Some thoughts:
I don't get the grammar that labels 'economy' with 'broken' or 'not broken.' Economies just are. Or, societies just are, and their institutions and practices achieve some goals and not others.
Example: inflation is largely irrelevant to most objectives we might have for an economy. It doesn't matter how many zeros are on the dollar bill. Relative prices (price of that Coke compared to price of my time = my wage) are all that matters. Money is just a unit of account. The only exception - and economists debate this hotly - is when inflation has some effect on investment and growth. Not clear to me that there's a connection between VW inflation and overall in-world economic activity.
Let's see, what else. Um, OK, so the goal of a VW economy is to provide the player with an enjoyable experience, period. I don't think our measures of RL economic health are viewed that way, but at their core, that's what theya re about too. The difference is, there's a lot more going on in the RL economy, especially as pertains to long-run / short-run issues. So one of the reasons you don't want hyperinflation in the RL economy is that it starts to dampen general confidence in government, and investment, and so on. Very long-run feedback effects. Worry about defaults, collapsing central banks, violent revolutions, etc. Also, inflation eats up fixed incomes and can impoverish people. In VWs, nobody cares about the poor, no fixed incomes, no central banks, no investment, etc., etc. So, inflation is much more tolerable.
Foreign trade imbalances are a different matter. For a coutnry like the US, trade deficits are really unimportant - its a small part of our economy, and anyway, it means that foreign people are giving us real goods in return for scraps of paper. So long as the scraps of paper (dollars) retain their purchasing power, we can keep playing this shell game forever.
Conversely, in a VW, foreign trade is a very serious issue. that's how I view eBay. Like the fellow who said the VW economy is like a city economy: i think of it as a small open-economy international trade and currency exchange model. the VW economy is tiny compared to the US dollar economy. the US dollar price of any good, including currency, is the 'price on the world market', and the internal price will always adapt to that. BB is always making that point: you have to keep an eye on the outside market.
Now that is one kind of game design problem when the outside market is a huge amorphous mass of buyers and sellers. its another kind of problem when that market is in the hands of a single entity. we are moving from the former scenario to the latter. game design needs to adapt to that reality. generally, if a market is changing from being a competitive supply-and-demand market to a monopolistic one seller-many buyer market, well, its typically only a good outcome for that one seller. thats why we have anti-monopoly statutes.
Indeed from a political perspective, i dont think any small open-economy country - think Trinidad - would be happy knowing that all dollar-based trade in its currency was commanded by one bank. in effect, whoever that bank is just became the country's Central Bank. And unlike the Central Banks we know and love (the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve), this central bank is private and for-profit. its not necessarily acting in the public interest at all. Not Alan Greenspan here; Sam Walton. Food for thought.
What to do? I personally think there are ways to control inflation in VWs without having immersion-breaking sinks and without having to rely on an outside central banker. But I still think that's a little bit off-focus.
The point of a VW economy is to create a personalyl satisfying experience for the player, by immersing her in a carefully-crafted fantasy environment within which she can play out scenarios that feel good. From that standpoint, all this monetary stuff is not very important. Its not inflation that's the problem: its unjust redistribution. eBay allows ostensibly poor characters to become rich overnight, without doing diddly in the VW. That tosses every element of challenge in the design out the window. Its no longer about achievign or succeeding or solving; it's just buying. Worse, every other player then feels like a dupe - unless he eBays himself. eBaying encourages itself and fundamentally distorts the nature of gameplay.
If using dollars to buy your way forward is the design, then the trade that makes it possible should be in the game. And if thats not the design, then the design needs to make sure that the incentives that lead to this outcome are taken care of. If you think its OK for one player to use extra dollars to buy in-world stuff from other characters, or whole accounts, then build it in. If you don't think its OK, then design it away:
1. Limit charitable giving.
2. Charge fees for item and money storage
3. Impose progressive taxes
4. Stop giving out treasure for every GD monster. Take hold of the money supply and keep your hands on it.
5. Shift from a durable-goods based economy to consumption goods. Yes, item decay.
6. Use level restrictions
7. Ban eBayed accounts. Buy eBay items, poison-pill them (gold that explodes for 5000 instant perma-DD to the bearer), sell them again. Use tactical media (bidding bots, feedback bots, etc) to disrupt the trade.
8. Change gameplay to render sweatshops impractical.
Some designers react to this with 'players will hate all that.' no they won't. a game without eBay can reall be a game. a game with eBay isn't a game, its Mall of America. those people in your eBayed world aren't game-players, they're shoppers. did you get into this business because you wanted to help a company attract shoppers and make a billion dollars? or because you wanted to make games?
This became a rant, but I've been forced to sit on some thoughts about eBaying for far too long.
----
How much value open trade adds to a MMORPG IS the interesting question. Clearly, eBaying exists because there are some things that users want to do, very badly, but they just can't do it within the game's parameters. In EQ, it's dragon raids. In DAoC, it's RvR. The Elder Game - with current designs, you can't do it unless you have lots and lots and lots of time. That's why dollar-based trading is there - people who have money but no time can use these markets to get ahead.
