Actually…

The typical, if not exclusive, method designers use to regulate currency in massively multiplayer games is the so called “the faucet and sink”. Money is created in certain parts of the game usually as a reward to players for defeating enemies or completing missions and it is destroyed elsewhere through attritional or punitive means.
Designers came [...]

Money is created by people. Oddly enough, in our age this is a shocking statement as most people think that governments create money. Governments create currencies but it is the people that give them value. However governments are not the only entities that can create currencies and there are no better examples of this than [...]

I study MMO’s, but I haven’t played many for any substantial period of time. Being a Star Wars geek from way back*, I couldn’t resist playing Star Wars Galaxies. It had its strong points like character and skill systems. But it had its weak points as well like its endless, mindless, and majorly unfun [...]

Virtual worlds hold great promise for the ability to study human behavior and the macro-manifestations of that behavior, economics, sociology, etc. Rich expansive virtual environments give researchers the ability to study humanity in situ which heretofore has been difficult as the act of collecting data in the real world can influence the results. Additionally surveys [...]

I had a conversation today with an avid MMO player about hacks in modern games. I never bothered writing this article because in my opinion it fell into the “Well Duh..” category. Yet when insanely popular games make blunders that were understand decades ago, I feel compelled to point it out.
For example, World of Warcraft [...]

Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist doing ground breaking research in primate, including human, social networks (among other things). In 1992 he published a paper titled “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates” in the Journal of Human Evolution that conclude the maximum size of human social groups is 148 ± 50. Subsequently [...]

Yesterday I began with great hesitation to outline the motivations of players in MMOs. Primal motivations may be the most important is they are addictive and keep players in the game until they can get over the hump into more cerebral endeavors. Wealth in money and items is one such higher order motivation. There [...]

I have been very hesitant about writing this article. In the past I have railed against human personality taxonomies. Examples of such taxonomies are Richard Bartle’s taxonomy of MUD players, Myers Briggs, and (ugh…) shape based personality. When I am being charitable, I describe these systems as conversation starters, but mostly I just call [...]

Recently I was sucked into a brief argument about governance in virtual worlds. Richard Bartle argued that developers were gods to the virtual world and thus could not be governments. He wrote an interesting paper on the subject. Although I have found the deity metaphor useful, I disagree with his conclusions.
First off, I have decide [...]

One of the most interesting though seldom discussed dimensions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s collective works is the role of death. In Tolkien’s world, the elves never aged while the humans grew old and died.
This seeming blessing bestowed on the elves became a curse as it ensured that they would witness countless unspeakable horrors and evils. Also [...]