I suppose it was inevitable.
I was sitting (in a virtual sense) in the East Commonlands in the game Everquest looking for bears, wolves, and giant spiders. Why? I needed money, virtual money but money nonetheless. I needed to buy a piece of armor for my character and killing monsters for a copper piece here, a silver there wasn’t cutting it. So I was gathering pelts and spider silks in order to auction off to other players and earn enough to buy this armor piece.
That was back around 2000 and I was part of the emerging virtual economy. An economy that had some real world implications. For wherever there is a need and a way to pay, there will be commerce. Some bright spark got the idea that all these make-believe items and make-believe money could be sold online to other players for real world money. Soon someone worked out an exchange rate, so many platinum pieces per US dollar and suddenly I was part of a nation that had a larger economy than Bulgaria.
Amazingly it had all begun rather organically. In a fairly unused corner of the game lay an underground tunnel with a large cavern. Players would sit there and broadcast their items for sale to anyone in the area. People would meet and exchange the item for virtual money. Soon dozens of players sat around doing the same. The game developers took note and set up a more formal auction zone and system. They still took the position that selling things for real money offline was against the game rules but they really had no way of enforcing this.
Professional “farmers” began cropping up. These farmers set up game accounts to do nothing but gather raw materials to sell to players or to gather up virtual currency to sell on websites. Players would set up the deal offline and then meet clandestinely online to receive their goods.
The in-game economics also got skewed. Some players would hoard things like spider silk or high quality bear pelts, items used to make other in-game items, and artificially inflate the price of these raw materials. Other players might retaliate and swamp the market with low prices and collapse a market.
The game developers helplessly admonished players not to do this.
I left Everquest around 2004 and took up Warcraft and found that the system first pioneered back in Everquest was fully formed and flourishing in Warcraft. If anything, it was worse. You could “buy” a high level and fully equipped character on a website and skip all the training and leveling up. Of course such people were usually morons when it came to game play but that didn’t stop them.
Farming was worse. A report in 2011 told of prisoners forced to play games to gather “virtual currency”. This was getting insane. It’s just a game!
I have to admit this was one of the reasons that I left online gaming. It was becoming work and I had nothing to show for the long hard hours spent in-game and now some teen can come in and short-circuit the process and buy his way to the top?
Money. It ruins everything.
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