Sevarus James
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Posted - 2006.01.26 15:09:00 -
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The arguments pro and con regarding the farmers, the sellers, the buyers, and how to deal with them is in and of itself an interesting subject.
To think that a short while back in the real world, a guy named William Gibson wrote about these things, and it was called science fiction.
Now, just a short 'breath' later, and there are lawsuits over virtual ownership of property, arguments about what is right and wrong in the realm of REAL vs. VIRTUAL, and even murder over property that can't be touched, seen, held or looked at outside of a computer CRT.
Interesting from an historical perspective. As was posted previously, the genie is outta the bottle. As we move forward, a thing to remember about persistent worlds...THEY ARE NOT GAMES.
To clarify that. A game yes, in the sense that people log in, using their computers and software to 'have fun'.
A game NO, in that a persistent world continues to evolve and progress with OR without the player being there. In most MMO's.......er, well almost all except EVE, sharding leans the 'world' toward "game", and yet their individual communities make them 'more'.
There will always be the groups of people who come play, get bored and leave, but unlike a true 'game', an MMO such as EVE is much more. If it were JUST that, we'd have it on the shelf next to our freelancer, homeworld, starcraft, and other titles that are played, enjoyed, and then stored.
Eve is a huge and giant and monstrous and (outta ephithets)........leap toward a gibsonian 'space'. It isn't sharded. It doesn't "reset". Its territory is "owned" and contested. The only other 'space' I can think of currently like this is the Linden game Second Life, and due to its 'construct', it has embraced the real world and made it work for the virtual universe.
This doesn't mean that this embrace is correct or right for a place like EVE, but it muddies the waters even further as to who owns what, and further what should or CAN be done to regulate the "real" bleeding into the virtual.
As we progress forward, the lines between what is 'real' and 'virtual' continue to get blurrier.
Avon mentioned true ownership and shutting things down in his post, but if he were to do that, I'm pretty sure that he'd end up in front of a judge somewhere with a ton of lawsuits on his head...and in that future time, the 'space' he'd shut down would be restarted and run by a holding corporation or a governmental agency, as ownership would belong to someone else, namely those players. -just positing what would happen in Avon's 'player-owned' scenario.
I do NOT envy the operators (CCP) this part of MMO's ongoing evolution.
-personal take is that the real needs to stay out of the virtual. The realist in me understands that wish is fantasy in this day and age.
Rod, great post, as usual.
"No power in the 'verse can stop us now!" |