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But I don't think you can say just because some people were surprised that their surprise is well founded. Lots of people were not surprised - the original buyers and sellers of these accounts and items, for instance.

You can find "some amazement" for lots of things (I'm constantly surprised by popular music) but that isn't a sound basis for arguing that something is essentially surprising.

Okay, I'll put it this way - if you'd told UO devs that they could probably double their revenue just by allowing people to buy items directly in the game during development, they'd have done it.

Or that the first guy who sold his house for a big sum was surprised by how much he got.

That people sold in-game items: not surprising. That people sold in-game items on an out-of-game auction system and attracted significant dollars: surprising.

But as I said: hindsight is 20/20.

[lamaros]

That people sold in-game items: not surprising. That people sold in-game items on an out-of-game auction system and attracted significant dollars: surprising.

I don't agree and I think you're getting caught on a slippery slope by making such statments.

[Venkman]

What you're missing is that this practice pre-dated UO, and the term "MMORPG" itself. eBay certainly helped facilitate this activity, but neither that nor Garriot not-condemning it (while being surprised by it) in any way signified the invention of RMTing. My point earlier was simply that trading items in game pre-dated doing that for real world sales. I don't know by what margin, but you could trade items for years before UO launch, maybe even over a decade prior. Since item trades first between player and NPC and then between actual players were built on a long history of game features, it is not so hard to assume that adding the real world commerce reward was actually surprising. You just can't look at it from the lense of this particular offshoot of MUDs though.

We'd need someone who lived this stuff to really lend some insights, but this rather valuable historical discussion is buried as a derail in a thread that otherwise should have died a few pages ago.

[lamaros]

Well, if people want to let this thread slide and end the topic here I guess that's ok with me. But as a final point:

As you implying that this began with UO? Many MUDs had Dev (and player) driven exchanges of game items for money before UO came about.

And where do you draw the line on what is a virtual good or not? The example Fordel gave is meant to illustrate this; if we take things offline we can look at card games as an example where virtual items assumed a real world value, and I'm sure should we want to we could keep taking it back step by small step. By doign this I think you would recognise not that there are real and vitrual goods, but that many virtual goods had such a low value that it was not realised in real currency. Right from the begining any virtual good that was of sufficient value was immediatly realised in real terms - it's just that the relative market was smaller and thus the demand, and thus the vaule of many of these virtual goods, was lower than this point of realization in more instances..

You're creating a seperation between the 'virtual' and the 'real' that both current and prior examples show to be imagined. There is no difference between them.

Now you might say that many people never thought that certain goods would never attain enough value to cross the realization threshold, but that is a different thing to saying that those goods never actualy had value. Which is how I read what you're saying now. Nothing has been fundamentaly added, the scale has just changed.

So it's not surprise over the existance of value but over the level of value. Thus not fundamentaly surprising.

Anyway, I'm meant to be writing a philosophy essay.. and I'm not sure how this discussion relates to the original topic of conversation anymore.

[Venkman]

I'd love to see the last 20 or so posts split off into a new thread rather than this one go away.

As you implying that this began with UO? Many MUDs had Dev (and player) driven exchanges of game items for money before UO came about.

No. As I said, the trading of items in games pre-dated doing that for real world sales.

Where we seem to come down on different sides is what constitutes "virtual". I've been specifically focused on virtual goods as they appeared within online worlds (not just persistent) that are traded between two player characters. That practice came first because developers added that ability. Then people began to realize that those virtual goods could have a real world value. And this surprised people because the original designers did not conceive of a time when their virtual bits and bytes would carry real world dollar values.

That any intangible/virtual good carries value is not surprising. That's been going on ever since banking was invented, much less futures markets. But that only serves to drive my earlier point further.

The reason things can be seen as surprising/emergent is sometimes due to a lack of scope. There are people, including developers who are surprised by antics of players in these worlds. This could be argued as relatively emergent behavior. There are others who realize the sociological elements as they relate to the real world, and are therefore not surprised. There it's not fundamentally emergent behavior. But until the industry employs more psychologists and macroeconomists, we're likely still to see surprise where one could retroactively argue none should have been.

Edit: Grammar, punctuation, etc

[Count Nerfedalot]

Emergent behavior, regarless of what incomplete or inaccurate definitions you may find elsewhere, is really quite simple to define.  Emergent behavior is an apparently complex social activity which is the direct result of the application of a relatively few simple rules governing the interactions between a number of individuals.  Tests for true emergent behavior include ensuring that outside factors aren't the actual source of the apparent complexity.  The classic example of emergent behavior is a colony of insects, each reacting to the others it encounters according to it's own simple internal ruleset, building an elaborate nest without any centralized guidance or predefined plan.

Now, is players engaging in RMT with virtual game items/accounts an emergent behavior? Taken from the point of view of the game design itself, not at all.  The players are breaking the game rules and injecting external considerations into their decision making.  On that level, RMT is more an example of what happens when the actors in a complex system DON'T follow the simple rules.  The system stops functioning as designed and becomes, essentially, broken, with excessive amounts of resources being diverted to one activity/funcion to the detriment of the rest of the system.  Rather like a cancer whose cells have been induced to break the rules and run amok.  Now, the system may still be "fun" or "interesting to study", it may have been unexpected by those who failed to consider either history or human nature in designing the system, but it's definitely not emergent behavior.

On another level, RMT definitely could be considered an emergent behavior, along with every single other human activity, if you subscribe to some theory of biological determinism that considers life in general and human activity in particular to be merely the end result of the relatively simple interactions of our constituent cells with each other based on external stimuli and the basic laws of chemistry.  Or of the molecular and atomic interactions between our cells constituent atoms. Or even the quantum interactions beween the subatomic constituents of the atoms, etc.

Somewhere between those extremes, on the level of basic human social interaction, RMT might possibly be argued to be a symptom at least of human emergent behavior based on human motivational rules such as acquiring the most for the least effort, or some such.  But that's more the playground of sociology and macroeconomics, and definitely not something unique to virtual games.

As for the history which keeps being ignored, the earliest example of RMT involving virtual game assets which I can recall was the buying and selling of Gemstone accounts on Genie back in the 80's.  I'm willing to bet that there's probably even earlier instances that I'm not aware of.  Jessica Mulligan, among others, could probably describe how what was happening in Gemstone was already old-hat and not something new even then. 

Ignorance of history and failure to take into account human nature when designing a game do not expose some wonderful new interesting emergent behavior.  They just expose ignorance and failure!

[Murgos]

Well said.

[Stephen Zepp]

Yeh, it was--convinced me :)

[Venkman]

Ignorance of history and failure to take into account human nature when designing a game do not expose some wonderful new interesting emergent behavior.  They just expose ignorance and failure!

I agree, and well said. But how often it occurs anyway is why I call it perceptually emergent when it happens. And that could be applied to everything from games to politics to life :)

[Talonus]

As for the history which keeps being ignored, the earliest example of RMT involving virtual game assets which I can recall was the buying and selling of Gemstone accounts on Genie back in the 80's.

I can attest to personally doing this to pay for the costs of playing. There were "auction" boards and, later, websites to handle this as well. It certainly wasn't a new idea at the time, though nobody really thought much of it back then. I do believe that most of it was done in order to pay the expensive costs of playing, rather to make cash though.

[tazelbain]

People mistakenly think a game is a closed system.  RMT is a example of bleed from the outer system.  So is most griefing.