Real Life Game

1 POINT
Colour Cluster of 3

3 POINTS
Face Logo

5 POINTS
Cat(Real life)


Wallets

Soft toys

Face

Pooh Bears

Arcade Buttons

Bananas

Arcade Machine

Penguins

Boxes

T-shirt

--

Poster

Balloons

Bags

Chips

US$

A million dollar

Ajisen

Signs

Lights

Barriers

Money & Life

Interesting reads this week about being submerged into the virtual world(McKenzie Wark) and Real Money Trading(Julian Dibbell) in the MMOs. I shall first touch on the part about "The Cave"

Not all that is mentioned about The Cave is applicable to SL though. Yes, players can get very addicted to SL too but it's perhaps for a different reason compared to the article. Firstly, SL is not competitive. You don't have to level up or defeat other players. Secondly, you will never see the legend Game Over on your screen. The game just goes on and on forever and your avatar doesn't die unless you shut down your account.

So what are the players doing to keep them plugged-in to SL? One big reason I can think of is escapism from reality. As the game title suggested, it can be your second life, literally. You can do almost everything in there which you can do in the real world. In fact, you can even become a totally different person in SL. Rich, powerful, beautiful etc etc which you aren't in reality. It gets you so sucked in that you want to be the avatar of yours than being yourself. This bring us to the topic of Mimicry which was mentioned in past blog post. You're not engrossed with monster slaying. You're engrossed with being somebody else you're not, whom you hope you are.

Reality VS Virtual. Real Life VS Second Life

Next to RMT. Further evaluation to the point above, RMT can be a playing point of SL which gets them addicted. I've mentioned it in previous posts about the game's virtual properties and other digital goods are allowed to be sold in SL for real money legally. SL's virtual market totally thrives within the game. If not for it, it won't be as popular as it is today

Linden US$??

Unlike WoW, Linden Dollar can be directly bought using real life currency. Gold in WoW needs to be earned by playing the game, which can be time consuming. You can be cash rich in SL within a few minutes as long as you're willing to pump in the US$.

Be rich in Second Life

I guess Gold Farming is something that won't happen in SL. My guess to the closest equivalence of SL to WoW's gold farming is perhaps "Designing Shops"?? Because in order to earn money in SL, you can provide a service(camping, working in stores, custom content creation), become a real estate trader or simply buy/sell digital goods within the game. The design shops can create virtual goods including buildings, vehicles, devices of all kinds, animations, clothing, skin, hair, jewelry, flora and fauna, and works of art. With these, the shops can sell them to players who are willing to buy for them.

Instead of lowly educated topless men in terrible living conditions farming for gold in China, SL's version might be well dressed digital designers creating beautiful content in an air-conditioned office in Silicon Valley. The irony.


Things that you can only dream of buying in real life

Of course, the in-game economy is very much similar in SL to the real world. Demand and supply applies too. The exchange rates of L$ fluctuates everyday and an over/under supply of certain virtual goods will affect the price of it as well.


It may not be evident over here in Asia, but in the US it's a pretty common thing to buy/sell virtual goods in SL. Players play the game to earn money and that has created a massive amount of money being circulated within the game according to this report.

How far can SL thrive with its open source nature of in-game content creation and virtual economy? It's going pretty well as of now even without much governance. But then, governance is actually handled by the game programmers, since there are restrictions in the game which were set down by the code writers. SL doesn't need explicitly a government figure to check on everything.



Question this week: Should we encourage more of games like SL which mixes fun with money or should we just play the game as it is? Which MMO kind of will be more popular?

FeMale vs Male

Investigating on gender differences in the gaming world is fast becoming an interesting topic today considering the increasing number of female gamers as compared to the 1990s. I myself have seen an alarming number of female players clicking away at Local Area Network(LAN) Gaming shops nowadays, a huge contrast of what I saw during my younger years when it was mainly male dominated.



Second Life(SL) is definitely one online game which has a substantial number of female players behind those avatars. When I first logged in, I could see a fairly even distribution of male and female avatars. However, SL doesn't restrict its players from choosing the OTHER gender as their avatar. Thus I'm quite skeptical as to whether the female avatar in front of me is indeed a female in reality. I admit, I was tempted to choose a female avatar myself.

Anne-Marie article mentioned about games being open source. Upon some reading up, SL didn't start up as open source. It only happened in 2008 according to this article. I believe that is a fantastic move by Linden Labs. Had it not done that, I will not be seeing beautiful houses and avatars while playing the game today. Apparently, you own the digital goods(houses, cars) which you created yourself. There are a number of tools which you can use to create your own "products". You can even sell them to other players as Linden Labs deem it as your property, not theirs. How cool is that!!

