Selling virtual property for real world money

A UO player was very upset by the recent phenomenon of established UO accounts selling for astronomical fees on online auction sites such as eBay. (As I write this, the high bid on one account is over $2000). He saw it as the end of the world of UO, as a “black pus filled ball of greed and selfishness.” The below are extracted from my replies to this thread.

…my, you sound bitter. And over what? Over people’s natural desire to get ahead, to make a profit on whatever they can. It’s not going to magically be absent from a virtual world, you know. People have been selling virtual property for years now on other online games, and it hasn’t ruined the games. It’s just reflective of real life.

It may be that you regard this basic part of human nature as “a black pus filled ball of greed and selfishness”… I would agree that human nature is the heart and soul of UO, though. However, whereas you see that as its weakness, I see that as its strength.

It may be that after seeing what UO has gone through, that other makers of online spaces will choose to avoid the route of trying to make actual worlds. They may settle for just making virtual realities about levelling or about killing or about chatting. They may decide that people cannot exist in a space together and be able to arrive at means of running their community themselves. They may decide that the audience of players and virtual citizens needs to have not just rules, but actual laws of physics coded into the game to make them behave nice. A pity, because it means that virtual spaces will remain just toys, instead of things that matter…

For every person you see selling an account on eBay for a lot of money, every greedy escapee from UO you see trying to make a profit, there are a bunch of people bidding, too. And they are bidding on intangibles. They are offering up their hard-won real money in exchange for invisible bits and bytes because they see the intangibles of UO as being something worth having. A tower for a sense of pride. High skills for greater freedom of action. A place in an online community–they are paying real money for something that many argue doesn’t even exist. I find it odd that people think this cheapens the whole thing. I think it validates it. It says to me that there are more people who want to be deeper IN than there are who want OUT. That there are strong emotional reasons for being a participant.

Yes, it may seem unfair that to the rich of one world go the advantages of the other world, but hey, life isn’t fair. Heck, I don’t even know if the sales on eBay are legal. But I DO know that wanting to be more involved with a virtual world doesn’t sound like a marker of that world’s ending. It sounds more like a sign of its strength.

Could the game be safer if we took more stringent measures, like a PK switch? Yeah, quite probably. I don’t think we could afford to run, though. My faith in the players’ abilities to circumvent rules is boundless, you see, and I think that the tighter the rules, the more rebellion you get. Hence increased admin costs.

It could be that we’re a doomed experiment. That it’s not possible to have a virtual environment in which you can do anything worthwhile. I’d be very depressed if that were so.

But if all online games are gonna be is little amusement park rides where you can log in, gain a level or two, slay a monster (maybe in the company of friends) and feel like you scored some points–well, that would be a future that merited my being depressed, I think. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but it’s been done before, and it has no real social significance.

You’re not going to learn anything about yourself or about others in a game like that. You’re not going to be challenged in any way that matters. Yeah, you might feel a great deal safer not feeling challenged, but I’d rather have one engaged player than three who are going through XP-run, gain-stat, level-tomorrow motions.

It might be UO’s very aspirations that trip it up, but without those aspirations, it won’t be art and it won’t be society, it’ll just be hackwork. Hackwork is easy to come by. Why settle for it?

If RL is more worthwhile and fun than UO (and I wouldn’t dispute that it is), then what are you doing here, arguing the point? 🙂

We cannot judge whether someone is a loser just by their actions on one auction. What do you know? Maybe someone is buying it as a special gift for a dying kid. Still a loser? Maybe they are buying it because they hate the person and they want to carefully demolish everything that account has achieved. Loser? Probably. 🙂

Either way, nobody is going to spend that amount of money on something they are not passionate about. And lemme tell you, if their life in UO is passionate, and their life in the real world is dry and gray, then maybe it’s the virtual life that is worthwhile and valuable, not the real one. Maybe that’s where they touch more people, where they influence lives, where they make discoveries about themselves and others, where they do good deeds, learn lessons, and take risks.

Who are you (or me, or anyone) to judge that?