 |
THE RUMORS ARE TRUE:
PLAY
MONEY IS NOW A BOOK.
(And you can buy it at Amazon.)
|
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Market Watch
The numbers look good this week, and why not? It's the dawning of a new era in the UO economy: The Age of Publish 21.
Released to all shards yesterday, the new version (or "publish") of the game introduces a number of rule changes, and of these, none are so potentially far-reaching as the new rules for the economy. For a couple years now, the gold farmers of UO have been exploiting simple imbalances in the economic system to pile up gold in amounts far beyond any normal player's reach. Buy cloth from vendor A for x gold pieces, cut the cloth up into bandages, sell the bandage to vendor B for 2x gold pieces, write a macro to automate the process, run it on 30 machines at once, repeat 300 zillion gajillion times -- and voila, your student loans are paid off and you have a new Mini sitting in your garage.
As of yesterday, though, it's not so simple any more. Pub 21 makes the UO economy behave a little more like the real one, in which demand is not bottomless and supply not endless. Buy from vendor A more than a few times in a row, and vendor A will start raising her prices. Sell to vendor B too often and vendor B stops paying you so much. Pretty soon you're buying cloth for 2x gold pieces, selling bandages for x, and wondering why you ever went into this business in the first place.
The golden age of the gold farmer is over, in other words. And this means, in theory, that there's not going to be so much gold floating around in this game anymore. Which furthermore means, all else remaining equal, that the price of gold will start to climb again.
You read it here first.
And now your weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:
Market sales total: $136,255 (+3,453 from last week)
Market sales total, annualized: $3.5 million
Market volume total: 3,221 sales (-18)
Exchange rate: $14.20 (+0.38) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces
Price of an 18x18 house in the new Malas region: $204.00 (-7.25)
My gold holdings: 109.7 million gp ($1,557.74)
My dollar holdings: $455.88
My profits, year to date: $3,002.82
(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)
7:04 PM
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Good Grief
David Myers likes this blog. Apparently, though, he doesn't much care for its author. I know he likes the blog because he said so. As for not liking me, well, put it this way: he delights in the news of my hard-drive crash, and he accuses me of being the creepiest form of online gamer there is, a grief player.
Now, Myers is a communications professor (the Rev. Aloysius B. Goodspeed, SJ, BEGGARS, Distinguished Professor in Communications, no less, at Loyola University, New Orleans) and the author of The Nature of Computer Games: Play as Semiosis, and you'd think that an accusation so grave bearing down on me from a height so high would smart pretty bad when it hit. But it doesn't, for two reasons: (1) It's actually sort of interesting, and (2) it's ultimately sort of off-target.
The accusation is interesting mainly because Myers's definition of griefing is interesting. Like most people, he agrees that the effect of griefing is to make its victims feel "stupid/clueless/lame/ineffectual," but for him the essence lies in the grief player's invention of new rules for himself -- a metagame that trumps the game the victims think they're playing and effectively rubs their noses in the message that "your rules are not as real/true/powerful as my rules."
This allows Myers to stretch the boundary of grief playing to include a human activity that has for centuries, and by no coincidence, been making lots of people feel stupid, clueless, lame, and/or ineffectual: market economics. In what Myers terms a kind of "cultural imperialism," market values are always and everywhere trumping communal values, folk values, personal values. It's the age-old story: Gemeinschaft, meet gesellschaft, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Fair enough. And since the Ultima Online I play is not the standard player's game but the metagame of economics, and since my metagame trumps the standard game (in which social status can't be bought in the marketplace but must be earned through hours of dedicated play), and since that's the essence of how grief players play, I am therefore a griefer. QED.
Or not. For while I like the parallels Myers draws, I think he also ends up erasing one essential aspect of the true griefer's game. The true griefer, I would argue, remains in the realm of the personal, the gemeinschaeftlich: like a pagan warrior glorying in the wails of his vanquished enemies' women, he savors every howling e-mail, every ineffectual threat, from every noob or role-player or otherwise hapless dork whose gaming day he has ruined. (Don't believe it? Educate yourself.) The griefer may be a creep, but he knows it, and he wouldn't be having much fun if he didn't.
The metagame of economics, on the other hand, is more insidious than that. It may have corrosive effects on people's fun, but the effects are systemic, indirect, never personal. Moreover, they are hopelessly ambiguous. Sure, players complain about eBay, but perhaps as many players buy items and accounts there, and who's to say that in the final utilitarian analysis the benefits to the buyers don't outweigh the complaints of the complainers?
Thus, unlike the griefer, I am able to play my metagame without ever necessarily taking responsibility for what harms it may do to the people I play with. I can fret about those harms, but I can't really own them. That would be a different game, a braver game. A griefer's game.
Me, I'm just another businessman.
