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"Synthetic worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games,"
by Edward Castronova. University of Chicago Press, 2005, 344 pages.
The Massively Multiplayer Life by David Friedman
The approach to virtual reality that got most of the attention over the past few decades relied on elaborate technologies to create as complete an illusion as possible of the experience of a different world — goggles over the eyes, headphones, motion sensors, and much more. The one that worked relied on a still more advanced technology: the human imagination. The flat screen of a computer monitor, sound from its speakers, a keyboard and mouse to control a player's online avatar, a compelling world and storyline; and millions of people — more than ten million for "World of Warcraft" alone, perhaps a hundred million for all the so-called "massively multiplayer online games" combined — found themselves immersed in a fictional world.
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David Friedman is an economist
and professor of law at Santa Clara
University. In "World of Warcraft"
he and his family can sometimes be
found on the Feathermoon server.
His views of the future, virtual
reality included, can be found in
Future Imperfect, a book manuscript
to be published by Cambridge
University Press and currently
viewable on his
website.
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With the advantage of hindsight, the outcome should have been obvious. After all, millions of people have been losing themselves in fictional worlds for a very long time, through the much narrower bandwidth of the printed word.
The player of a conventional video game interacts only with the computer. In a massively multiplayer online game, he shares his world with thousands of others. Human beings are much better at impersonating human beings than computers are, making such games enormously richer and more interesting, social rather than solitary. Players can make friends, flirt, fight, gossip, or engage in any social activity that does not require physical contact, with a social network no longer limited by geography. My family routinely adventures with a friend on the other side of the continent; my daughter's online circle includes a married couple of French Canadians living in British Columbia. On one occasion my wife, investigating the question of why the person she was talking with had a different idea from hers of what time it was, discovered that he was in Spain.
In "Synthetic Worlds," Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, explores the universe of virtual worlds as of a few years ago, sketches out what is known about its inhabitants, reports on interactions, surprisingly substantial, between virtual and real world economies, and discusses ways in which such worlds will become increasingly important over the next few years. The book has a number of faults, including an unconvincing attempt to show the relevance of virtual worlds to the currently hot topic of terrorism. But it also gets some important things right, including the attractions of such worlds, the roles they are likely to play over the next few decades, and the considerable ambiguity in describing them as less real than other parts of our lives.
Castronova's research suggests that, contrary to what many outsiders assume, most players are adults, a large minority are married or the equivalent, and a substantial number are parents. That fits my experience: it is common for someone to apologize for having to drop out of a group to feed a baby or put a child to bed. For many players online gaming is a substitute for television, consuming a similar amount of time in a much more interesting way.
A central theme of the book is the interaction between virtual worlds and the real world. Multiplayer games have their own economies, in which individuals find or create virtual goods, exchange them, sell them to the game or to each other, even put them up for auction. Increasingly, those economies interact with the economies of the outside world. Virtual money and virtual goods and services are routinely sold online. The current exchange rate is about ten units of "World of Warcraft" gold to the dollar; the total size of the market is by now almost certainly over a billion dollars a year. The user agreements of many games prohibit such transactions, but the restriction is widely ignored, with much of the online supply coming from "Chinese farmers" — workers in the third world who make their living playing online games, accumulating virtual assets, and selling them for real money. Their number in China alone has been estimated at anywhere from 100,000 to half a million.
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Contrary to what many
outsiders assume, most players
are adults, a large minority
are married or the equivalent,
and a substantial number are
parents.
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Current virtual worlds have their limitations. They offer sight and sound but no taste or feel. We cannot live on virtual food or be kept warm by virtual clothing. On the other hand, they have been designed, as our world has not, to be places that people enjoy occupying. They are inherently safe — my real world body cannot be injured by other people's virtual actions — and they come complete with a carefully designed structure of objectives, activities and story line, all planned to attract customers. In the real world I am stuck with the body nature gave me. In a virtual world I can be tall or short, handsome or ugly, male or female, old or young. Those are good reasons why many people prefer to spend much of their time there. And I can choose not only my body but my world — fantasy, science fiction, a free-form environment created by the users . . . whatever enough people want to make it worthwhile for someone to provide.
