.

What you mention, Edward, reminds me of The Uncanny Valley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley).

I wonder if there is a similar phenomenon for Virtual Worlds.

People are comfortable with them up to a point of realism, but after that point people are VERY uncomfortable (until they become SO real that the difference no longer matters).

[Michael Chui]

16.

Good eyes, sharp mind, Ted. I wish I'd read that a few weeks ago, before I gave my informative speech on virtual worlds. The entire class's feedback on the content was either "I didn't get it" or "That was mind-blowing/bending".

[Mike Sellers]

17.

Ted, the thing that occurs to me reading your comments above is that different types of consumers want different things. Those on the leading edge want to be the ones in the know; they want to have the cool stuff. Earl adopters hang back a bit, but also like being in to something "before everyone else."

Most other people though want to know that something is safe, effective, tried and true. They don't want to risk their reputation, enjoyment, etc., on something too new.

So it may be that the vast majority of people (and the readers of the NY Times) don't yet know what to make of these new-fangled computer games, especially the ones you somehow play over the Internet. For these people, the whiz-bang cool newness of computer games is not going to have a strong viral aspect: they don't speak to what they want and need.

Stories in the media, playing to the non-avant garde masses, will thus predominantly be one of two types: the "look, this really bad for your health/marriage/job" (i.e., stay away, this is really unsafe!) or "hey look other normal people are doing this and even making money at it" (i.e., it's safe, effective, and won't label you as a weirdo).

The more of the latter type we can get, the more likely we are to see a broadening of the overall MMOG market.

[Jeff Cole]

18.

Ted, what assertion does RMT make harder to ignore? The assertion that people are blurring the lines to such an extent that they are "living" in the games, or that such blurring makes people uncomfortable (i.e. they RMT because they are uncomfotrable with the blurring)?

I'm not sure that RMT lends support to either, really.

As for a virtual atheist and her general response, how do you know that it "COULD NOT" be that it is simply not interesting to her? Maybe it's just that the zealots (rather than their doctrine) make her uncomfortable. After all, just look at Ludlow's completely unprovoked, irrational attack on another of the flock.

After the sky has fallen, I think we will see that it is the culture that has assimilated MMOs, and not the other way around (isn't it that against which Richard crusades?).

Jeff Cole

[Jeff Cole]

19.

Ted, what assertion does RMT make harder to ignore? That people blur the line? Or that people are wigged out by any blur?

Or, perhaps it's the zealots themselves, and not their doctrine, that disturbs the atheists. After all, consider Ludlow's unprovoked, irrational attack on another of the flock.

I think that once the sky has fallen, it will be the culture that has assimilated MMOs, not the other way around (and isn't exactly that result against which Richard crusades?).

Jeff Cole

[Peter Ludlow]

20.

I wonder why you don't consider it zealotry when people repeat over and over "its only a game" and "get a life". But in any case, zealotry doesn't seem to be turning people off these days. In fact, if you turn on the news you'll see that the zealots are running the country. But my zeal makes me say that.

[Jeff Cole]

21.

First, apologies for the double post above. TN crashed posting the first, and when I was able to reload the site fifteen minutes later, the first was not there, so I quickly re-typed what became the second.

Where did I claim that there were not "it's only a game" zealots? That said, merely repeating one's position does not make him per se a zealot.

"Zealotry doesn't seem to be turning people off these days"? Have you seen the poll numbers?

Just because one votes for the lesser of two zealots doesn't mean she is not turned off by zealotry. There is nothing whatsoever inconsistent between, on the one hand, voting for the zealot that most serves your self-interest; and, on the other hand, being turned off by zealotry, in general.

Hell, I am a professional zealot to the extent I get paid to advocate positions in a manner which many an opposing likely considers "excessive" or "fanatic." However, I rarely "take it home" with me, and I practice that zealotry in narrow circumstances and appropriate venues.

Ludlow's unwarranted and misplaced attack on Jessica accomplished two things: made him look like an ass, and supplied the "get a life" zealots with munitions.

Jeff Cole

[Peter Ludlow]

22.

Uh, sure.

Returning to your original point Jeff, and you DID have one, it was that people are not turned off by the message that the reality/fiction distinction collpses, but rather by the zealotry of the advocates of the thesis. But I don't see any evidence of zealotry. To the contrary, I see the advocates of the position wringing their hands over the fact that the topic appeared in the New York Times four times in the last six years. Far from scaring people with our zealous preaching of this message, we are so allergic to repeating the message (and so dismissive of reporters that report on the topic)that we are in effect preventing the message from even being aired at all.