In my rant, I said that one response to this is just to shut down eBay. More enlightened would be to design the game so that people with money and no time can get to the elder game, but without seeming unfair and without shattering the magic circle all to bits. Example: Let only higher-priced accounts be enabled for certain classes, specifically, a set of classes that can level up in their expertise area when the user is offline. There'd be tension among the players - some have leveled up the hard way, others the soft way - but that kind of tension could be turned into entertainment. Kind of like the way everyone in EQ hated druids before the PoK portals came in - those people were just lucky enough to have rolled druids, so they could travel anywhere, and solo-kite to gain XP at four times faster than anyone else too. I think so long as you make it clear that you are trying to accomodate the needs of the player base, and that everyone is free to choose either path, most players won't mind that, in effect, someone has chosen a high-money, low-time method. The critical thing is that the rules of the game are sitting there on the table, and everyone is playing by them.
From a profit perspective, these systems are also preferable because they satisfy the drives that lead to eBay entirely within the game. That means the publisher can effectively capture the eBay revenue, in the form of more subscriptions (all those low-time, high-money users).
If someone told me that a Tolkien game was coming out with some kind of higher-priced account with a Wizard class that could reach top level, guaranteed, in X months with only a few hours a month play time - I'd be all over that in a hurry. And I'm sure lots of other Moms and Dads would be too. We just don't have time to level up.
ANd I'd love to see a parallel worlds experiment, one world with level-buying being OK, the other not. It would be a great way to sort the player base in terms of their interests and approach to the game. Kind of like PvP and PvE servers - as a designer, you can use the shard system to give all your players the kind of world they would like most.
Posted by: Edward Castronova | February 26, 2004 01:55 PM
I don't get the grammar that labels 'economy' with 'broken' or 'not broken.' Economies just are. Or, societies just are, and their institutions and practices achieve some goals and not others.
Example: inflation is largely irrelevant to most objectives we might have for an economy. It doesn't matter how many zeros are on the dollar bill. Relative prices (price of that Coke compared to price of my time = my wage) are all that matters. Money is just a unit of account. The only exception - and economists debate this hotly - is when inflation has some effect on investment and growth. Not clear to me that there's a connection between VW inflation and overall in-world economic activity.
Let's see, what else. Um, OK, so the goal of a VW economy is to provide the player with an enjoyable experience, period. I don't think our measures of RL economic health are viewed that way, but at their core, that's what theya re about too. The difference is, there's a lot more going on in the RL economy, especially as pertains to long-run / short-run issues. So one of the reasons you don't want hyperinflation in the RL economy is that it starts to dampen general confidence in government, and investment, and so on. Very long-run feedback effects. Worry about defaults, collapsing central banks, violent revolutions, etc. Also, inflation eats up fixed incomes and can impoverish people. In VWs, nobody cares about the poor, no fixed incomes, no central banks, no investment, etc., etc. So, inflation is much more tolerable.
Foreign trade imbalances are a different matter. For a coutnry like the US, trade deficits are really unimportant - its a small part of our economy, and anyway, it means that foreign people are giving us real goods in return for scraps of paper. So long as the scraps of paper (dollars) retain their purchasing power, we can keep playing this shell game forever.
Conversely, in a VW, foreign trade is a very serious issue. that's how I view eBay. Like the fellow who said the VW economy is like a city economy: i think of it as a small open-economy international trade and currency exchange model. the VW economy is tiny compared to the US dollar economy. the US dollar price of any good, including currency, is the 'price on the world market', and the internal price will always adapt to that. BB is always making that point: you have to keep an eye on the outside market.
Now that is one kind of game design problem when the outside market is a huge amorphous mass of buyers and sellers. its another kind of problem when that market is in the hands of a single entity. we are moving from the former scenario to the latter. game design needs to adapt to that reality. generally, if a market is changing from being a competitive supply-and-demand market to a monopolistic one seller-many buyer market, well, its typically only a good outcome for that one seller. thats why we have anti-monopoly statutes.
Indeed from a political perspective, i dont think any small open-economy country - think Trinidad - would be happy knowing that all dollar-based trade in its currency was commanded by one bank. in effect, whoever that bank is just became the country's Central Bank. And unlike the Central Banks we know and love (the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve), this central bank is private and for-profit. its not necessarily acting in the public interest at all. Not Alan Greenspan here; Sam Walton. Food for thought.
What to do? I personally think there are ways to control inflation in VWs without having immersion-breaking sinks and without having to rely on an outside central banker. But I still think that's a little bit off-focus.
The point of a VW economy is to create a personalyl satisfying experience for the player, by immersing her in a carefully-crafted fantasy environment within which she can play out scenarios that feel good. From that standpoint, all this monetary stuff is not very important. Its not inflation that's the problem: its unjust redistribution. eBay allows ostensibly poor characters to become rich overnight, without doing diddly in the VW. That tosses every element of challenge in the design out the window. Its no longer about achievign or succeeding or solving; it's just buying. Worse, every other player then feels like a dupe - unless he eBays himself. eBaying encourages itself and fundamentally distorts the nature of gameplay.