Virtual worlds have other advantages as well. If I move across the country or vacation in Paris, I leave my real-world friends behind but bring my virtual world, my online life, along. As we shift more of life to virtual spaces online we become more mobile. That means that governments will find it increasingly necessary to offer value for money if they wish to attract and keep taxpayers.
That constraint applies still more strongly to virtual worlds themselves, a point whose implications Castronova does not entirely appreciate. He is bothered by the fact that the rules built into the software of a virtual world are created by a private firm free to ignore the wishes of the inhabitants. He thinks something should be done to give the citizens of "World of Warcraft" a vote, but he isn't sure what. It has apparently not occurred to him that the system of governance he observes online is the same one he encounters every time he goes into a restaurant or hotel. I have no vote over the menu of my favorite Japanese restaurant, just as I have no vote over the next set of modifications that Blizzard adds to "World of Warcraft." I have, in both cases, absolute control over whether or not I choose to be a customer. Competitive dictatorship is, on the available evidence, the best-known way of running things.
Castronova might respond by pointing out an important difference: sunk costs. Changing restaurants loses me the value of my accumulated knowledge of a particular menu, but that is very little compared to what I lose if, after spending two years gaining skill, levels, gold, and equipment in a virtual world, I decide to shift to another. As in some other economic relationships — marriage and employment are the obvious examples — relationship-specific sunk costs convert what was ex ante a competitive market into a bilateral monopoly ex post.
But then, I knew all that when I signed up and I chose my virtual world accordingly. If customers preferred virtual worlds in which they got a vote on the usual combination of autocracy and anarchy, it would pay firms to provide it. On the evidence so far, customers don't. The universe of virtual worlds is a competitive market for environments, the nearest thing yet to the late philosopher Robert Nozick's utopia, in which everyone gets to live in his preferred community under his preferred rules. The outcome of that competitive market is good evidence of what environments the customers prefer.
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The current exchange rate
is about ten units of "World of
Warcraft" gold to the dollar;
the total size of the market is
by now almost certainly over
a billion dollars a year.
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A further point Castronova misses is that if costs of change are a serious problem, in virtual worlds it is not only possible but profitable to reduce them sharply. There is nothing to prevent a new entrant to the market from offering a special deal to its competitors' customers. I turn over my "World of Warcraft" account to them, and they provide me with the equivalent in their world — an avatar of corresponding level with the same name, a sum in virtual gold sufficient to equip him as my old avatar was equipped. They then sell off my old account for dollars, and we split the money. Creating virtual gold, advanced avatars, and high-end gear, after all, costs them nothing. Potential customers may be reluctant to leave their friends behind, but then, the invitation is open to the friends too.
As high-speed internet connections become more common and the quality and variety of virtual worlds continues to increase, more and more people will use them. As the technology improves, worlds will become increasingly immersive. In the limit you can imagine a society where almost everyone spends almost all of his time in virtual reality, perhaps through a direct link between mind and computer, with only enough real-world production to keep our bodies alive while our minds wander.
Would this be a bad thing? Castronova worries about "toxic immersion" — games sufficiently addictive to pull customers in, keep them in, and ultimately give them very little in exchange. One might argue that some real-world institutions already do that: the Church of Scientology, the Moonies, fundamentalist churches — a list whose contents depend on which of the things to which other people devote their lives that you consider obviously worthless.
A more fundamental problem is the philosophical issue of what sort of life is worth living. If I write books, I do not care whether they are read on paper or on a computer screen, in real space or in a virtual world. If I make clever conversation, it is equally satisfying in my living room or online. But if some day a computer can give me a believable illusion of the experience of rearing happy and productive children, it will still be no substitute for the real thing. As the illusion gets better and better, we will all have to choose between the experience and the reality.
But then, we have to make that choice already. Considered as an illusion, playing "World of Warcraft" is a great deal more rewarding, more useful, more real, and a better environment for learning useful skills — not how to throw fireballs but how to get along with other people — than watching soap operas.
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