3) Join Her Guild

The internet has allowed us to meet loads of people without ever having to actually talk to them fact to face. Email, instant messaging, it has all allowed us to communicate in ways we’ve never imagined. Some people take it to a whole new extreme. MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role playing games) take it to a new level, no pun intended. Games like World of Warcraft, Everquest, Project Entropia, and others have allowed groups of people, known as ‘guilds’ to battle online in real-time. You wouldn’t believe it but it’s actually a great way to meet women, that is if you know what you’re doing.



I actually had a friend who went to California to the annual Blizzcon convention and hooked up with one of the members of his guild after meeting her in person for the first time. If you’re not into these games, it’s very playful to challenge a girl to Guitar Hero or DDR if that option is available to you.

For more regarding these online role-playing games click here.

4) Pretend You’re a Famous Author

Nothing impresses a woman more than a man who’s written a novel, or two, or three. Fortunately for us, most people don’t keep tabs on many authors profile save for a few favorites. Simply say to her you’re a well known author who’s just finished his book signing for his latest novel. For extra points keep a copy of your ‘book’ handy to show her as proof. Just make sure it doesn’t have the author’s picture on the inside jacket. I suggest paperbacks for this. While copyright infringement may be illegal, pretending to be someone famous to sleep with a woman has been going on unregulated for generations. Keep this tip close to home.

5) Be Yourself

When all else fails this is the best advice I can give you, just be yourself. If you’re talking about us hardcore science fiction aficionados it is very much still a boy’s club. If a gorgeous woman is attending an event like that it is not by accident, she’s a fan of the genre. Use this as a launching point for your relationship and build it from there. It’s much easier to get into a relationship with a girl if you already have mutual interests. Don’t get discouraged. Be yourself.

In 1992, science fiction author, Neal Stephenson, published his third novel, Snow Crash.  The book depicted a near-future dystopia, a world where cyber-technologies and laissez-faire capitalism have gone awry. Along with a heavy dose of Stephenson’s signature satire and black humor, one of the reasons for its incredible versatility over the years was the author’s conceptualizing of the internet, what he dubbed ‘the metaverse’. What he envisioned was a virtual-reality network that allowed external users to interface with other users through graphical reconstructions of human forms (or ‘avatars’). Many believe Stephenson’s vision of the ‘metaverse’ is the next technological evolution of the internet, while others argue it is already happening.

While the study of virtual worlds is still very much in its infancy, the ideas have been fashionable in popular culture for decades. However, with the sudden rise in popularity of online games the fiction of such authors as William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, and Bruce Sterling are becoming more like reality every day.

So how do these online worlds function?

Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (or MMORPGs) are virtual communities that exist entirely online where large assortments of players interact in a game’s persistent world. The mythology surrounding these games is largely derived from Dungeons-and-Dragons folklore and Tokien-esque high fantasy. Thus, MMORPGs can be seen as an intricate fusion of high fantasy literature and modern 21^st century technology. Through their avatars, players can trade items, gain experience and skills, or join clans (also known as ‘guilds’) with other players for the purpose of accomplishing greater quests. For the techno-savvy already familiar with these online worlds this is very much old news. However, for those who feel left behind when it comes to computers and technology, be sure to note this ever-changing phenomenon.

Everquest, an online role-playing game (developed by Sony Online Entertainment in 1999) boasts a population of nearly 200,000 subscribers worldwide[2]. In one of his essays, Dr. Edward Castronova, Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University Bloomington, describes the virtual economy of ‘Norrath’, a planet in the land of Everquest:

“The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath’s currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many. The population is growing rapidly, swollen each day by hundreds of émigrés from various places around the globe, but especially the United States”.[3]

Julian Dibbell, writer of the influential essay ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’, published a weblog chronicling his year-long experiences in the land of Britannia, the virtual world of Ultima Online that currently serves a membership of over 225,000 users. In his book ‘Playing Money, or How I Quit My Job and Struck it Rich in Virtual Loot Forming’, Dibbell states the following in his final blog entry:

As of a few hours earlier this evening, it’s official: I have paid taxes on my income as a trader of virtual items. I listed $3,131 in profits from Play Money on my 2003 federal return. And in my Q1 2004 estimated tax payment, I included $2,056 to cover my $8,225 in Play Money profits for the year so far.[4]

Project Entropia (also known as the Entropia Universe) sets to raise the bar when it comes to online gaming. Created by Swedish-developer MindArk, the software is essentially free to download and use. There are no membership or subscription fees of any kind. However, without any money invested from the user, a player’s options in the game are limited to roaming the virtual world and using the private chat interface. Calypso is the planetary backdrop for the Entropia Universe which allows real world currency to be converted into virtual currency (in this case, one dollar US equals 10 PEDs). From there players are free to purchase equipment, armor, weapons, and tools to build up their skills as well as their bank balances. To this end, MindArk has recently released the Entropia Universe cash card, a tangible bank card which allows gamers in the real world to withdraw and load funds via ATMs. This is accomplished through Cirrus, an interbank network that links MasterCard, Maestro, and Diners Club credit to a network of over 900,000 ATMs worldwide.