9:00 AM
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Market Watch
Another weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:
Market sales total: $132,802 (-260 from last week)
Market sales total, annualized: $3.5 million
Market volume total: 3,239 sales (-8)
Exchange rate: $13.82 (-0.12) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces
Price of an 18x18 house in the new Malas region: $211.25 (+99.50)
My gold holdings: 48.4 million gp ($663.36)
My dollar holdings: $920.20
My profits, year to date: $3,002.82
(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)
9:01 AM
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Play Money, Meet Big Money
Brock Pierce looks like a Norman Rockwell 13-year-old, talks like a coked-up 35-year-old, and happens to have turned 23 last Friday. He is either my new best friend or my new worst nightmare.
More to the point, Brock is co-founder and chief executive officer of Internet Gaming Entertainment, the leading purveyor of EverQuest platinum pieces and Star Wars: Galaxies credits. Along with a couple of his fellow IGE execs (and me, and over 100 other attendees) he was at a conference this weekend called The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, hosted by New York Law School and co-sponsored by NYLS and Yale. The conference was, as the kids say, off the hizzook, and I will be digesting its many lessons and discussions for weeks to come (watch this space and others for reports). But nothing I heard there seared my brain pan quite as memorably as the hallway conversations I had with Brock and his partners about their business.
To set things in context, let's review: I am a small fish in this market. Others are big. But big or small, the scale of operations never really grows beyond the level of mom-and-pop. Mostly it's just pop, in fact, alone at his desktop filling orders and counting PayPal receipts, even when they add up to mid-six-figure annual profits.
Imagine, therefore, my surprise upon learning that in addition to the half dozen executive types working out of IGE's Boca Raton headquarters, the company employs another 65 Chinese citizens at its Hong Kong base of operations, the majority engaged in 24/7 delivery of virtual goods. Imagine, furthermore, my wonder at learning that some of IGE's chief suppliers are mainland Chinese subcontractors running EverQuest-playing sweatshops in the hinterlands (at a level of production perhaps only hinted at in the famous but abortive Black Snow sweatshop in Tijuana).
And imagine, finally, the shock and awe I felt upon learning that IGE is now, as a matter of company strategy, targeting all game-currency markets with a player-base of 250,000 or more, which as of this year includes my own Ultima Online.
I swallowed hard and tried not to sound too pathetic when I told Brock & co. I'd be interested in working with them in the UO market. "Well, we're always looking for suppliers," replied Randy Maslow, the company's general counsel, grinning sort of like a fox inviting a hen over for dinner.
And frankly, I wasn't too unhappy to get the invitation. I could do worse than end up in the belly of a supply chain like theirs, after all. But there's no sugar-coating what's about to happen here: I haven't even had a chance to get my little five-and-dime up and running, and already the Wal-Mart is coming to town.
8:01 AM
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Market Watch (Reunited and It Feels So Good Edition)
Sigh. Just so you know, my dear old hard drive is truly dead and gone and my backup habits in the last few years have been far from stellar, but I am slowly clawing my way up and out of the wreckage. This week, it pleases me to say, I have got my eBay analysis tools up and running again. The results follow. Gloomy though they may be in economic terms, it's a kind of poetry to me just to see them on the page again.
Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome-back to your...
...weekly UO eBay market snapshot, based on average sales figures for the preceding 14 days:
Market sales total: $133,062 (-1094 from three weeks ago)
Market sales total, annualized: $3.5 million
Market volume total: 3,247 sales (-52)
Exchange rate: $13.94 (-1.00) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces
Price of an 18x18 house in the new Malas region: $111.75 (-44.88)
My gold holdings: 55.9 million gp ($1,036.84)
My dollar holdings: $954.51
My profits, year to date: $3,002.82
(Numbers crunched with help from HammerTap's DeepAnalysis, an eBay market research tool.)
8:08 AM
Thursday, November 06, 2003
Lost and Found
In case you were wondering, I am alive and well and holed up in the cozy, sleepy Dutch city of Utrecht, where the first major international academic conference on digital games is taking place and where, oddly enough, the chances of finding a broadband socket to plug one's laptop into seem to be very close to zero.
No problem. There's a public dial-up terminal here in the computer lobby and I am making the most of it. I logged in long enough to discover, among other things, that the conference proceedings have already been grossly distorted in the great game of Telephone that is the contemporary Web-enabled press. It seems a fellow from the Reuters news agency sat in on a panel on online community and apparently heard the "scientists" present declare that "Video Games Are Addictive." A fellow at Forbes then took the opportunity to ridicule the "misemployed wags in academia" who were allegedly making this declaration.
Whatever. I may be a misemployed wag myself, but I was at the same panel and all I heard was two panelists presenting nuanced, if somewhat incoherent, discussions of the possibility that there may be some addictive aspects to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (a suggestion that most players of such games would find laughably obvious). Take a look at the abstracts for the papers (Florence Chee's and Stephen Kline's), and judge for yourself.
And meanwhile shed a tear for the old dinosaur days of journalism, when this sort of coverage at least took days, and not hours, to do its damage.
[Of course, I'm still doing my best to keep things at a slow, Jurassic pace. Having typed up this entry in Utrecht, Thursday night, I ran out of time on my hotel Internet-access card and had to wait till I got home, a day and a half later to publish. Sorry, news junkies.]
4:01 PM
|
