Dibbell cited the research of Edward Castronova who calculated the GNP of the game EverQuest, discovering that, based on the money generated by its users per year ($135,000,000), the game would rank as the 79th richest country in the world.Īpparently the wealth generation of such games is well-known. It’s a fascinating realm, this space where people play with pixels and faux money to generate actual wealth. With a little figuring, he discovered that the virtual building he sold online was worth 425 crisp American dollars. He uses the example of a castle he sold to another player for the tidy sum of “20 million gold pieces and a south-facing bearskin rug.” Since such items are for sale on ebay, he could calculate the “real money trading” (RMT) value in actual dollars: one dollar can buy you 50,000 gold pieces–which is a better exchange rate than, say, the Turkish lira or the Romanian lei.
In the game, users interact and buy and sell goods using fake monetary units, but, as Dibbell points out, these games have real-world value.
For his yearlong exploration, Dibbell played Ultima Online, one of the early MMOs. World of Warcraft is the most popular of these insanely popular games (for some titles, hundreds of thousands play across the globe at one time), but others in the genre include EverQuest II, Lineage II, City of Heroes, and Star Wars: Galaxies. The games include complex economies, virtual currency, and intricate social interactions. For his forthcoming book Play Money (Basic Books, July 2006), Dibbell set out to discover if he could make more money playing these games than he could as a professional writer. This notion of technology and pure capitalism lead into topics discussed by speaker Julian Dibbell, who presented on the fascinating world of MMORPGs, “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” or MMOs for short. The work, he admits, is purely about the art market: if you want three Maos (hmm, very Warholesque), or a single chairman floating on a digital background of, say, an idyllic beach, it’s yours.
One project he listed, among others, involved rendering Chairman Mao as a 3D model that can appear multiple times or superimposed on various backgrounds. While known primarily for using videogames in his art (usually inserting himself into first-person shooters, often carrying a video camera), Chinese artist Feng Mengbo is also a painter.
0 kommentar(er)