[Uhhuh]

23.

The reason why (normal) people are uncomfortable with RMT articles or discussion, is because they innately recognize the cheating aspect of when you buy something outside the scope or rules of the system.

It's the same reason why you don't see many articles or discussions about the revenue benefits of selling your highschool/college term papers.

Most people, who aren't morally ambiguient, don't sell (or buy) their term papers or other such academia, or condone any other forms of cheating and as such would not be likely to support or further those discussions or articles.

but people want to ignore this. yes they do. more: they want to kill it. it's too damn scary.

I submit, its not that its too scary, they just know its wrong.

[Flatfingers]

24.

Maybe I'm wrong, but this looks to me less like "we don't get this newfangled technology" and more like "adults don't play games."

Westerners (particularly Americans) are actually pretty quick about picking up technology if it can be shown to have some utility in their daily lives. On a visit to Poland last year, I noticed that not everyone had a door on their bathroom, but everyone had a cell phone. One guy I met had three -- he used one of them as a bottle opener.

It seems more likely to me that the discomfort some people feel comes from taking play seriously. To talk about play at all is to tacitly approve of adults playing games, which for many years our Western culture has disparaged as childish. It's OK as an adult to engage in recreation... as long as you don't take it seriously.

This has been changing over the past half-century or so. Gambling in Vegas or Atlantic City, professional sports leagues, Disney places for adults, computer games -- it's becoming more acceptable for adults to play openly, and to treat play as an acceptable (or even desirable) aspect of human existence. We even talk about a "right to play."

But cultural change is slow. There are still a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the idea that adults are permitted to have fun. A year or so ago, the conservative Weekly Standard published an article entitled "The Perpetual Adolescent" that highlighted this concern.

The thesis of this article is that our increasing acceptance of play is a symptom of a decreasing social expectation of self-responsibility. The more it's OK for people to focus on self-pleasure, the less they'll focus on behaving responsibly. Once enough people feel this way, the self-reinforcing result is an infantilized, pleasure-oriented and self-centered society whose members are no longer willing or able to do the hard work of adults to maintain that society.

To talk about virtual worlds, whether here on in the pages of the NYT, may or may not contribute to the decline of the West. (I suspect not.) But it's not a trivial or silly question to ask, and might say something useful about how we can communicate to the general public about virtual worlds.

That said, I do get the impression that most old-school reporters and editors absolutely despise computers, and that this personal bias affects what is printed (and what is allowed to be printed). So stories about "virtual worlds" will probably be too "out there" for these folks for at least a few more years.

--Flatfingers

[Edward Castronova]

25.

Mike> Stories in the media, playing to the non-avant garde masses, will thus predominantly be one of two types: the "look, this really bad for your health/marriage/job" (i.e., stay away, this is really unsafe!) or "hey look other normal people are doing this and even making money at it" (i.e., it's safe, effective, and won't label you as a weirdo).

Points well taken. I feel I've also read stories (and been interviewed in the mode of) "look at how stupid people can be." In other words, not anger but marginalization.

I guess if there was a concrete prediction to be made from my off-the-cuff theory, it would be that the color of news coverage will take the first of Mike's two tracks as/when/if the MOG phenomenon grows into undeniable salience. And sometimes I think that this fight is not going to be like the fight over the nickelodeon and rock. Sometimes it feels like a much bigger thing. I hold myself back because the perceived bigness of the topic feeds my ego, of course - "I'm a scholar of a Great Big Thing, bigger than the punylittlething you study" - but still: there are a couple of hints that this is not your ordinary cultural struggle. 1) Some people say we're about to go post-human. The singularity is upon us. All that stuff. When that seems persuasive, and sometimes it does, I tend to think synthetic environments are going to be a big part of it. So in that case we're not talking about a fight over a hobby, we're talking about a fight about what humanity is. Yikes. 2) In the past, it seems to me, any cultural innovation that proposes we simply work less is viciously attacked. As long as rock seemed to suggest dropping out, there was a fight. The minute the hippies put away their bongs and went to work, we had Led Zeppelin muzak in elevators. Well, one pushback I get comes from this sense of outrage at MOG users just not caring about the world of school and work. And it's true: if you play MMORPGs every available moment, you can live at poverty wages and still feel pretty accomplished. That's by design. MOGs make a lotus-eating lifestyle feasible. Just think: no school, no work, just leveling up your characters, learning a craft or two, and selling the excess on eBay. Unlike LSD, you can do it your whole life. Seems like it could evolve into [what is perceived as] a serious threat against the work ethic, the core doctrine of the socio-economic religion that now grips the entire globe. (Yes, you know and I know that the work inside virtual worlds is also work, but it may not be seen that way.) So again, we're not talking about a hobby here, it's heresy.

