SLURRRRRRRP!

That sound you just heard was the loud sucking sound of all my free time being sucked away.

See, there's this game, a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, or MMORPG for short, that a bunch of my friends—both on the private chatservers where I hang out and on LJ—have been getting into. It's called City of Heroes, and unlike all the other MMORPGs that have come down the pike, this one is a comic book superhero game.

I swore up and down that I would never get into a money-and-time-suck game like a MMORPG, and up to now, it's been pretty easy to do. I beta-tested both Neocron and The Sims Online and never had any real urge to pony up the cash for either of them. Those, Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Final Fantasy XI, Star Wars Galaxies—my willpower was mighty: I could resist them all. I didn't want to have to deal with the griefing, the hunt for J. Random Specific Artifact that I needed to power up, the frustration of losing a zillion experience points (and whatever items I might have on my body) whenever I died: in short, the problems inherent in all MMORPGs I'd ever heard about or experienced prevented me from getting into them. After all, if I was going to pony up a monthly fee to participate, I wanted to be paying for something I'd enjoy, and none of the current contenders provided that.

Until now.

( A paen to City of Heroes )

Anyway, if any of my LJ friends or acquaintances who play CoH would like to adventure with me, look up Serena Chow on the Protector server (Yeah, I play a female character on-line. What of it? It's not really any different from a novelist writing about a female protagonist. Besides, the third-person viewpoint is scenic :) or let me know who you are on whatever server you play and I'll make a character. If you're lower-level, I can sidekick you, or if you're higher level, you can sidekick me. As Serena is a Technological Assault Rifle/Devices/Leadership Blaster, a character with Empathy and particularly Teleportation would make a good partner.

See you in the comic books!

Economies, Virtual and Real

Found the most interesting and fascinating article via a link on Slashdot about the intersection of the economies of virtual worlds with real life. Funny how timely it is, given that I just got into a virtual world.

The article itself is truly remarkable. It's a great example of how actions can have unintended consequences—you set up an alternate virtual world within the real world that's played on by zillons of people, and before you know it, you've created an entire new economy with monetary systems and everything.

I think the most fascinating part was this bit, though:

This debate may appear rather abstract right now. But, sooner or later, one of these game companies will start losing money and decide it can't afford to keep its virtual world. (Many observers expect at least one major world to go bankrupt this year.) If a game shut down, it would instantly destroy hundreds of thousands — perhaps even millions — of dollars. ( snippety )

With stakes like that, said Jack Balkin, a Yale law professor and a host of the legal conference, players will probably fight back with lawsuits, or by going right to politicians, demanding legislation to prevent worlds from closing down. Julian Dibbell, a journalist who began trading virtual goods himself last summer — he aims to report "revenue from the sale of virtual goods" as the single biggest line-item on his 2004 tax return — later suggested an even stranger scenario. He said that players could well band together and try to buy back the world at the company's bankruptcy hearing — and then run it themselves as a breakaway republic. "Some renegade players have done things like that before, actually," he noted. "They've gotten access to the code of the game and then illicitly created their own duplicate world."

Up to this point, computer games have always had a life of a few years and gradually slipped into being abandonware. What would happen if a mass-MOG was legally required to stay in operation? I can't wait to see how this all shakes out.