Real virtual economies
Posted on November 07, 2002 @ 11:00 in Games
Online Game Economies Get Real at Wired and Lisbeth points to a BBC story: Everquest Fantasy Offers Real Rewards. The BBC story begins like this:
They look like ordinary people. By day they are citizens of the world - office workers, school teachers, bricklayers and doctors. But at night they transform into heroes, battling the scourge of the universe to bring peace and tranquillity to the magical lands of Norrath.
If it weren't for the reference to Norrath, this paragraph could have been lifted from just about any article on role-playing, from the pen-and-paper kind in the 1970s, to MUDs in the 1980s and 1990s, and now MMORPGs (since the late 1990s).
Wouldn't it be fascinating to do a content analysis of newspaper and magazine articles (and maybe televised reports) on role-playing to see what the main themes reported are (an educated guess: moral-ethical-religious corruption, addiction, the wonders of online interaction/virtual reality, sex and death) and if anything at all has changed in the reporting over the years?
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