[Edward Castronova]

26.

Jeff> Ted, what assertion does RMT make harder to ignore? That people blur the line? Or that people are wigged out by any blur?

The former. For some reason, people look at the market numbers and they then believe that what's happening inside the membrance is not just/only a game. It seems to have more effect than when you tell them 'people meet in these worlds, fall in love, have sex, and stay together as a couple'.

[Lee Delarm]

27.

Uhhuh>Most people, who aren't morally ambiguient, don't sell (or buy) their term papers or other such academia, or condone any other forms of cheating and as such would not be likely to support or further those discussions or articles.

but people want to ignore this. yes they do. more: they want to kill it. it's too damn scary.

I submit, its not that its too scary, they just know its wrong.
---
I've never thought it was wrong, not even in the very tentative stages of my MMO years of seeing graphical EQ. In fact, only a few months after I started I found a nifty repeatable quest that had an item that I made quite a hefty amount of money on (Tumpy Tonics) and my mother was quite baffled when she saw $1000 checks coming in the mail.

I can't say she was too frightened of it either, except she thought at first I was selling drugs :P Ah the old days :)

[Uhhuh]

28.

And that sir, I would consider a prime example of http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=moral+ambiguity>moral ambiguity.

"There is a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path."

[Rich Thurman]

29.

Cheating? Seems this converstation always comes back to cheating/exploiting:

Uhhuh>Most people, who aren't morally ambiguient, don't sell (or buy) their term papers or other such academia, or condone any other forms of cheating and as such would not be likely to support or further those discussions or articles.

but people want to ignore this. yes they do. more: they want to kill it. it's too damn scary.

I submit, its not that its too scary, they just know its wrong.
---

Let me ask you this....

Are there economies with-in most MMO games?

Yes?

Well then, in comparison to RL economy, is the guy that puts together an assembly line to produce pre-fabed garage cabinets to sell considered cheating? Is the guy that buys the pre-fabed garage cabinets rather then toiling hours on end to make them from scratch considered cheating?

No?

So, why is it considered cheating for a player in an MMO to create his own virtual assembly-line and start manufacturing goods in which there is ample demand? How are these two different?

[Uhhuh]

30.

So, why is it considered cheating for a player in an MMO to create his own virtual assembly-line and start manufacturing goods in which there is ample demand? How are these two different?

Of course that is not cheating, if all transactions reside within the system and no exploits are used.

One of the core tenets of (most) games is, you abide by the rules and everyone has a fair and level playing field. You progress within the scope and context of that world.

Why is it that Larry Byrd never needed or wanted some guy in the stands to run out and grab the ball from Michael Jordan and pass it to him?

It's against the rules for one.. outside interference..

And its against the spirit of the game, for another.

What is really frightening is the amount of people who can not or will not accept, or just plain don't care, that outside interference is cheating.

[Urizenus Sklar]

31.

Well it's not cheating to make and sell things in second life -- in fact its encouraged. And by the way, that was the primary case discussed in the article we are supposedly talking about in this thread.

[Rich Thurman]

32.

Sklar raises a great point; some MMOGs actually encourage this behavior, so not all MMOGs consider this activity cheating.

With that said, has anyone actually documented where each game explicitly states that it is against game rules to buy/sell outside of the game it's self?

The thing is, I understand why Uhhuh feels it is cheating, but I see the lack of evidence that the rules are clearly defined and prohibit it. Some games probably have it as a 'clearly defined' rule, but games like UO and SL don’t make a declaration that RMT activity is against the rules, and therefore, the "its cheating" argument is totally moot.

BTW, while I was a professional farmer, I stayed away from Sony games based solely on the conjecture that the activity was against the rules. I never actually looked at the rules, instead I stayed within a realm where my activity was accepted by the publisher and had no clear ruling on the activity itself.

[Mark Wallace]

33.

