The Alphaville Herald

Commodify Me! Chapter 2

by Alphaville Herald on 15/07/05 at 2:32 pm

Thanks again to Clickable Culture for reporting on this little gem — A breakdown of the way Massive Incorporated‘s in-game advertising works. Seems that not only are the ads placed in the game, but the marketers collect information about the amount of time the ad is viewed by individual players, the size at which they view it, as well as the angle it is viewed from.

Now I’m sure there will be a chorus of “screw me harder” gamers saying if we don’t like it we don’t have to play, but this “love it or leave it meme” limps as badly in MMOs as it does when we talk about nation states. It cannot be emphasized enough that this is precisely what Lawrence Lessig has been warning us about for years, especially in his book Code as Law. In virtual worlds we are effectively engineering certain values into the world. The question is, are we going to engineer in values and principles of freedom, privacy, and liberty, or are we going to surrender all of that as our lives continually move online? It seems we are on a trajectory in which we are gladly surrendering our liberties to despots with benign sounding titles like “Game Maker.” But strip away the friendly title and we don’t find a kindly toymaker like Gepetto, or even the Wizard of Oz, but something much closer to Big Brother.