Games People Play
Games and role-playing are as ancient as Mankind. Rome's
state-sponsored lethal public games may have accounted for up to
one fifth of its GDP. They often lasted for months. Historical
re-enactments, sports events, chess - are all manifestations of
Man's insatiable desire to be someone else, somewhere else - and
to learn from the experience.
Last week, Jeff Harrow, in his influential and eponymous "Harrow
Technology Report", analyzed the economics of Massively
Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). These are 3-D
games which take place in comprehensively and minutely
constructed environments - a medieval kingdom being the
favorite. "Gamers" use action figures known as avatars to
represent themselves. These animated figurines walk, talk,
emote, and are surprisingly versatile.
Harrow quoted this passage from Internetnews.com regarding
Sony's (actually, Verant's) "EverQuest". It is a massive MMORPG
with almost half a million users - each paying c. $13 a month:
"(Norrath, EverQuest's ersatz world is) ... the 77th largest
economy in the [real] world! [It] has a gross national product
per capita of $2,266, making its economy larger than either the
Chinese or Indian economy and roughly comparable to Russia's
economy".
In his above quoted paper, "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account
of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier", Professor
Edward Castronova, from California State University at
Fullerton, notes that:
"The nominal hourly wage (in Norrath) is about USD 3.42 per
hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita
somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of
Norrath's currency is traded on exchange mark ets at USD 0.0107,
higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized
by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to
many."
Players - in contravention of the game's rules - also trade in
EverQuest paraphernalia and characters offline. The online
auction Web site, eBay, is flooded with them and people pay real
money - sometimes up to a thousand dollars - for avatars and
their possessions. Auxiliary and surrogate industries sprang
around EverQuest and its ilk. There are, for instance,
"macroing" programs that emulate the actions of a real-life
player - a no-no.
Nor is EverQuest the largest. The Korean MMORPG "Lineage" boasts
a staggering 2.5 million subscribers.
The economies of these immersive faux realms suffer from very
real woes, though. In its May 28 issue, "The New Yorker"
recounted the story of Britannia, one of the nether kingdoms of
the Internet:
"The kingdom, which is stuck somewhere between the sixth and the
twelfth centuries, has a single unit of currency, a gold piece
that looks a little like a biscuit. A network of servers is
supposed to keep track of all the gold, just as it keeps track
of everything else on the island, but in late 1997 bands of
counterfeiters found a bug that allowed them to reproduce gold
pieces more or less at will.
The fantastic wealth they produced for themselves was, of
course, entirely imaginary, and yet it led, in textbook fashion,
to hyperinflation. At the worst point in the crisis, Britannia's
monetary system virtually collapsed, and players all over the
kingdom were reduced to bartering."
Britannia - run by Ultima Online - has 250,000 "denizens", each
charged c. $10 a month. An average Britannian spends 13 hours a
week in the simulated demesne. For many, this constitutes their
main social interaction. Psychologists warn against the
addictive qualities of this recreation.
Others regard these diversions as colossal - though inadvertent
- social experiments. If so, they bode ill - they are all
infested with virtual crime, counterfeiting, hoarding,
xenophobia, racism, and all manner of perversions.
Subscriptions are not the only mode of payment. Early multi-user
dungeons (MUD) - another type of MMORPG - used to charge by the
hour. Some users were said to run bills of hundreds of dollars a
month.
MMORPG's require massive upfront investments - so hitherto, they
constitute a tiny fraction of the booming video and PC gaming
businesses. With combined annual revenues of c. $9 billion,
these trades are 10 percent bigger than the film industry - and
half as lucrative as the home video market. They are fast
closing on music retail sales.
As games become graphically-lavish and more interactive, their
popularity will increase. Offline and online single-player and
multi-player video gaming may be converging. Both Sony and
Microsoft intend to Internet-enable their game consoles later
this year. The currently clandestine universe of geeks and
eccentrics - online, multi-player, games - may yet become a mass
phenomena.
Moreover, MMORPG can be greatly enhanced - and expensive
downtime greatly reduced - with distributed computing - the
sharing of idle resources worldwide to perform calculations
within ad hoc self-assembling computer networks. Such
collaboration forms the core of, arguably, the new architecture
of the Internet known as "The Grid". Companies such as IBM and
Butterfly are already developing the requisite technologies.
According to an IBM-Butterfly press release:
"The Butterfly Grid T could enable online video game providers
to support a massive number of players (a few millions)
(simultaneously) within the same game by allocating computing
resources to the most populated areas and most popular games."
The differences between video games and other forms of
entertainment may be eroding. Hollywood films are actually a
form of MMORPG's - simultaneously watched by thousands
worldwide. Video games are interactive - while movies are
passive but even this distinction may fall prey to Web films and
interactive TV.
As real-life actors and pop idols are - ever so gradually -
replaced by electronic avatars, video games will come to occupy
the driver seat in a host of hitherto disparate industries.
Movies may first be released as video games - rather than
conversely. Original music written for the games will be
published as "sound tracks".
Gamers will move seamlessly from their PDA to their PC, to their
home cinema system, and back to their Interactive TV. Game
consoles - already computational marvels - may finally succeed
where PC's failed: to transform the face of entertainment.
Jeff Harrow aptly concludes:
" ... History teaches me that games tend to drive the mass
adoption of technologies that then become commonplace and find
their way into "business." Examples include color monitors,
higher-resolution and hardware-accelerated graphics, sound
cards, and more. And in the case of these MMORPG games, I
believe that they will eventually morph into effective virtual
business venues for meetings, trade shows, and more. Don't
ignore what's behind (and ahead for) these "games," just because
they're games..."