Edward> if there was a concrete prediction to be made from my off-the-cuff theory, it would be that the color of news coverage will take the first of Mike's two tracks [Mike> "look, this really bad for your health/marriage/job" (i.e., stay away, this is really unsafe!)] as/when/if the MOG phenomenon grows into undeniable salience.

I'm surprised to hear that that's your view, Edward. I'm more optimistic. I think the American public is well prepared for things like people earning money in MMOGs and virtual worlds. The median age of Americans these days is just over 36. That's two years younger than me, and I learned BASIC before I even started studying for my bar mitzvah. I don't know how many people were born after 1980 or so, but those are all people who were born into a world in which computers were no big thing by the time they came of age. Remember that during the dot-com boom people were earning buckets of money doing nothing more than having an idea (no implementation required). If that's not threatening to the work ethic, I don't know what is. A few tut-tuts were heard, but no great outcry.

There are certainly legitimate concerns to be raised about people neglecting their "real" lives for some "virtual" existence (though the lines between those are definitely blurring, as has been pointed out). But I think/hope that by the time that becomes a major headline virtual worlds will have progressed to the point where they're more nearly like tools and extensions of our physical lives than they are games. Second Life is a great example of first steps in this direction.

And perhaps there's some dovetail with an earlier comment thread here about how RMT could possibly kill MMOGs. Perhaps what will happen is that RMT will move into worlds like Second Life, where it's specifically encouraged, and "gaming" worlds and other alternate social realities will return to being more hermetic. I don't know if there's any way to totally stamp out RMT in MMOGs (I'm looking forward to seeing Barry's ideas in action), but perhaps as more and more MMO environments appear that are not "games" but are "worlds" (i.e., places you can do whatever you want) it will take some of the pressure off traditional MMOGs to be commercial spaces.

[Mark Wallace]

34.

In fact, it should probably read above: "...born after 1970 or so..."

[Barry Kearns]

35.

Uhhuh wrote:

What is really frightening is the amount of people who can not or will not accept, or just plain don't care, that outside interference is cheating.

What I find vastly more frightening is people who cannot or will not accept that not everyone needs to (or wants to) play games in the same manner they do... and people who embrace "outside interference" when it's for reasons they like, and at the same time condemn the same interference if it's for a reason they don't like.

One of the core tenets of (most) games is, you abide by the rules and everyone has a fair and level playing field. You progress within the scope and context of that world.

Once your game gets beyond a certain size, you're going to see meta-gaming taking place (and size is probably a sufficient but not necessary condition).

In many ways, quite a few virtual worlds are akin to toys, and people will play with toys in different ways. The larger the collection of people you assemble, the greater the probability that someone in that collection is going to find a very different form of entertainment by playing a different way. Some will find that different way of playing disturbing.

An arbitrary set of rules for the "proper" way to play with a toy will be summarily ignored by a percentage of people. In general, some people are interested in exploring novel and creative ways to extract enjoyment from their toys. "Progress within the game" takes on a radically different meaning when you adopt your own set of goals.

In many ways, it's like art. A subset of artists will pursue realism, some will attempt to create inspiring things, some will create art in an attempt to "shake people up". At the root (for many of them) is a desire to create something evocative... and not everything that is evocative will be pleasant to everyone. In fact, some of the most evocative art is evocative precisely BECAUSE people find it offensive or disturbing.

Yet we don't see many people taking the concept of "rules" for art seriously, nor the idea that artists who ignore those rules are "cheating". It's entirely subjective. Playing with virtual worlds is similar.

This becomes a significant problem with "soft rules" (rules that are not programatically enforced), and even more so when you create soft rules that are based on out-of-game player motivations, and not on the in-game behaviors.

That's "outside interference", too. Game providers attempt to interfere with the out-of-game pursuits of RMT players instead of fixing (IMO) the root problem: the disruptive nature of arbitrary and largely unrestricted trading of achievement tokens between players.

Bob joins an MMO game and creates his first character. John walks up to his character, opens a trade window, and gives him 10,000 gold.

That's what is "in the game". The hard rules of the game allow John to give 10,000 gold to Bob, despite Bob having played the game for only 47 seconds.

What's outside the game is John's motivation for giving Bob 10,000 gold.

Is this "outside interference"? Sure it is. Bob didn't earn 10,000 gold with that character, and he'll have a substantial advantage over Steve, whose in-game balance in his first 20 levels wasn't subsidized by another player.

