Fast Capitalism

[dr_mickey_k]

I had an article published today in Fast Capitalism about massive online games on the virtual political economy. I thought some of you guys might be interested.

www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/4_1/kent.html

Comments

[strangedave]

The different attitudes to buying and selling virtual goods are generally treated, as in your article, as merely different strategies pursued by companies, with the motivation behind the strategies little addressed. I think the difference between Second Life and WoW, for example, the former welcoming real money trading and the latter vehemently opposing it, is easily understood as due to the underlying viewpoints of what sort of activity the game ultimately is. Second Life represents game as art, and so (as in the art world generally), real money trading is seen as ultimately validating. But in WoW, the game is seen ultimately as sport, and deriving an advantage via spending cash is seen as corrupting to the ideals of the game, just as deriving a direct advantage from money spend is seen as being corrupting to sport (that there is an element of hypocrisy in both positions notwithstanding

[mikey_ob]

The usual farmer class is NE/Troll Hunter. Rogue was the favourite for the first year but it was Hunter from then on. I agree with Dave on the gold farming from account stealing and the power levelling services being the focus.

[strangedave]

I remember hearing about some bugged instance where rogues could carefully pick their way through it and grab chests without aggroing anything -- and the gold farmers did it dozens of times an hour. Can't remember what instance it was, though.

[creativemeans]

Dave, why aren't you a philosopher? Your opinion pieces are getting better and better. It's time to take the next step.

[mikey_ob]

Good article

[accy]

God damn, The Pusher man.

[strangedave]

I think also the move to have more and more high end gear from either Badges or PVP, making gold in general less useful. Which I think was a deliberate ploy by Blizzard - the prime customers, who are desperate to level up, find that gold is increasingly not that useful. And the 'recruit a friend' system probably cuts into the power levellers business, too.

Blizzards response to the gold farmers has been, in part, to reduce the importance of gold as a factor in the game. Which makes it very clear that the economy is a toy one. Badges and other non-transferable tokens are increasingly being used in place of gold.

Compare EVE, in which cash etc are an absolutely central part of game play, because the economic competition is clearly at the core of the game.

[dr_mickey_k]

Dave, I think you are correct about the differences between second life and WoW. I think that you can actually track these differences back further to the game and outcome orientated multi user dungeons and the more social and player constructed environments such as LamdaMOO, although the different effects of involving out of game wealth are much more prevalent in these two examples