I know this doesn't belong here...

[Christopher Kubasik]

...but I just found this article on Arts & Letters Daily and just had to share it.  It's about online gaming, not RPGs.... But...  But... you all have to read this -- for so many reasons...

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=04/05/06/1929205&tid=1

Christopher

[clehrich]

Fascinating.  Thanks for the link!  

The thing that's saddest about that, though, is that the academics refused to take papers on the subject seriously.  The only sector of the academy that probably would take it seriously would be cultural studies folks, and I have enough problems with them not to want to go there.  Is it any wonder that RPG's, which command far smaller numbers of people and sums of cash, which are harder to transform into pornography rings and the like, have not attracted any serious academic attention?

Anyway, thanks for the link, Christopher.

[Lance D. Allen]

That is just.. amazing.

I play two MMORPGs.. I also admit to dropping $100 for 5M gold in UO, almost half of which I still have, so that I could buy property for myself and my guild mates. I used to know someone who actually made a living by playing EQ and selling platinum and rare items.

But to see it all laid out like this is just amazing.

[Callan S.]

It's rather hyped isn't it, spinning it as an economy? It's basically an IP and 'antiques' factory. It's like people coming to one building where type writers are, to write books, or clay pot making equipment and they are making those. They started and the original idea was to exchane between themselves, but then the products gained an 'allure' that made currency offers appear for them that weren't of the book/clay pot currency variety.

[simon_hibbs]

This is realy about entertainment. If I write a novel, that 'product' has no intrinsic material value, it has a value that is assigned based on cultural conventions. Similarly a castle in Everquest has value that is only real as a result of cultural conventions. There's nothing magical about that.

Consider The Economist (www.economist.com) web site. It has some content you have to pay to access. Suppose that content only exists on that website. It has value because people will pay to acess it, but it's existence is completely ephemeral in just the same way as an artefact in everquest. The fact that Everquest content is tradeable makes it a bit more like the 'valuable reports' you can buy from chain-letter spam. There's nothing realy new at a fundamental level about Everquest and the value of it's content, however the fact that it's a game makes the social context very interesting.


Simon Hibbs

[Christopher Kubasik]

Strangely, what I most wanted to share was that the economist that was unhappy with his lot in life at the start of the story, and who ended up with the new job at the end, succeeded not because of published papers in a traditional, "real" journal, but through online publishing and PDFs.  I hoped it would inspires some of the designers and publishers around here.  Victory is in getting the work done, and success is often what happens after that, way out of our hands.

Christopher

[ethan_greer]

As will always be, the world is changing in amazing ways all the time, and "The Establishment" (in this case economy professors) is slow on the uptake.  Cool link.  I liked the happy ending.

[neelk]

Fascinating.  Thanks for the link!  

The thing that's saddest about that, though, is that the academics refused to take papers on the subject seriously.  The only sector of the academy that probably would take it seriously would be cultural studies folks, and I have enough problems with them not to want to go there.  Is it any wonder that RPG's, which command far smaller numbers of people and sums of cash, which are harder to transform into pornography rings and the like, have not attracted any serious academic attention?

Interestingly, the "big-name" economists I know are quite enthusiastic about Castronova's work. His approach -- applying standard economic modelling tools to novel fields of social life -- is exactly the sort of thing that won Gary Becker his Nobel prize, and will probably net Steven Levitt another in the next few years. I think gatekeeping as a tool for social exclusion is most likely when you have people who are worried about the status of their field, because they don't have personal status independent of it. It's too bad these people are often the referees, and a damn good thing that the web exists to help do an end-run around them.

[orbsmatt]

Wow.  That's all I can say.  I remember the days when Diablo 2 characters sold for $500 or more, but I just sluffed it off as a bunch of people with no lives wasting their money.  I didn't realize that it had such economic implications.  That's overwhelmingly amazing to see such a phenomenon.

[Callan S.]

On a side note, consider the number of man hours each character required. In Australia I used to be payed around $15 an hour for call center work. If a level 99 character takes 48 hours of play to create, it's really worth $720. Just because it's your leasure time doesn't mean you can't rate it against a per hour wage.

Not to mention my pay was fairly crap. People who play these online games I'd say earn more per hour, on the average. Certainly I've never played in an online game barring diablo 2 (and that's because there are no monthy fee's and my computer can handle it...just).