If you build your game to allow people to give each other obscene amounts of unearned power, a fraction of them will do it... especially when they see a benefit from it. That's rational optimization behavior in many cases. They'll choose to "play differently", and alter the progress curve. The problem is the concept that you can build a game that allows people to trade power at will, and then expect them not to do it for some arbitrarily defined reason. It's the ultimate in "soft rules".

The John-to-Bob transaction happens all the time in major MMOs. Some of those transactions are people "hooking each other up" as personal favors, generally because they know the person in real life and have often played with them before in a different game. John may have even introduced Bob to the game, and convinced him to start playing with the promise to give him plenty of cool stuff.

That's certainly outside interference... nothing Bob did in the game entitled him to receive 10,000 gold in the first minute of his character's life. Yet people barely blink an eye when this happens, and scream bloody murder when Bob gave John $10 instead.

To the best of my knowledge, no MMO in existence has a disruptive level of RMT of items and/or currency without first having opened the door by allowing twinking for entirely out-of-game reasons (which no one seems to even ask about)... and I have yet to see a TOS/ROC document that tries to implement a "soft rule" against people twinking each other to absurdly disruptive levels and calling it "cheating".

A soft rule that attempts to prohibit "selling" of in-game power while still allowing people to GIVE IT AWAY (for whatever unspecified reason they like) is doomed to fail, because it hinges on something that is entirely outside the scope of a game developer's purview.

RMT is a natural consequence of having a large collection of people playing in an environment where rewards are easily de-coupled from a character's actual achievements... where power tokens can be gifted at will.

A solution seems straightforward to me: make the rules hard instead of soft. Tie character rewards to a character's achievements, and (at a minimum) make any player-to-player gifting a publicly displayed character attribute.

Not everyone will want to play under that kind of rule... and that's fine. It's a ruleset that's designed to prevent the counterfeiting of achievement via hard enforcement, and some people would prefer to counterfeit. They have more fun with the "toy" aspect than the "game" aspect.

I say, let them play with their toys. Give them a server where they can treat the environment as a toy. Server rulesets that allow massive twinking obviously aren't meaningfully about achievement anyway, and stand no real chance of preventing RMT from arising in that environment.

If you want an achievement-based game, create a separate ruleset that eliminates disruptive levels of twinking, and I predict you won't see disruptive levels of RMT there either.

Anti-RMT soft rules stand about as much chance of working as a soft rule that tried to prevent you from giving in-game gifts for romantic reasons, but you can give them for any other reason. A fraction of players would rightfully ignore such a silly rule, since the rule doesn't speak to in-game disruption at all... it speaks only to a player's out-of-game motivation. Giving gifts is either unbalancing to the game or not, regardless of what motivated the player to give the gift.

[Michael Chui]

36.

One of the core tenets of (most) games is, you abide by the rules and everyone has a fair and level playing field. You progress within the scope and context of that world.

So what makes this fair?:

Player A starts the game on the day of launch. He achieves level 60. He meets Player B.

Player B starts the game and meets a level 60 Player A. Because it's a combat-oriented PvP game, A kills B.

That's obviously not fair. It's the difference between a "game" and a "world". In worlds, fairness is an illusion. In games, you restart the pieces: pawns on rank two and seven. Everyone has the say starting opportunity, everyone has the same range of possibility, the only variables are the other players.

Game-type fairness would demand this: everytime a newbie enters the game, everyone is reset to level zero. Otherwise it's exactly like starting a chess game, and having one player get up in the middle of it and another one sit down.

Unless the rules state "Whoever gets here first has the greatest chance of being the best in the game."?

[Aryoch]

37.

Michael Chui wrote: "Game-type fairness would demand this: everytime a newbie enters the game, everyone is reset to level zero. Otherwise it's exactly like starting a chess game, and having one player get up in the middle of it and another one sit down."

Um......... no.

You do understand that RPGs are a genre of games, right?

In an RPG type game, that is not how fairness is defined at all.

[magicback]

38.

What's the big deal really? People make money on millions of different opportunities.

People make money by working the food stamp program.

People make money on ebay selling pirated goods.

People make money selling virtual dreams.

So on and so on...

It's not really a big deal in the frame of what is going on around in the world. A mother starting a sucessful business in the midst of chaos in Iraq, etc.

I'm starting to rant, but my perspective, which is as valid as anyone's, is that it's not a big deal.

The only think I see that this highlight is that the "market" is not correcting itself. There's plenty of ways to arbitrage your way to a fortune.

