Socio-Economic Concern over Fantasy

I think this is a fitting post after myself engaging in virtual projection here.  You might think of this as philosophical reflections on complete and total geekiness, which, of course, I believe too much of this blog probably is.

In the MMORPG (short for: massively multi-player online roleplaying game) phenomenon sweeping the gaming industry, virtual worlds are populated with thousands or tens of thousands of people playing other characters in a graphical setting.  (Well, the graphical RPGs are more popular, but there are still plenty of the older text-based MUDs - short for "multi-user dungeons" -  running around.)  If you want an idea of just how many, see the big list at MudConnector.  Some of the more popular such MUDs are EverQuest (known as EverCrack for its addictive qualities), Second Life, Ultima Online, The Sims Online, Dark Age of Camelot and (for the non-graphically inclined) Gemstone III or Dragonrealms. 

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy and linguistics at the University of Michigan, not only plays The Sims Online, but published an on-line newspaper for the game's main city, Alphaville.  He's since been kicked out of TSO, but Ludlow's "research" continues in Second Life.  To read about it, go here.  The comments in this thread of Ludlow's cite (Ludlow posts as Urizenus) are quite strange. The BBC reported on Ludlow and TSO here.  A clipping from the latter:

The dark side of Alphaville has been documented by one of its former "residents", Peter Ludlow, who in real life is a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan.

A spin-off of the successful Sims strand Urizenus, one of the avatars controlled by Prof Ludlow, was chief reporter on a newspaper called The Alphaville Herald which featured interviews with Alphaville's child prostitutes, sadomasochists, Sims Mafioso, thieves and members of its shadow government.

The Alphaville Herald was not supposed to document dodgy things," he says. "It was done to document the emergence of economic, social and political structures in the game.

Such games can be immensely addictive, and I wouldn't doubt it for a second if Peter Ludlow plays as much for personal pleasure (or addiction) as he does to pursue his socio-economic research in fantasy worlds where all your possessions are captured by a few invisible lines of computer code and, if you're lucky enough to play a graphical RPG, a .gif or .jpeg associated with them.  Of course, you don't own the code or the items (except in Second Life perhaps? - a new experiment by Linden Labs), but players nonetheless sell them, usually "for the time put into acquiring them", on E-bay and elsewhere.  According to this site, $1000 Simolean dollars are going for $22 USD.  You didn't know you could make money playing a computer game, did you?

And, as this article testifies, you probably had no idea how much money you could make.  According to the The New Scientist, $265,000 Project Entropia dollars were just spent on a cyber-island floating in a sea of data.  The exchange rate, you ask?  One to ten!  That's $26,500 USDs spent for the rights to a few lines of computer code!  Apparently the new owner now has the right to impose a hunting and/or mining tax on those who wish digitally traverse his soil for their own profit, as well as the ability allocate parcels for sale at prices he gets to set.  It's quite possible he'll turn a profit.

I've never really taken a liking to applied ethics, although I find meta-ethics to be fascinating.  In part, I take it that my lack of interest in applied ethics has to do with its investigation of the contingent.  It seems to me that the purest philosophy concerns itself, like mathematics, with the infamous timeless, necessary, and a priori truths.  (If you're a nominalist, I'm sorry if I scared you.)  So it provides me with some mild amusement to reflect on Ludlow's diametrically opposed interests - what I'll call the fantastical contingent.  Surely there must be more fruitful philosophical terrain to mine than the unsupervised interactions of excessive videogame playing, hormone-charged adolescents?

Comments

[SelaTadarypep]

XVI:
In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one
aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and
Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be
made available to the Marines for the extra day.
XVII:
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing,
and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics, i.e., it always increases.
XVIII:
It is very expensive to achieve high unreliability. It is not uncommon
to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten for each factor of
ten degradation accomplished.
XIX:
Although most products will soon be too costly to purchase, there will
be a thriving market in the sale of books on how to fix them.
XX:
In any given year, Congress will appropriate the amount of funding
approved the prior year plus three-fourths of whatever change the
administration requests -- minus 4-percent tax.
-- Norman Augustine

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