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Games and role-playing are as ancient as Mankind. Rome's state-sponsoredlethal public games may have accounted for up to one fifth of its GDP. Theyoften lasted for months. Historical re-enactments, sports events, chess -are all manifestations of Man's insatiable desire to be someone else,somewhere else - and to learn from the experience.Last week, Jeff Harrow, in his influential and eponymous "Harrow TechnologyReport", analyzed the economics of Massively Multiplayer Online Role PlayingGames (MMORPG). These are 3-D games which take place in comprehensively andminutely constructed environments - a medieval kingdom being the favorite."Gamers" use action figures known as avatars to represent themselves. Theseanimated figurines walk, talk, emote, and are surprisingly versatile.Harrow quoted this passage from Internetnews.com regarding Sony's (actually,Verant's) "EverQuest". It is a massive MMORPG with almost half a millionusers - each paying c. $13 a month:"(Norrath, EverQuest's ersatz world is) ... the 77th largest economy in the[real] world! [It] has a gross national product per capita of $2,266, makingits economy larger than either the Chinese or Indian economy and roughlycomparable to Russia's economy".In his above quoted paper, "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Marketand Society on the Cyberian Frontier", Professor Edward Castronova, fromCalifornia State University at Fullerton, notes that:"The nominal hourly wage (in Norrath) is about USD 3.42 per hour, and thelabors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that ofRussia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath's currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy ischaracterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive tomany."Players - in contravention of the game's rules - also trade in EverQuestparaphernalia and characters offline. The online auction Web site, eBay, isflooded with them and people pay real money - sometimes up to a thousanddollars - for avatars and their possessions. Auxiliary and surrogateindustries sprang around EverQuest and its ilk. There are, for instance,"macroing" programs that emulate the actions of a real-life player - ano-no.Nor is EverQuest the largest. The Korean MMORPG "Lineage" boasts astaggering 2.5 million subscribers.The economies of these immersive faux realms suffer from very real woes,though. In its May 28 issue, "The New Yorker" recounted the story ofBritannia, one of the nether kingdoms of the Internet:"The kingdom, which is stuck somewhere between the sixth and the twelfthcenturies, has a single unit of currency, a gold piece that looks a littlelike a biscuit. A network of servers is supposed to keep track of all thegold, just as it keeps track of everything else on the island, but in late1997 bands of counterfeiters found a bug that allowed them to reproduce goldpieces more or less at will.The fantastic wealth they produced for themselves was, of course, entirelyimaginary, and yet it led, in textbook fashion, to hyperinflation. At theworst point in the crisis, Britannia's monetary system virtually collapsed,and players all over the kingdom were reduced to bartering."Britannia - run by Ultima Online - has 250,000 "denizens", each charged c.$10 a month. An average Britannian spends 13 hours a week in the simulateddemesne. For many, this constitutes their main social interaction.Psychologists warn against the addictive qualities of this recreation.Others regard these diversions as colossal - though inadvertent - socialexperiments. If so, they bode ill - they are all infested with virtualcrime, counterfeiting, hoarding, xenophobia, racism, and all manner ofperversions.Subscriptions are not the only mode of payment. Early multi-user dungeons(MUD) - another type of MMORPG - used to charge by the hour. Some users weresaid to run bills of hundreds of dollars a month.MMORPG's require massive upfront investments - so hitherto, they constitutea tiny fraction of the booming video and PC gaming businesses. With combinedannual revenues of c. $9 billion, these trades are 10 percent bigger thanthe film industry - and half as lucrative as the home video market. They arefast closing on music retail sales.As games become graphically-lavish and more interactive, their popularitywill increase. Offline and online single-player and multi-player videogaming may be converging. Both Sony and Microsoft intend to Internet-enabletheir game consoles later this year. The currently clandestine universe ofgeeks and eccentrics - online, multi-player, games - may yet become a massphenomena.Moreover, MMORPG can be greatly enhanced - and expensive downtime greatlyreduced - with distributed computing - the sharing of idle resourcesworldwide to perform calculations within ad hoc self-assembling computernetworks. Such collaboration forms the core of, arguably, the newarchitecture of the Internet known as "The Grid". Companies such as IBM andButterfly are already developing the requisite technologies.According to an IBM-Butterfly press release:"The Butterfly Grid T could enable online video game providers to support amassive number of players (a few millions) (simultaneously) within the samegame by allocating computing resources to the most populated areas and mostpopular games."The differences between video games and other forms of entertainment may beeroding. Hollywood films are actually a form of MMORPG's - simultaneouslywatched by thousands worldwide. Video games are interactive - while moviesare passive but even this distinction may fall prey to Web films andinteractive TV.As real-life actors and pop idols are - ever so gradually - replaced byelectronic avatars, video games will come to occupy the driver seat in ahost of hitherto disparate industries. Movies may first be released as videogames - rather than conversely. Original music written for the games will bepublished as "sound tracks".Gamers will move seamlessly from their PDA to their PC, to their home cinemasystem, and back to their Interactive TV. Game consoles - alreadycomputational marvels - may finally succeed where PC's failed: to transformthe face of entertainment.Jeff Harrow aptly concludes:" ... History teaches me that games tend to drive the mass adoption oftechnologies that then become commonplace and find their way into"business." Examples include color monitors, higher-resolution andhardware-accelerated graphics, sound cards, and more. And in the case ofthese MMORPG games, I believe that they will eventually morph into effectivevirtual business venues for meetings, trade shows, and more. Don't ignorewhat's behind (and ahead for) these "games," just because they're games..." Article Tags: Video Games