Wish I had these kinds of opportunities in the virtual money bank account game.

Frank

[Rich Thurman]

39.

Barry Kearns! That was brilliant! I couldn’t agree more on all points.

[Uhhuh]

40.

I agree with a lot of Barry's comments, and that 'soft rules' can be ineffectual, because they rely primarily on the playerbase to voluntarily uphold the rules.

Where as in games, such as various sports, rules are enforced more effectively where the player (or fan) is removed or penalized for infractions.

People make money by working the food stamp program.

People make money on ebay selling pirated goods.

People make money selling virtual dreams.

Ah yes to try to justify, and all that makes explititly going against the rules or spirit of a game right how?

[Mark Wallace]

41.

Is the spirit of a game really found in its TOS? Or is it found in the collective behavior of the inhabitants of the game world and the typists behind those avatars?

[lewy]

42.

What precisely is the practical difference between someone giving you a Sword of Leet because you're a guildie of theirs and someone giving you the same weapon because you paid them $50 for it on Ebay?

[Thabor]

43.

I think Barry must keep that one saved on his computer somewhere. All good points, which are worth repeating.

Mark, just made another point that bears repeating. "Cheating" is really defined by the community. Rules aren't static things that justs sit there. They evolve and change over the life of the game.

Someone said early, that Jordan wouldn't pay someone to walk in and pass him the ball. However, I'm sure he would be perfectly willing to foul someone, or draw a foul to gain a game advantage.

Meta gaming is a significant part of professional sports. Some of its strategies end up being adopted into the accepted set of behaviors. There are probably plenty of historic parallels if we bother to look for them.

[magicback]

44.

Uhhuh,

Not a justification, just additional examples of grey markets that occur on a daily basis and that the significance of this on a global scale per the perspective of NY Times is small.

Interesting to note that how many recent comments ends up being too "zeal" (maybe that's not the right word).

Ebay took a few years to take off. I expect the same timeframe for the development of RMT in the US. It's not really a big deal in Asia and perhaps in Europe (as noted before).

Also note that E3 had some MMO developers who have shown/pitched MMOs with integrated RMT business models.

RMT of virtual "stuff" could be as common as a cheap flat-panel TV soon, game or no game.

Frank

[magicback]

45.

Er, please overlook my poor grammar above.

[Jeff Cole]

46.

Jeff>> Ted, what assertion does RMT make harder to ignore? That people blur the line? Or that people are wigged out by any blur?

Ted>The former. For some reason, people look at the market numbers and they then believe that what's happening inside the membrance is not just/only a game.

But, aren't RMT'ers drawing a very distinct line, rather than blurring any line? People are paying a good bit of money to play their games. So what? People regularly pay insane amounts to play. Heck, it costs around $50k just to join the Austin Country Club

Jeff Cole

[Uhhuh]

47.

Grey markets, yes.

Why are they grey? Because they bend or outright break the established rules.

Mob/mafia/organized crime is apparently a widescale and profitable business..

Does that make it right that people are extorted for money, or scammed in various manners?

When a developer has created a game/world/system in which it is explicitly stated that items/coin/accounts are non-transferrable outside the in-game systems, where is the grey in that?

It's plain disrespect of not only the developers, but to your fellow players.

On the other hand, if a developer wants to bow to monetary pressure and tolerate or outright support RMT, then there isn't really any grey in that either.

Of course, I know which developer I will be supporting.

[Uhhuh]

48.

May be Old News for some...

Rules of the game

[Barry Kearns]

49.

Uhhuh wrote:

When a developer has created a game/world/system in which it is explicitly stated that items/coin/accounts are non-transferrable outside the in-game systems, where is the grey in that?

It's plain disrespect of not only the developers, but to your fellow players.

Of course they are non-transferrable outside the in-game systems... because these things aren't exported from the developer's database and then re-imported. *THAT* would allow them to be transferred outside the game.

We really need to separate the discussion of items/currency from the discussion of account transfers, because there are distinct implications for each.

For items/currency, there's a bit of a misdirection game going on IMO with the way many of these ROC/TOS documents are formulated (with respect to the RMT question). The typical language revolves around the idea of calling these things intellectual property, and then claiming that someone engaging in RMT is violating their IP rights.

But this is simply smoke and mirrors, because no copies are being made, nothing is leaving the system, and the alleged IP-holder never lost control or possession of their IP.

