Wednesday 11 August 2004

Pic of the day: The fun part is of course saving damsels in distress, even scrawny ones. In CoH, this is what you do most of the time. No hunting rats and snakes. No ...

Gaming for money

No, I have not taken up this profession myself, tempting as it may be. But I think it is okay that people do it. What I am talking about is, as usual, online games. In this case, playing games for money.

The sad fact about many online games is that they are boring. Oh, not all of the time. If they were boring, all boring and nothing but boring, people wouldn't pay to play them. So there are bouts of excitement and then there are long periods of boring preparation. This may take the form of practicing trade skills, or "camping" in certain areas waiting for that particular monster to show up so you can finish a quest or collect a special type of raw material. Or there are times when you simply have to kill a large number of monsters, just to " farm" online money or experience.

(Of course, this doesn't apply to City of Heroes, or at least to a much smaller degree. City of Heroes is an online game, and even a massive multiplayer online game, but it is not yet a secondary life the way some of them are. I suppose it will have to move in that direction eventually, but if so that is for a later entry.)

If you search a little bit on the Net, you will find sites that claim to sell currency or items or entire characters for online role-playing games such as EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot. To the best of my knowledge, only complete accounts can be sold legally; certainly this is the case with DAoC. But people still do it, because there are some people who really hate being bored (especially on their free time when they are supposed to have fun), and because there are people who really love money. I personally think it should be legal. After all, this is how economy works in the real world. There is supply and there is demand, and the trade leaves both parts feeling better.

The most recent development that I have heard of is the "outsourcing" of boring gameplay to second-world countries. In such countries as Russia and Thailand, wages and living costs are generally quite a bit lower than in North America and Western Europe. At the same time Internet is available at a reasonable quality and reliability. I personally think this kind of transfer of money from richer to poorer countries is a great idea and certainly preferable to trading in illegal drugs. Playing online games is bound to be some of the most innocent activity you can get these people to do. And if players in the rich world want to waste even more money than the subscription fees, they should surely be free to do so. After all, "a fool and his money has a short but hectic relationship."