Comments on: Thought Experiment (part1)

By: Fischer Paul

Fischer Paul — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 18:00:34 +0000

‘May you live all the days of your life.’ – Swift

By: kale

kale — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 20:26:42 +0000

I would also like some ruminations on this in the following form: How much do people use the virtual realm for escapism? I tend to believe that’s the major attraction. You can do all sorts or crazy, adventurous, strange things in these games with your character, and the consequences aren’t that bad. Which leads me to wonder about how far someone could take the proposal above, made by our editor-in-chief, Squirrel. Attaching severe consequences to actions in these games might make them more real-life like, and perhaps it would be interesting to academics and the like-minded to study that. Yet, as the game gets more real (I’m thinking here, specifically, of the proposal that you would die in the game and lose your character without hope of redemption), people will be less attracted to it. Maybe people want things to “look real,” maybe people care about things like ridiculous money deflation in the game (I don’t hear much moaning about it, except from my fellow economics editor), but I suspect that they’re most interested in getting away from reality when they enter these game worlds. If that’s the case, wouldn’t a move towards reality (in terms of attaching severe consequences to game actions, making sure the value of money holds up, etc.) turn people off from what they value most in some of these realms(getting away from the real world and it’s nasty inescapable consequences)…any further thoughts?

By: Peter Ludlow

Peter Ludlow — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 21:08:52 +0000

While I’m digesting this, I just wanted to point out that the MMORPG “There”, which I just joined, has at least part of this plan in place already. You can buy local currency from the game corp. This gives them the incentive to control the money supply, since if they can’t, people will buy the currency on the black market from money suppliers who have found cheats or other efficient means of generating in game currency. The other thing that There has going for it is lots of custom content. And guess what, because the money supply is under control it is worth the trouble of gamers to design and make objects (typically fashion items, but so what?). Why we don’t have this on TSO is utterly beyond me.