A reason I feel why SL is able to attract a large number of female players is due to its Sandbox nature. As we've seen in The Sims which was introduced to the gaming world in year 2000, it was immensely popular with females. According to the reading, females are slowly breaking the tradition though, venturing into more violent and monstrous games. However, I feel that majority of the female gender still prefer a more laid back game mechanics with less violence, less competition and more cutesy stuffs. It is not evident in SL only, the increasing number of Facebook games(Bejewelled, Restaurent City) infested with female players has also proven it.

I like the idea of playing a game with females. They are able to inject a different kind of gaming experience as compared to a single gender game. The way they handle things, react to certain situations etc are very different from what a male gamer would do. As a result, females make the game more interesting, less rigid and not so one-dimensional.

Advantages aside, the female gender can also be a problem. When you mix the two genders in a common world, there are bound to be conflicts and trouble. Sexual harrassement, stalking, online prostitution are just some examples. I haven't encountered any of these during my time in SL though, but I think that's because I haven't gone to the correct places where such activities are raging. And then with the open source nature, people may create undesirable contents which make the game sleazy and unsuitable for the young.


Nudity


Cybersex


Undesirable Content

There has also been cases of what happened in SL leading to devastating consequences in real life with regards to the female gender playing the game. One example is an online affair leading to a real life divorce. I doubt such things will occur if the other gender is not within the game.

There are pros and cons to this phenomenon of increasing female gamers. At the end of the day, it is still how an individual approach the game that matters the most, especially so in an open game like SL. Discussion question I suggesting this week is "Male vs Female, how does a game affect them psychologically. Same in-game occurence, but how different can it affect them?"

Human? God? Private? Public?

Seriously speaking, this week's reading is totally abstract and not understandable no matter how many times I tried to read it. It just leave this empty feeling after completing the readings. And I keep asking myself as I read each sentence "What has all these gotta do with the gaming world?" Sheesh, I shall try to write whatever I can understand which I can relate to Second Life then.

Firstly, I'll bring in the three classification which Hannah Arendt uses: Labour, Work and Action. I find it very interesting that he does it this way and I'll use them to relate to my SL character.

Labour
According to the author, it is actually life itself. The spontaneous growth, metabolism and eventual decay of the human body. No then, "Labour" doesn't apply to SL. My character in SL will never grow old, he will never decay and he doesn't even have an age. I can stop playing it for one year and log in after that only to find that my character is still the same as before, and he's on the same spot the last time I logged out one year ago.



Work
If I'm not wrong, "Work" refers to something which is artificially created that doesn't belong to life. In SL, work will probably be the different ways the players play the game. Selling digital houses?? Finding nice outfits to dress up their avatars? In short, without work, players in SL will just be wondering around and doing nothing. This being a Sandbox game is normal, in a sense that players can choose not to "Work" since there is no leveling and no disadvantages.



Action
Referring to activities that goes on directly between men without any extra matters or so. This perhaps can relate to SL's interaction between players?? The chat function is there and players can just log into the game and find friends which they can purely hang out in the virtual world. I've seen NUS students just log into the NUS island in SL, basically do nothing and just "park" there and wait for fellow students to log in and chat with them. Whatever the reason they do that I have no idea. Perhaps they are treating it as a 3-dimensional MSN?



Immortality is also another thing mentioned. Like I've discussed in my previous blogpost about Mimicry, I find that players in SL are sort of seeking a form of immortality which they can't achieve in real life. They can feel powerful and high desired in SL, but then it may not be the same in reality. It is much easier to attain immortality within the game than reality.


With this, I'll like to come up with a discussion question. And that is what has all these philosophical stuffs got to do with the gaming world? Why must we go in so deeply on something that is so simple and supposedly enjoyable?



No idea, toughest reading ever.

Agon . Alea . Mimicry . Ilinx . Paidia . Ludus

Looking at the age of the reading, I'm glad that I'm able to at least relate to a new age game like Second Life. So Callois basically categorized games into four different groups, and each game by itself has some portions of Ludus n Paidia.

After playing SL, I can see that it falls into more than one category stated above. I shall now zoom into each category and further analyze how does SL falls under it.

Agon(Competition)
Eventhough SL is sort of like an open-ended game with no specific target/goal to achieve, there is still intense competitions among players themselves. What kind of competition will depend on what the player intends to achieve in the game. To be the most beautiful? To possess the most amount of land? To be the richest? To have the most amount of high value possessions(house)? All these can be classified under Agon since every player is trying to outdo and outplay each other in the same aspect.




