Wednesday, November 12, 2008

I'd Rather Be In My Virtual World

Journal Entry No. 8

After recently reading Halting State by Charles Stross, I can't help but think about the future of gaming. Stross is praised for his ideas on how future inventions and games will look, and I think he is not far off. Advances in technology, the internet, and the rapidly growing market of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORGPs) hint towards a future not unlike that found in Halting State.

I have played many, many MMORPGs. They have literally taken months from my life. Still, I keep going back. Playing a MMORPG is like entering into a different universe, where real life problems take a backseat. In my experience as a MMORPG player, I have noticed that there is an economy that affects gameplay. Blizzard, the creators of the world famous World of Warcraft, have admitted that they need to keep creating more and more ways for players to spend in-game money to level the economy. The gaming economy described in Halting State is profoundly similar to MMORPG economies living today. The economies take a hard hit when cheating goes on. In Final Fantasy XI, the auction house, where you can buy items just like almost any other MMORPG, you can see a history of prices people have paid for a single item. After a surge of gil sellers hit the game – people trading real money for in-game money (gold farmers in other games) – you could watch the price of items go up: up to ten times the normal rate. Suddenly, the rewards from quests mean a tenth less, and the regular player cannot afford necessary items. The items you do have go up in value as well. Similar to a real economy, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. There is a huge divide between new versus experienced players that was not meant to exist. The same happens in in other MMORPGs. It is interesting to watch the economies in these virtual worlds. In Guild Wars, some item prices are influenced by how many people buy that item. The price of black dye goes up every day; an ever popular item. Most people would rather have dark, black clothes than orange threads. But, for the people who can't afford that black dye, where can they get the money if they don't want to spend the time playing? It comes from gold farmers. More money than the economy can handle is shot in. The MMORPGs I have played have been much more pleasant when there is active resistance (from the developers) against gold farmers.

An interesting economy can also be viewed in Second Life. In Second Life, there is a perfect “Linden” dollar to real-world money exchange rate. By way of gold farmers, there is an exchange rate for other MMORPG worlds as well. Virtual money and real money being confused and intertwined, as in Halting State, is already a reality.

Some of the technology in Halting State is also very interesting, and I expect (and hope, a little bit) to see it in the future. There are glasses that people can wear, allowing them to access a HUD or desktop kind of interface wherever they are, and especially allowing a screen with video games images to be that much closer to the eyes, bring you into the world. Glasses already exist that project what seems to be a huge screen to the eyes, but they are still cumbersome, and you could not wear them, say, while walking down the street. In Stross's future, you can access you e-mail using your glasses as a screen, and your fingertips as a virtual keyboard – as long as there is internet floating around. I think the virtual keyboard will take more time to create, but internet being readily available all over the world (and having trouble finding in in places) is already a reality. Employees need to check their e-mail whenever they can, and gamers want to be that much closer to the action. Similar to many other computer technologies, I think that these glasses will be first made for gaming, then will be acquired by others to use for military reasons or business reasons.

Another technology talked about in Stross's future is “CopSpace”. A play on words off of MySpace, CopSpace allows the police to access the internet for retrieving information about an area, and then display that information over their glasses and thus onto the whole world, in perspective. As the internet becomes more and more filled with accessible information, the police and higher defense forces will have to rely more and more on the internet. I think that data being access from multiple terminals (namely, a paying users) will also soon become a reality because of the huge cost of server space. The technologies explained in Halting State do not seem that far off from what the near future might bring us. What is most likely to happen very soon, as in Stross's future, is an influx of MMORPG players. This, we have already started seeing in recent years, especially as we sit at the tip of the upcoming release of yet another expansion to World of Warcraft. The Koreans have developed dozens of MMOGs, from sword-slasing to kart racing to golf – realizing the income value of these games. The Americans, and the Japanese to a smaller extent, have developers spending millions in designing these games, only to get all of the money back, perhaps more than tenfold. Gaming is enhanced tremendously when you throw real people into the mix. Suddenly, you are not just saving a princess, you are saving your friend that you have quested with for years; you stormed keeps with her, you discovered new towns with her, you know her life story. The connectivity and the huge, alternate universes available to gamers will only increase as time goes on.

The technology seen in Stross's novel are very likely to become a reality, sooner rather than later. Halting State's fears will become more of a reality as well. The line between virtual space and real life will become more blurred, especially as more and more people spend their time in virtual worlds instead of real ones. Virtual worlds are becoming a source for income as well as entertainment – and these virtual worlds cannot avoid being victims of criminals – something that will affect the real world. It won't be so bad, though, you can always start up a new game. Right?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Virtual Worlds London with a brief overview of Second Life, including the fact that the virtual world has seen 600 million user hours of activity and is projected to hit the billion-hour mark next year. Significantly, the world is changing. The 18-24 bracket makes up 45% of total registrations now, which Kingdon describes as "the platform getting younger as we get older." The application of the world is changing as well.
-------------
kimrennin
promoter