From an in-game perspective, the only thing that is happening during RMT is that one player is using the trade interface on a character to gift something to another character. That in-game transaction is obviously not in-game disruptive... if it were, there would be a rule that said you couldn't trade between characters regardless of reason (and if the developer is smart, they should enforce that with code instead of leaving it as a soft rule).

Instead, what this type of anti-RMT rule really MEANS is that the developer doesn't want two (or more) players to have a commercial relationship or interaction OUTSIDE THE GAME, if that's going to alter their reasons for performing in-game-legal actions.

I hold that trying to create a game rule that references the out-of-game interactions of players is generally beyond the legitimate scope of rule-making for large-scale commercial online games. It's frankly none of their business. Some players will show favoritism towards other players (if the game mechanics allow it), and their reasons for doing so are entirely their own business.

So the "grey area" in this case is the nature and legitimacy of the rule itself. IMO, legitimate game rules about player-to-player interaction should be about in-game actions and behaviors, not out-of-game player relationships. I generally see no ethical issue with someone choosing to ignore a rule that goes beyond the legitimate bounds within which a game-maker should be operating.

Any number of analogous situations can be constructed, which illustrate the basic problem with this type of rule (and why it is so readily ignored by many intelligent players... and done so with sound ethical reasons).

Case 1: The latest and greatest new MMO comes out... it's better than anything else we've seen. As part of the click-through agreement, the developers state that players are not allowed to group together or join the same guild if they are romantically involved. Their rationale: they've seen players show excessive favoritism towards each other if they are romantically involved, and that disrupts the competitive landscape.

Case 2: Same game, but the click-through agreement states that players may not have their characters give each other betrothal rings within the game if the players (not the characters) are of the same sex. (Betrothal rings give character bonuses in the game).

Case 3: This time, the click-through agreement states that guild members cannot have any real-world commercial ties at all with each other. You are forbidden from joining a guild where your boss or subordinate is a member.

In all three of these cases, I can legitimately see why players would simply choose to ignore these so-called "game rules". Each of these rules REFERENCES something in the game, but the deciding factor for whether the action violates the "game rules" has nothing to do with in-game behavior. Instead, it tries to tie the decision on legitimacy to something that is happening OUTSIDE THE GAME. In reality, they are not game rules, they are player-to-player life rules.

If there's any "disrespect" going on here, it's developers failing to respect the private lives of their customers. It's little wonder that players bothered by that don't "respect" such a rule.

If characters giving each other huge gifts is imbalancing to the game, then fix the game so that they can't unbalance the game by doing it, or make it an across-the-board soft rule against the IN GAME BEHAVIOR only... not the out-of-game relationship.

If my character is allowed by the game to give 10,000 gold to another character, then my reason AS A PLAYER for doing so is my business and no one else's. It's either a legitimate in-game action or it's not. If it's not, then make the rule about the in-game behavior. Whether CHARACTERS are allowed to give in-game gifts is the legitimate purview of the developer for rule-making... but the player motivation or real-life form of compensation they receive for doing so is not.

[Aryoch]

50.

> Thabor wrote:
>
> "Cheating" is really defined by the community.

Absolutely Not.

Cheating is defined by the developers. That is a factual issue that is not a matter of opinion.

"Lame" or other "unacceptable" behaviors are defined by the community, but they do not decide what is cheating (unless the developers have for some reason chosen to cede this power to the community).

> Barry Kearns wrote:
>
> I hold that trying to create a game rule that
> references the out-of-game interactions of
> players is generally beyond the legitimate scope
> of rule-making for large-scale commercial online games.
> It's frankly none of their business.

It is definitely their business if someone is selling THEIR property for money.

Every single item in any MMO belongs to the developers (unless they specifically choose to give up this ownership). Selling something owned by someone else is theft.

> Barry Kearns wrote:
>
> If my character is allowed by the game to give
> 10,000 gold to another character, then my reason
> AS A PLAYER for doing so is my business and no
> one else's.

Anything a developer chooses to monitor or control about his/her/its game is the developer's business. Period. The developer is the absolute authority.

[ren reynolds]

51.

Aryoch wrote

>> Thabor wrote:
>> "Cheating" is really defined by the community.

>Absolutely Not.
>Cheating is defined by the developers. That is a factual issue that is not a matter of opinion.

Sure, the developers are one of the actors that define cheating.

In practice cheating is defined by a range of actors in a range of contexts.

The operational rules defined by the developers are a part of this, but cheating often falls in the gaps, in the wide are of interpretation of terms like un-sportsmanlike.

