Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Is the virtual world real?
So this guy I talked about doesn’t understand why someone would pay real money for something virtual. Why buy a virtual shirt if you can get a real one not made of pixels? Well in a way all that virtual clothes you can get for your char has the same symbolic effect as real clothes. Most clothes and accessories we ware on our body got more than one purpose; to cover us up. We cover up in symbols and signals whether its high fashion designer clothes or not. You can signalise personal stile, send messages or simply stating that you are rich! Going to the hottest discotheque in the world of second life gives the same status ingame, than going to the popular places in real life does. So the virtual clothes have almost the same value to some people as their real life clothes and then it becomes acceptable to spend money on it.
You can’t really compare clothes in Secondlife with all the items in wow, since we pretty much all are aiming for the same stuff: epics! But still I know some of us do care about how our char look in its outfit. Sometimes you accept the silly pants cause they got better stats, other times you have to go with those that look really cool and get a little lesser agi ^^
We spend game gold on our stuff and the main goal when visiting AH is to get good gear, not good looking gear. But I’m pretty sure all of us rather want a really evil looking staff than a puny one. So there is some signal value in wow gear aswell as in Secondlife and real life. The difference is that in wow you are not suppose to use your real money on these virtual things, but the fact is that some people do. All those goldsellers wouldn’t keep spamming us all the time if there weren’t anyone buying! This could mean that some find the virtual things in wow having value similar to real stuff, hence the virtual things become more real. Or they are simply lazy bastards :p
[This post is simply an expression of my own thoughts and point of view]
I think much of this is how you as a person looks at it.
For an example: if i dont want to play Kiaras any more and a person would like to buy her from me for loads of money, why wouldnt i sell?
In the other way around, I as a person wouldnt like to buy a lvl 70, the fun part is to get there.
Muuh
: 1:32 PM I heard that the swedish goverment want to build a embassy in secondlife for comercial purposes about sweden. and a friend of me that have some kind of social proplems likes to play it becous he can have a "normal" life. i to like the idea but it scares me. i think that you really need a strickt line between virtual life and the real life. but that's just me
: 6:17 PM and the ideea of spending RL money just to luck nice in some game or other thing like this, its a damm stupid ideea if you ask me...making RL money out of it, not that bad :))
cheers all,
Radul
For example I've read an analysis somewhere that those games that in those games that have free gameplay and client access, but you have to pay RL cash for epix, in average players spend LESS money then in games based on subscription. In a game like wow, you buy a client and dump 15eur/month no matter what you do, wether you play or not, in the other model, you pay for free, but spend money every time you want to buy a new epic, in the end you spent equal or less money (although there probably are extremes) AND you have the exact stuff you want ingame so I'm really unable to tell which model is better.
When EQ2 has put in the service that allows you to buy items (on servers that have that enabled - you have a choice), in the end they figured out that on those servers the items were more equally distributed through the population because you have on one side people that have alot of time but no money , and the others have enough money but too little time (employed, kids, familly etc.)There were very few players that spent alot of money on items, most of them just un-gimp themselves every now and then. It's safe, because its not black market, and is supervised, and Sony takes the % of the transaction. In the end I think that for the average Joe nothing changed, except there are much less secondary market goldfarmers on the station exchange servers. The prophecies about "the end of equality" in MMOs didn't really materialise, because it did the exact opposite. I think there is much to be debated here and much undiscovered ground.
It is a lot of work to get them just right though, especially if you're not gifted with any computer skills. If you don't have the skills or the time, you can spend money to get the thing somebody else made who could be bothered. In that sense it works exactly like the real world.
/Gurell
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