[MUD-Dev] Virtual Property

[J C Lawrence]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/05/04/1437206&mode=flat

eBay launches the era of Virtual Property

Posted by JonKatz on Wednesday
May 05, @10:12AM EDT
from the
There-Goes-The-Neighborhood,-literally dept.

On eBay, people are shelling out thousands of dollars for gaming
characters, symbols, armor, magical potions of trinkets.  The media
has missed the real story as usual: it isn't online violence, it's
digital property. eBay may be even more significant than Mp3's. As
the middle-class plunges into gaming, the Net is facing real world
problems like housing costs and congestion. The result is another
landmark in Net evolution: the owning of virtual property, something
that may change the nature of Net economics and knock the gaming
world for a loop.

Heads up: here comes another Net landmark: the broad-based
mainstreaming of computing games by the hundreds of thousands of
middle-class Americans pouring online in a continuing stream and
preparing to pay big bucks for characters, property, tools and
symbols.

Here goes another online neighborhood, literally.

For the Net, the past couple of years has already been a
Wall-Busting time: MP3's, open source, e-trading, and now, bidding
for virtual property.

New but mushrooming trading for characters and property on games
like Ultima Online has significance way beyond gaming. It suggests
that space on the Net isn't infinite after all, and that people may
have to begin paying or trading for access to the parts of it they
want to use. Also that people with money can alter the balance of
Net and Web culture suddenly and dramatically.

As usual, our phobic media has been obsessing on the wrong story: it
isn't online violence, but online property.

The idea of virtual property is radical and new, almost completely
unforeseen by the legions of futurists and cyber-theorists studying
about the Internet. EBay, it turns out, will perhaps be even more
revolutionary than the Mp3.

This week on eBay, Ultima Online players are spending real $US,
sometimes thousands of them, to acquire video-game assets.

According to a story by Ariana Eunjung Cha in the San Jose Mercury
News, players are bidding at online auctions to own imaginary
resources that are becoming increasingly scarce as tens of thousands
of people try and play.

Since its release in l997 by Electronic Arts the number of Ultima
players has been growing by the thousands each month. Ultima is
bringing the formerly geeky world of MUD's to the
middle-class. Ultima, played by more than 125,000 people globally,
and is, increasingly, creating its own reality for people who once
viewed computer games as obsessive behavior for weird kids.

On Ultima, people are born, get married, are happy and stressed, get
and lose jobs and die, just like they do in the real world.

But so many people are coming online to play that Ultima is facing
serious real world problems, especially over-crowding, congestion
and runaway housing costs.

So players are buying imaginary but increasingly scare resources as
empty lots for housing, tower or castle developments sell
out. Although Ultima's software engineers update and expand the game
each month, they can't keep up with the population explosion, which
means that gamers are trading with other players for virtual
property. It's a shocker, perhaps an inevitable one, but urban and
suburban planning problems are hitting online games. Perhaps Web
designers, social planners and architects can do better than their
real-world counterparts.

For the past two months, reports the Mercury News, eBay has offered
gamers the chance to bid on property, characters, gold, armor,
magical potions and trinkets.  Ultimate Online sells for $39.95,plus
$9.95 a month for access to the servers. But on eBay, one gamer sold
his account for $4,000, and others have gotten anywhere from $1,500
to $3,000. This morning eBay has nearly 200 different items listed
for sale.

This trading could permanently change the culture of gaming, as well
as Net economics. The amount of time consumed in getting established
in games like Ultima is enormous. Some players have spent thousands
of hours over months, even years, to develop characters so they are
experienced enough to explore the towns and countrysides of the game
without getting maimed or killed.

Now, people with money can acquire sophisticated players and
property with little work or time.  Inexperienced players can have
mature characters. That would change the whole nature of gaming.

"I don't want to spent a year developing my character, building
property, getting savvy and confident only to find myself up against
some Yuppie who's buying his way past me. That alters the whole
idea," wrote Jared from Chicago, an online friend who plays Ultima
almost every night of his life. "I have to earn the money I collect,
and some newbie can start twice as rich as me because he's willing
to pay. It's wrong, and I hope they stop it."

They won't. Company officials told the Mercury News that trading is
perfectly legal, that they couldn't do anything about it even if
they wanted to.

Still, it's amazing to see that the problems, pressures and rewards
of a virtual game are suddenly morphing to real life. People are
trading real-world money for virtual property. That takes recreation
to a completely different level, and alters the very idea of how
conventional property-buying works.

The Ultima trading began when a Texas firefighter decided to put his
account up for sale when he got a second job and no longer had the
time to play. The minimum bid was placed at $39, and it sold a week
later for $521. Two weeks ago, a network security consultant from
Chicago paid $1,000 on eBay for five virtual characters, three
virtual houses and 300,000 pieces of virtual gold. An Ultimate
Online fanatic, he bought the characters and property as a gift to a
friend.

The eBay trading is especially ironic in the weeks after the
Littleton, Colorado school massacre, when computer games -
particularly those like Quake and Doom -- were widely described in
media as responsible for aggression and violence. The CBS News
broadcast "60 Minutes" devoted a whole hour to this question: "Are
Video Games Turning Your Kids Into Killers." As more middle-class
Americans turn to gaming, and experience its complex, creative and
communal nature, the notion will seem even more ludicrous than it
already does.

In the most literal sense, gaming is about to be about as
controversial as buying a new car or fixing up a second home. In
fact, it might soon be almost indistinguishable from it.

Maybe it's time to get your characters in shape. You might soon be
using them to buy some new hardware, or pay for your real-world
vacation.

--
J C Lawrence                                   Home: claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                Linux/IA64 - Work: claw at varesearch.com
 ... Beware of cromagnons wearing chewing gum and palm pilots ...


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