If using dollars to buy your way forward is the design, then the trade that makes it possible should be in the game. And if thats not the design, then the design needs to make sure that the incentives that lead to this outcome are taken care of. If you think its OK for one player to use extra dollars to buy in-world stuff from other characters, or whole accounts, then build it in. If you don't think its OK, then design it away:
1. Limit charitable giving.
2. Charge fees for item and money storage
3. Impose progressive taxes
4. Stop giving out treasure for every GD monster. Take hold of the money supply and keep your hands on it.
5. Shift from a durable-goods based economy to consumption goods. Yes, item decay.
6. Use level restrictions
7. Ban eBayed accounts. Buy eBay items, poison-pill them (gold that explodes for 5000 instant perma-DD to the bearer), sell them again. Use tactical media (bidding bots, feedback bots, etc) to disrupt the trade.
8. Change gameplay to render sweatshops impractical.
Some designers react to this with 'players will hate all that.' no they won't. a game without eBay can reall be a game. a game with eBay isn't a game, its Mall of America. those people in your eBayed world aren't game-players, they're shoppers. did you get into this business because you wanted to help a company attract shoppers and make a billion dollars? or because you wanted to make games?
This became a rant, but I've been forced to sit on some thoughts about eBaying for far too long.
----
How much value open trade adds to a MMORPG IS the interesting question. Clearly, eBaying exists because there are some things that users want to do, very badly, but they just can't do it within the game's parameters. In EQ, it's dragon raids. In DAoC, it's RvR. The Elder Game - with current designs, you can't do it unless you have lots and lots and lots of time. That's why dollar-based trading is there - people who have money but no time can use these markets to get ahead.
In my rant, I said that one response to this is just to shut down eBay. More enlightened would be to design the game so that people with money and no time can get to the elder game, but without seeming unfair and without shattering the magic circle all to bits. Example: Let only higher-priced accounts be enabled for certain classes, specifically, a set of classes that can level up in their expertise area when the user is offline. There'd be tension among the players - some have leveled up the hard way, others the soft way - but that kind of tension could be turned into entertainment. Kind of like the way everyone in EQ hated druids before the PoK portals came in - those people were just lucky enough to have rolled druids, so they could travel anywhere, and solo-kite to gain XP at four times faster than anyone else too. I think so long as you make it clear that you are trying to accomodate the needs of the player base, and that everyone is free to choose either path, most players won't mind that, in effect, someone has chosen a high-money, low-time method. The critical thing is that the rules of the game are sitting there on the table, and everyone is playing by them.
From a profit perspective, these systems are also preferable because they satisfy the drives that lead to eBay entirely within the game. That means the publisher can effectively capture the eBay revenue, in the form of more subscriptions (all those low-time, high-money users).
If someone told me that a Tolkien game was coming out with some kind of higher-priced account with a Wizard class that could reach top level, guaranteed, in X months with only a few hours a month play time - I'd be all over that in a hurry. And I'm sure lots of other Moms and Dads would be too. We just don't have time to level up.
ANd I'd love to see a parallel worlds experiment, one world with level-buying being OK, the other not. It would be a great way to sort the player base in terms of their interests and approach to the game. Kind of like PvP and PvE servers - as a designer, you can use the shard system to give all your players the kind of world they would like most.
Posted by: Edward Castronova | February 26, 2004 01:55 PM
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개인적으로 아이템 현금거래 관련 그의 외환거래의 비유는 선뜻 받아들여지지 않더군요. 제가 이해를 잘 못하여서 그런 것인지 모르겠습니다만... |
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SugY님 논문 가운데 "현실 화폐와 게임내 재화(화폐도 결국은 아이템이므로)의 교환은 통약가능한 공간의 통합이 아니라 현실 화폐의 게임 내 통약 가능한 공간의 침투일뿐'이라는 부분과 제 글 중의 "현거래에 있어 현금과 교환되는 대상은 게임화폐(아이템) 자체가 아니라 그 아이템에 투하된 플레잉 등 (아이템 자체와는 구분되는) 무형의 가치이다"라는 부분을 결합하여 보면 혹시 그 답이 도출되지 않을까 생각해봅니다. 즉 두개의 국가경제단위'간' 돈과 돈의 맞'교환/매매'인 외환거래와 달리 예컨대 아데나 현거래에 있어 돈은 아데나 자체와 교환되는 것이 아니라 가상경제단위'내'의 아데나의 이전과정에 소요되는 수수료(제 방식으로 부르면 권리금)의 성격으로 '지불'되는 것 아닌가 합니다. 그렇게 보면 결국 아데나는 현거래에 불구, 현실경제 단위로 침입하지 못한 것이고, 두 경제 단위간 거래단위의 교환/매매도 겉보기와는 달리 실상은 일어나지 않는 셈이 되는 것이고요... |