Many gamers have criticized games like Project Entropia for being a cash sink making it impossible for players to actually turn a profit without investing money into their character. Although, there have been a number of success stories to contradict this belief. On December 14, 2004, the BBC reported the sale of a virtual island put up for auction. It was sold for a price of 265,000 PEDs or $26,500 US to an Australian man named Zachrum “Deathifier” Emegen[5]. One of the undisputed kingpins of the game is an avatar by the name of Jon ‘NEVERDIE’ Jacobs. In late 2005, Jon bought an asteroid space station and quickly renovated it into a virtual resort, which grossed $100,000 US in the first eight months of operation[6].

One of the earliest literary precedents involving online games is Vernor Vinge’s novella ‘True Names’, a science fiction story about a group of disenfranchised computer wizards conspiring in a virtual dungeon similar to Everquest. It is with a heavy heart to say that this story can now be seen as a cautionary tale since online games are not without their inherent consequences.

‘Farming’

This is a term used in online gaming for players who repeatedly attempt to acquire items of value within a game. While these activities are often mundane and tedious, when conducted on a large scale collectively (such as killing a large creature or collecting items such as gold) players can exploit the game’s mechanics for maximum profit. The practice of farming remains a very controversial issue when it comes to online gamers as it leaves the individual player at a marked disadvantage. Many players complain farming takes the fun out of gaming. As particular items become harder to locate and more people flood the game’s world simply looking to turn a profit.

‘Mud-flation’

When new items are introduced into a game, usually through an expansion pack, the value of existent items (such as potions, armor, and weapons) drops considerably as their availability becomes evermore common in the game’s persistent world. This is known as ‘mud-flation’ (a portmanteau of the words ‘inflation’ and ‘MUD’ or ‘Multi-User Dungeon’).

Mud-flation is also of critical importance in the scheme of a game’s larger economy. The virtual currency within a game’s programming is usually levied against a real world one, in most cases the US dollar. As more and more money gets introduced into the virtual environment, through the buying and trading of items and services, there begins the gradual decline of a game’s online currency.

To combat mud-flation developers resort to a number of options:

· Offering purchasable upgrades, expansion packs, or membership subscriptions using real world money

· Creating more consumable goods during gameplay such as armour, potions, and supplies

· Offering more purchasable services within the game’s world such as healing, item repair, transportation, and inventory space

· Purchasing items through auction houses, pawning, or private trading, usually with an added markup

Virtual Outsourcing

One of the most disheartening consequences is the outsourcing of virtual labour in the real world. In countries with a lower standard of living (what we might candidly call the ‘third world’) workers are often hired at slave wages to play online games for hours on end, farming their way to real-world profits for bosses ready to exploit them. This is exactly the case with Black Snow Interactive, a small company created in Southern California. Black Snow was developed by two men who dumped their life savings into renting office space in Tijuana; stocked with eight PCs, a T1 line, and twenty-one Mexican laborers forced to play Ultima Online on rotating eight-hour shifts.[7] While some claim this outsourcing is purely exploitative, others argue it gives people jobs who would otherwise be unemployed. This practice is especially prevalent in China where it’s estimated 100,000 people (0.4% of Chinese gamers in total) are employed in these faming sweatshops.[8]

Game Addiction

It is clear our dependence on modern technology far exceeds their dependence on us. It is this same dependency that has resulted in treatment programs being set up worldwide. Amsterdam, Massachusetts, and Richmond, British Columbia have added ‘computer addicted services’ to their clinics in an attempt to combat this growing trend. In Asian countries such as China and South Korea, ‘game addiction’ is beginning to reach epidemic proportions. With an estimated twenty million teenagers logging on in China alone, some estimate as much as one fifth of them have the potential to become addicted. Symptoms can range from the typical obsessive gaming and withdrawal from daily life. Other characteristics include the player dreaming about the game while sleeping, involuntary typing movements of the fingers, and obsessive thinking about what is happening in the game when offline. Gamers who consider themselves ‘addicted’ often sacrifice sleep and food for continued online play, even at the cost of dehydration and sleep deprivation. This has resulted in sporadic deaths around the globe.

In the strictest literal sense virtual economies are nothing new. We use them everyday; Ebay, debit cards, online banking services, and ATMs are just a few examples of how the internet has changed our daily lives. So to answer the question posited in this article’s title. Yes, virtual worlds do have economic recessions. However, it is only in the sense of how far human beings will go to satisfy their virtual cravings, to grasp the intangible, and achieve nothing.

“The writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds – they’ve already been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible…in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles”[1]

Probably one of the oldest precedents in postmodern gaming, pastiche is a type of blank parody. To paraphrase Jameson, ‘satire without impulse, parody without laughter’. Intertextuality refers to the shaping of texts’ meanings from other texts. For instance, some examples of intertextuality in literature include:

• East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck: A retelling of the story of Genesis, set in the Salinas Valley of Northern California.
• Ulysses (1914) by James Joyce: A retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, set in Dublin.

