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June 23, 2004
OGIC: Links alive
- Maud has a short story, "Post-Extraction," up at the newish literary magazine Swink. In news that will surprise nobody, it's really, really good. How smart and nice of them to make it freely available!- Part of Maud's story is about on-line gaming. A little while back, a thoroughly fascinating essay in The Walrus looked at the real-world economics of on-line fantasy worlds. Economist Edward Castronova stumbled on these games a few years ago and what he discovered there revived a flagging academic career:
EverQuest had its own economy, a bustling trade in virtual goods. Players generate goods as they play, often by killing creatures for their treasure and trading it. The longer they play, the more powerful they get--but everyone starts the game at Level 1, barely strong enough to kill rats or bunnies and harvest their fur. Castronova would sell his fur to other characters who'd pay him with "platinum pieces," the artificial currency inside the game. It was a tough slog, so he was always stunned by the opulence of the richest players. EverQuest had been launched in 1999, and some veteran players now owned entire castles filled with treasures from their quests.
Things got even more interesting when Castronova learned about the "player auctions." EverQuest players would sometimes tire of the game, and decide to sell off their characters or virtual possessions at an on-line auction site such as eBay. When Castronova checked the auction sites, he saw that a Belt of the Great Turtle or a Robe of Primordial Waters might fetch forty dollars; powerful characters would go for several hundred or more. And sometimes people would sell off 500,000-fold bags of platinum pieces for as much as $1,000.
As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock what he was looking at. It was a form of currency trading. Each item had a value in virtual "platinum pieces"; when it was sold on eBay, someone was paying cold hard American cash for it. That meant the platinum piece was worth something in real currency. EverQuest's economy actually had real-world value.
He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S.--higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game--the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled.
Then he performed one final analysis: The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia.
It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist.
- I like James Lilek's affectionate tribute to writers who smoke. Or is it smokers who write? In any case, Christopher Hitchens' recent slice-and-dice jobs on Michael Moore and Ronald Reagan are the occasion for a description I know will have certain FOOGICs nodding their heads in self-recognition:
I am reasonably sure he wrote both pieces in the same state of furious irritated inebriation, and both strike me as two-pack essays. Forty cigarettes, minimum. Of course, you don't know if he's one of those light-‘em-and-leave'-em writers who fire up a Winston, set it aside, pound furiously for four minutes, take that last toxic plastic-tasting drag that makes you think I hate cigarettes for a fleeing second, or whether he parks the butt in the corner of his mouth and smokes as he writes, getting ashes all over the place. I suspect the latter. I suspect he is one of those writers who doesn't empty the ashtray until the piece is done, and occasionally will use the butt to clear away some empty real estate in the ashtray so the cigarette doesn't relight the discarded filters.
If he's a filter man. Probably so. Otherwise he'd have to shave his tongue with a straight edge every morning. Steady, lad. Steady. Hold the wrist with the other hand if you have to. Ah, to hell with it.
- Colby is being blistering and funny, what else is new, on Road to Perdition and some other movies:
Tom Hanks plays a button man whose murdering ways get his wife and children (I forget exactly how many) killed, but who is healed and redeemed and whatnot as he flees his betrayers with his last surviving brat in tow. The whole thing's a very nice opportunity for the old man and the boy to get to know each other, and even to engage in a little comic business--at Al Capone's expense, no less! Too bad the pair chose to flee towards the town with a name ripped from the pages of A Child's Garden of Lameass Foreshadowing. Sam Mendes seems to have arrived just in time to answer America's undiscovered need for a stupid, gauche version of John Sayles.
In related news, I'd still like the two hours I spent watching American Beauty back. And as long as we're all stomping on Mendes, I wonder what Terry's reaction will be when he hears that the man's next project is a film version of Sweeney Todd? Nothing involving a straight razor, I hope.
Regarding Colby's assessment of School of Rock, however, I'll grant him "piffle," but "noxious piffle"? Isn't that almost a contradiction in terms? And Colby, why do you hate kids?
- Finally, Alex Ross's blog is going like gangbusters. Here he shares his used-book finds, including a copy of Lord Jim inscribed "Texas School Book Depository, 1963." A couple of weeks ago he had a brief appreciation of music used in The Sopranos that I've been meaning to flag. Bookmark him.
Posted June 23, 2004 6:48 AM
