Taking MMORPG Really Serious

MMORPG is big business. Quite a number of games have more than 100,000 players, topped by Lineage with 4 million South Korean players. Add it all up and you get (just a rough order of magnitude) a total of about 10 million players paying 1 billion dollars per year worldwide. Okay, mobile phone ringstones sales last year were 3.5 billion dollars in 2002, which should put that MMORPG sales number a bit into perspective. But 1 billion dollars is still a nice stack of money, and so it is not surprising that some people are beginning to take MMORPG really, really serious.

If you are into serious theoretical reading, you can head over to Terranova (a collaborative blog on virtual worlds) or Ludology.org ("an online resource for academic videogame researchers). You won't find much game reviews there, but instead more serious discussion about the legal and economic implications of virtual worlds, including MMORPG.

The problem is, that this discussion can get so serious, people start forgetting that we are talking about games here, a form of entertainment. If you stop seing it as a game, and start seeing it as a virtual world, and then apply real world concepts to these virtual worlds, you end up with very serious sounding discussion of total nonsense.

A major recurring theme is virtual property. Fact is that EBay has its own category for virtual item sales, with a sales volume of about 20 million dollars per year. The easy, logical, but false, conclusion from this fact is that virtual items have value, and can constitute property. But as lots of people accept this false conclusion (including a jury in a minor chinese court room), this can lead to a wide range of rather absurd speculations on the legal implications.

If you accept that virtual items are property with value based on EBay sales prices, you could then take seriously the calculations of Prof. Castronova (already mentioned several times in this blog as the worlds leading MMORPG economist) that the world of Norath from Everquest has a gross national product of $135 million, or $2,266 per capita, making it as rich as Russia. But then you should realize that Russia can not be switched off, Norath can. Earth and Beyond recently announced that they would switch off their world in September, and the same can happen any day to any MMORPG world. And then all the virtual property becomes totally worthless.

In fact items in MMORPG do not constitute property, but are more similar to services, like a haircut. They only have a very temporary value. If your virtual item later disappears due to a bug, or the game shutting down, you have the same chance of complaining as if you tell your barber that the haircut he sold you didn't last more than a month. In fact, some people on EBay are even declaring the virtual items they sell as service, to get around the legal small print from game companies declaring that all items in their game belong to the game company. So they sell "the time it took me to make X platinum pieces", instead of the actual platinum piece. If you buy virtual currency or an item in a game, you are hiring somebody to "work" for you, doing a boring part of the game that you yourself couldn't be bothered to do. You are not acquiring real world property rights which would hold up in a serious court of law.

Serious discussion about virtual worlds is possible. They do constitute models, simulations, of some parts of the real world. Real-world phenomena, be they social or economical, can be observed in MMORPG. If for some reason the supply of virtual currency goes up, inflation occurs in a MMORPG just like it would occur in the real world. So they are useful for observation and modeling. And there is an interface between the real world and virtual worlds, of which EBay is just one example. But this link is not a fixed link. Fortunately. Because, if you think of virtual worlds as being real, you just moved to a place where an autocratic, all-powerful government (the game company) can not only instantly take away your property, but can also kill (ban) you for offences as minor as using foul language. It is a lot healthier to regard MMORPG as the games they are.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:02 PM Permanent Link