If you want a recent high profile example look at the SWG credit dupe and they way that accounts that were banned for receiving credits were re-activated post-community outcry over this. Was receving credits a cheat or not? Well it depends who's statment you look at and when. Did the developers them selves 'cheat' the community etc etc.

This sort of thing happens all the time, it just tends to be more subtle and is the way the communities develop over time.

Also it is worth noting that there are the rules interpreted just by given groups such as guilds that really fall under the radar of the developers, breaking these is just as validly cheating. And we have not even got on to greifing,,,

[lewy]

52.

Aryoch wrote:

"It is definitely their business if someone is selling THEIR property for money.

Every single item in any MMO belongs to the developers (unless they specifically choose to give up this ownership). Selling something owned by someone else is theft."

Is it really comparable to selling someone else's property though? Mr. Kearns made the point that from the developer's perspective they still have control of the IP associated with the game item--what's changed is who is renting it. What's more developers who attempt to ban RMT aren't banning the transfer of in-game items outright, they're only attempting to stop some transfers based on a transaction which is completely external to their game world--in other words they're attempting to police motive. That, it seems to me, is doomed to failure.

As to the question of cheating, here's one hypothetical. Someone finds out their boss is playing the game in another guild on the same server and mails him a trunk of uber-gear and gold. Clearly the motive here lies completely outside the game world and is related to some hoped-for financial quid pro quo. Cheating or not?

Frankly I think RMT is just an idea whose time has come. There are too many convergent trends in other areas of the gaming market--note Microsoft's announcement at the GDC of a new strategy of online "micro-purchasing" for the next generation of X-Box games, or the popularity of virtual gear in virtual social sims in South Korea. Game companies are not charities and failing to exploit every revenue stream available to them simply doesn't make sense.

If someone did want to make a RMT-resistant game though then that might be the spark needed to kick the MMOG industry out of the rut it's in. WoW at the higher levels settles down into a grind for farming items. How about a fantasy game setting completely without magical weapons or supernatural gear?

[Jimpy]

53.

At the core, I don't think Barry and Aryoch are making mutually exclusive points.

Aryoch's point seems to be that developers, as absoulte authorities, are entitled to attempt to control the transfer of virtual property - even if those attempts at control are oriented at out-of-game motivations.

Barry seems to be pointing out that it is highly questionable whether those rules are enforceable or even desirable - and noting that developers certainly have an "in game" solution if they were serious about the problem: code in the inability to transfer items.

The main problem with developers trying to prohibit RMTs in games where the code allows it is that they have to get in the business of mind-reading: Once they identify a transaction (the transfer of the Sword of Leetness from a level 60 to a level 1 character), they have to now try to figure out WHY the transaction took place. Because, for all the protestations, they really only object to the thoughtcrime of handing over goods for the wrong motivation ("money," not "you are my buddy from Everquest, and I want to twink you just for the heck of it")

So developers can certainly *try* to prohibit RMT and ferret out the motivations of "bad" twinkers (while allowing "good" ones, of course - god forbid we don't have twinking). And they are within their "rights" as developers to try to prohibit such transactions. But for all the reasons Barry identifies, it is probably really neither a particularly legitimate goal nor a particularly practical path to achieving it.

[Thabor]

54.

Anything a developer chooses to monitor or control about his/her/its game is the developer's business. Period. The developer is the absolute authority.

Garbage, from both a business and ethics standpoint. Players are clear stakeholders in the game. The purpose of a commerical game is to make money, but it can't do it without players.

The demand drives the supply. Primary feature sets an rules are implemented to fit the desires of the consumer base. Additional features and rules are implemented to increase and maintain that player base. The people in your game are the people who substantally agree with your representation of the communities rules.

You may try to impose additional rules but they are subject to the agreement of your community. People who disagree with them enough will leave.

Until there is a monopoly to point where they have nowhere else to turn to it is up to them. You can play with semantics all you want, but it doesn't change it.

[EQ2 Gold]

55.

Is it really comparable to selling someone else's property though? Mr. Kearns made the point that from the developer's perspective they still have control of the IP associated with the game item--what's changed is who is renting it. What's more developers who attempt to ban RMT aren't banning the transfer of in-game items outright, they're only attempting to stop some transfers based on a transaction which is completely external to their game world--in other words they're attempting to police motive. That, it seems to me, is doomed to failure.

[portailmsn]

56.

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