[MUD-Dev] MEDIA: Blizzard - Virtual Trade Tough Nut to Crack

[J C Lawrence]

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Virtual Trade Tough Nut to Crack
By Daniel Terdiman

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,66074,00.html
02:00 AM Dec. 20, 2004 PT

When Blizzard Entertainment recently announced an aggressive policy
against trafficking in the virtual goods of the massively multiplayer
online game World of Warcraft, it stirred up an old controversy about
whether secondary market trading is something game companies can stop.

For years, companies like Sony Online Entertainment have prohibited the
buying or selling of goods from games such as EverQuest. Despite such
rules, which are commonly spelled out in MMOs' terms of service, the
secondary market for virtual goods is estimated at $880 million
annually.

Many in the virtual worlds community are now trying to determine what
methods game developers can use, if any, to retard the growth of such
transactions or even if anything should be done.

"There's a lot of debate about whether anything could be done," said Ed
Castronova, an expert on the economies of virtual worlds. "People get
wrapped up in the mechanics of this particular technology. The broad
question is whether someone with policy tools can affect how someone
acts."

In its announcement on the World of Warcraft community site, Blizzard
stated its policy against the buying or selling of the game's objects
for real-world money. Its goal, which many MMO developers share, is
keeping the game pure from an inflated economy and from players who buy
game attributes rather than earning them. And they often claim that such
objects have no real-world economic value.

"If you are found to be selling in-game property (such as coins, items
or characters) for real money," the policy says, "you will lose your
characters and accounts, and Blizzard Entertainment reserves its right
to pursue legal action against you as well."

Castronova, and others, feel that Blizzard can stop such illicit
activity, much of which happens on eBay, through actively tracking down
buyers and sellers and banning them from the game.

"I think that could have a substantial impact on the demand," Castronova
said.

But others think such campaigns are pointless.

"The secondary market continues to grow exponentially," said Brock
Pierce, CEO of IGE, one of the largest secondary market trading
companies. "Someone will always be there, because someone else is
willing to pay for it."

The problem, say some virtual world experts, is that many players see
the objects they earn or build through countless hours of play as
property. And property has value.

"In cases where the users' contribution to the game constitutes a new
intellectual property or new content," said Philip Rosedale, CEO of
Second Life developer Linden Lab, "I'd say it makes no sense and is
probably indefensible to claim that you can't traffic in those products
and that those products have no inherent value."

Linden Lab is one of the few developers that encourages transactions in
the goods and services created in its game. But some economists agree
that it is fruitless to ignore the common perception that virtual goods
have a measurable economic value outside the game.

"They can stop in-world transfers completely," said Dan Hunter, an
assistant professor of legal studies at the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania. "If you do that, you have a completely
different property system than you have now, where only that which you
have is yours.... That goes against our expectations of capitalism."

In fact, said Hunter, the game companies are often two-faced in their
opposition to secondary market trading.

Publicly, the Blizzards and Sony Onlines of the world say these virtual
worlds are role-playing games and that the users want the games to be
about play, said Hunter.

"If you talk to them in private," he said, "they will accept, or at
least start to tell you, a significant number of the power players --
the guys they count on to drive the world -- if you didn't allow the
transfer of these things, they would just head off into another (game)."

Blizzard could not be reached for comment for this story.

Sony Online spokesman Chris Kramer said his company does not intend to
change its contention that secondary market transactions, which are
afforded no protection by eBay or PayPal, are an invitation for fraud
and a detriment to the purity of game play.

"In our opinion, as long as there's not a safe and secure way to buy and
sell and trade items in a game," Kramer said, "it's just not going to
work."

Yet Kramer also acknowledges that there is little that can be done to
stop the illicit trafficking.

"It's a matter of man hours, literally how much time you can devote to
the subject," he said. "For us, and the nature of our games, as the
recording industry is finding, when something is out on the internet,
there's no way to stop it. Once it's out there, it's out there."

Some say the solution may be marriages between game developers and the
secondary markets, like the relationship between Second Life and the
Gaming Open Market, which has ATMs in that metaverse for the depositing
and withdrawal of Lindenbucks, its currency.

"If it ever gets to the point where the majority of those playing the
games are involved," said Gaming Open Market co-founder Jamie Hale, "the
players will benefit from the game companies accepting this."
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--
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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