  

While pastiche and intertextuality are more suited terms for literature, many examples appear within interactive gaming entertainments. Let’s take the game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as our archetypal example. Indeed one of the more comical aspects of the game is that much of its cutscene storylines borrow from references to popular culture. These include but are not limited to Taxi, Red Dawn, Heat, Pulp Fiction, Scarface, and Carlito’s Way. The title ‘Vice City’ alone implies not only that the setting is a place of ‘vice’ but also makes fun of the popular eighties television show Miami Vice.

So how can we apply this to video games?
The answer is genre hybridity.

One of the staples of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is its versatile gameplay. Indeed, the actions of the player (one Tommy Vercetti) include the third-person over-the-shoulder elements of shooting games; the combat system of traditional fighting games like Double Dragon and Streets of Rage; the driving elements of classics like San Francisco Rush, Crazy Taxi, and Road Rage; as well as the open-ended worldliness of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games like Everquest and World of Warcraft that allow the participant to explore a fully flushed out gaming environment.

This genre hybridity, however, is not strict to video games genres but can indeed cross mediums altogether. Take the Max Payne series and examine what formats construct the game. Max Payne combines the traditional tropes of hardboiled detective fiction, sketch drawings as cutscenes typically seen only in comic books, the voiceover monologues of the lead protagonist during actual gamplay (a technique normally suited for cinema), and the use of flashbacks as entire levels, a common technique used in television.

Since there are only a limited number of storylines to tell, our only method of inventing new styles of gameplay is to resurrect dead genres and reconstruct them to make something new. Narration evolves, gameplay evolves. Hardware merely progresses. Long gone are the days of two-dimensional side-scrollers and linear gameplay. The future of gaming is here and now.

January 2009

In 1989, Russian chess grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, defeated the computer, Deep Thought, in a two-game championship chess match. In the move before Deep Thought’s defeat it took the computer three seconds to decide its next move. Now why is it significant? It’s just three seconds after all. Answer this. Why would a computer that is capable of achieving millions of calculations per second need three of them to make its next move? Many scientists cite this example as one of the first instances a machine has shown intelligence, a consciousness.

As games get more complex, quality assurance testers are finding it increasingly more difficult to locate and eliminate computational errors. Conversely, gamers themselves are finding new and innovative ways to tamper with a game’s mechanics in ways the programmers never anticipated. This section is by and large an extension of open-ended gameplay but is further extended to include the technological progression of console hardware and the public’s influence to affect a gameplay’s mechanics for entertainment or economical purposes.

Consider the following examples:

• Machinima: The art of making films using a game engine. Cut scenes in games rendered using the game models instead of motion video or actors are examples of machinima. Usually though the term is used to describe content not originally developed for the game (i.e. the Red vs. Blue Series).




• Cat and Mouse: In online car racing games players came up with this variation. The racers play on teams of at least two cars. Each team picks one very slow car, and their goal is to have their slow car cross the finish line first. Thus the team members in faster cars aim to push their slow car into the lead and ram their opposing teams’ slow cars off the road (i.e. Project Gotham Racing).




• Lurikeen invasion: Inspired by the diminutive form of the smallest avatar in Dark Age of Camelot, a guild called ‘Lurikeen Invasion’ formed on the Guinevere Shard, Hibernia Realm, starting an imaginary political movement based on the power of the lurikeen class. Originally started as a Grief guild, Thousands of players quickly joined created characters ending in ‘*keen’ e.g. ‘cokekeen’, ‘iamkeen’ on a single game server. As Dark Age of Camelot requires a roughly equal balance of three different races on each shard, Guinevere shard quickly became unbalanced and overrun by the ‘keen invasion’. It became so large Mythic Entertainment had to re-design the guild statistics webpages.




• Real economy interaction: Traders in massively multiplayer online games with economic systems play purely to acquire virtual game objects or avatars which they then sell for real-world money on auction websites or game currency exchange sites. This results in the trader’s play objective to make real money regardless of the original game designer’s objectives (i.e. World of Warcraft, Everquest, Project Entropia, etc.)




• Glitch or quirk-based strategies: In several games, especially first-person shooters, game glitches or physics quirks can become viable strategies, or even spawn their own game types. In id Software’s Quake series, rocket jumping is a popular strategy (as is gauss jumping in Valve Corporation’s Half-Life series) — a player fires a rocket at the ground while jumping, allowing the weapon’s splash damage to propel him to otherwise unreachable areas.

More often than not I’m going on Youtube to find new videos of people hacking Guitar Hero’s game engine to custom-create their own songs, or reprogramming a Nintendo Wii controller to use on laptops. If what we’re seeing is a trend towards open-ended storytelling and away from linear narrative; than with regards to emergent gameplay, what we’re seeing is a shift from big-time developers/publishers to indie development and a hacking subculture bent on subverting a game’s mechanics and programming to the fullest extent. (Continue to Part Five)