Mimicry(Simulation)
I think SL falls under mimicry the most. It's almost like the definition of Second Life that maybe SL can rename itself as Mimicry. Usually players in SL will try to be a person which they can never be in reality, which is why it's called Second Life. A fat man can portray himself in SL as a hunky and well dressed character. He can have a car, a nice house and many admirers in the game, which in actual fact is a dream for him in reality. He wants to be that, but is not able to achieve his dream in reality, thus making use of SL to "fill in the gaps". It is the fastest, easiest and surest way to get what he wants, and he can even customize everything according to his choice. He has total control over everything, an aspect in reality which is not totally possible.




Alea(Chance)
I don't really know if this is considered as chance, but a player needs some form of luck too. For example a property seller in the game who sells beautiful in-game houses. He's gonna need some luck to find willing buyers and also characters who will chance upon his houses and take a look at them. This is especially tough when SL is a very big game with many places to teleport to.



Paidia vs Ludus
Of course, being a Sandbox game, Paidia will be the dominating aspect of the game with lesser influence of Ludus in it. There is absolutely no restriction on what you wanna do in SL. You can choose to play the game anyway you like, some examples were already stated above. You explore an open virtual world which mimics the real world. You can play the game alone, or collaborate with other players to achieve your goals within the game. However, it is not exactly 100% open. What the character can do is limited by what the game developer allows the character to do. There are only a set of programmed functions which one can do in the game. Example, one can't kill another character because this function is not coded into the game. This is the Ludus part, when things are more controlled and rigid.

What keeps the player in the game is the Paidia part. I can't stop myself from exploring more places and see what's nice in them. SL is so big that I haven't seen any houses that is of the same deisgn architecture. I get to meet different players from different parts of the world too. I guess this is wha keeps SL going strong even though there isn't any concrete agenda in the game.



So, is Paidia or Ludus based games more addictive?

Second Life

I've chosen a Sandbox game called Second Life as the game to explore. Second Life (SL) is a virtual developed by Linden Lab that launched on June 23, 2003. Although it has been almost 7years old, I've only been onto this platform less than 5 times. Previous trials were due to school work when virtual lectures were held in the NUS island.

This time round, I've ventured into the "real world" to explore and interact with many other players as well as different islands. Basic navigation within the game is pretty easy, with walking and flying as the main form of travelling accompanied by the directional arrow keys. What ever interaction needed can be done using the buttons of a mouse.

My initial starting place was "Help Island". I could see many other players as well as helping boards. However, when I teleported to another place after a few clicks, I realised I was all alone in a huge island. Loading of the graphics is slow and as I fly through some parts of the island, what seems to be empty land slowly get loaded with features like houses and other buildings.

What amazes me is how beautiful those architectures are. So pretty that I feel like owning one myself in the game.




So, are such properties in Second Life considered as a form of goods? Though intangible, it's still an element in the game which needs money to buy, which is $Linden, a form of in-game currency in Second Life. As of now, I still have $L0 and I still have no idea how do I earn money to buy things. The only way that I've heard of is to use real world money, US dollar, to exchange into $Linden. I find it almost ridiculous to use real money in exchange of digital goods which in actual fact are just bits of 1s and 0s.



I also wonder who are the creators of these content. Because the architectures are so unique and different that it seems almost impossible for Linden Lab to create all of them by themselves. Is the community allowed to create their own content too? Something like The Sims by Will Wright? If so, is this a good way to earn $L? Creating your own content and selling to the other players for $L, which you can exchange back to US$. Can this be a motivation for playing the game?

I lost my way through the huge island and had no choice but to teleport to "home" through the menu. It didn't take me back to Help Island, and I ended up in some random place with a few other players. Then I got approached by a player who asked for directions back to Help Island. After telling him I have no idea, his reply was "Fuck you" before flying away. It makes me wonder how is this world in Second Life ruled/governed.

What I like about this game is its resemblance to real life; buying properties, possessions etc etc After staying in the game for a long while, the sky even turned dark into night time. It gives me as a player a sense of reality. Suddenly, it didn't quite feel as much that it is actually a game.

What is lacking now is the motivation to carry on playing this game. Being a Sandbox game with no absolute aim like goal based games, one has to set himself a target or goal to achieve, or else the interest may die off very soon. One motivation I have already mentioned earlier, which is creating content to be sold in the game.

Is it feasible? Will it cause the player to become a WORKER instead of a PLAYER like what Callois mentioned? Will a player who plays to earn money become a WORKER for sure? How about a player who actually enjoys the game a lot but only just making use of his joy in the game as an earning tool? Is it possible?