Money Ruins Everything
I’ve recently started playing Magic the Gathering again. More specifically, I’ve been playing it in its online incarnation. For those who are unfamiliar, Magic the Gathering Online is an online game of Magic the Gathering that mirrors the meat-world experience to a surreal level. If you are unfamiliar with the collectible card game Magic the Gathering, this may not be the right blog for you.
You purchase packs of virtual cards in the same way that you might walk into a game shop and purchase little, foil-wrapped pieces of paper. In a strange, metaphysical way, the value of the cards, like currency, are in the perception of value rather than the value of the raw materials. Unlike currency, there is no inherent promise that they can be exchanged for any other kind of good or service.
The notion that I place more value in my virtual property than in physical is just one sign of this age that leads me to believe there’s a better description of the epoch we currently occupy than the Information Age. I certainly have more virtual real-world liquid assets available to me at any given time than physical. This is an idea hundreds of years old, but there’s a new level of abstraction at work here: the virtual goods these days are backed by nothing save other people’s perception of their value. This is no land bank or gold-backed currency here; even stocks seem to rise and fall based on perception of market success rather than actual profits. These objects inherent worth are guaranteed by no more than the crystallographic orientation of a few thousand molecules orbiting madly in some server farm in a town you’ve never been to.
I’m surprisingly comfortable with the attachment of value to records in a database. Now, one could argue that as long as banks have been conducting a digital business, everyone has been doing this. The factor that makes this all possible is the notion of a fair playing field. I’d think after the recent scandals, scams, cartels, and conspiracies in the financial markets, my faith in the sea of gaming virtual value would be shaken. On the contrary, it just re-affirms that as long as game systems remain relatively closed and relatively uncomplicated, their inherent value is as or more trustworthy than my retirement plan. It puts things in perspective.
The conversion issue is significant, but I blind myself to the possibility that a game like Magic the Gathering Online is anything but a life-long investment. I have no illusions about “selling my deck” and making off with a real-world profit. I’ve invested in a lifetime of entertainment, which is, to my way of thinking, valuable improvement to my quality of life.
I think that many gamers have internalized this notion in one way or another. Online persistent systems, as long as they remain closed, should be less like real work. The second a player driven economy opens itself to the outside world of real currencies, the value is reduced. As long as the transaction is unidirectional, the player can maintain the illusion that it is “just a game”, which, to my mind, is actually very serious business.
Therefore, I can’t really fault companies for protecting their investments and cracking down on MMO “gold farmers” and the like. The damage inflicted by these people seems less about the impact on player economies, in game spam, and disruptive in-game “farming” behaviors. Instead I feel the real casualty is psychological – that by linking the real world value of currency to the virtual goods in the game, that every in-game transaction brings you crashing back into reality.
The reason games have aesthetics is to separate the game from the real thing. Actually trading stocks is not a game, and your brain doesn’t reward you because you can’t tell its fun. Trading fake stocks in a fantasy universe is training for the real world, and we are genetically conditioned to find pleasure in this training.
So let’s look at a problem with this theory: why do some people find work to be “fun”? My guess is that your brain tries to reward any useful thing that you do. With real-world success, comes real-world rewards, and you enjoy the kinds of responses you get. The thing is with games, there’s no real world reward with which to associate this pleasure. Game rewards come in four flavors: aesthetic sense pleasure (delight), fun (problem solving/brain training), social factors (recognition), and visceral responses (base emotion.)
If this sounds like a re-hashing of Ralph Kloster’s work, well, it is. I’m a subscriber. Even if he’s wrong, his theory leads to useful game design iteration techniques, which helps me make games for real. But the reason it’s here is to help me justify my position on the 4th wall in games with online property.
I’ll try to summarize my position: the problem with too many real-world rewards in an online game is that they diminish the value of the virtual rewards you get in-game. This seems counter to logic, where an in-game reward with real-world value should be, if anything, more valuable than a purely virtual reward. But by linking the virtual reward to the real, you’ve changed the goal of the activity from a training exercise to one of survival. In short, by giving real-world value to in-game rewards, you are stealing away the kind of fun unique to playing games.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention you should be asking, “what about gambling??!?!” What about gambling indeed. I’ll talk about that soon.
