Gaming+and+Web+2.0

Gregory L. Dewar CIS125W Final Project Michael Gray, INS. 09-02-12

=How gaming has helped to evolve and engender Web 2.0 through the use of model economies=

From the very beginning, video gaming has yearned for the things that we now consider Web 2.0, i.e. heightened levels of user interactivity, user-created and shared content, and the ability to enjoy things in turn-based (tumblr) or real-time (twitter) with other human beings. After all, we're a social species.

Many imagined the gamer the lone nerd on the fringes of society, existing without any great social ties, and completely encapsulated in their own little fantasy world. This is simply not true anymore, gaming has exploded in the last decade, and it's all thanks to Web 2.0. It's not uncommon to hear granny trash talking on the latest Xbox frag fest, or dad racing around a track with some kids in Europe.

With the advent of the internet, gamers quickly decided that they wanted to play games against other gamers on the internet, meaning you didn't have to actually have physical friends, or deal with the smell of ones who would come over to play games with you. I'm kidding, well, at least in part. Hygiene was never a gamer priority and with some people it was better to play with over long distances.

There was a growing group of gamers, myself included, that grew bored of fighting other opponents and wanted a more social experience. Co-operative games were created, where people could all play together, sometimes in teams vs. other players and sometimes cooperatively against the computer.

As the power of the internet grew from slow modems such as 28.8Kbps all the way up to a whopping 56Kbps, we saw an exponential increase in user content. It wasn't enough to just play a game with someone in Seoul, you could make your own custom map, your own custom music, your own custom player look, feel, and even modified versions of the original game— all to share and play with someone in Seoul. If that doesn't sound like Web 2.0, then I don't know what is.

Gaming shifted again when the MMORPG was invented (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, 'MMO' for short.), a system in which you played one character among millions and interacted with the rest of the world, whether you were cooperating or opposing. Unfortunately, there's no room for user-created content in a traditional MMO, so what users do create is supply and demand. As the games evolve, certain items, zones, crafting skills, crafting materials, dungeons, and player traits evolve to be superior than others, sometimes much to the dismay of game developers.

Being thoughtful, of course, and wanting to continually stimulate player interest, they put in a fully functioning economic network, with infinite generation of tradeable money and items from vendor NPCs (the guy in the potion shop that sells you Witch Root so you can make mana potions, for instance). This places the game at a point where players will perform services and craft for one another for money, but usually you can't buy a whole lot. They also have a limited trading system between two players which can become cumbersome and makes buying/selling a tedious experience. Some games will let you buy truly amazing items for grandiose sums of money, others you have to find them out in the game world. For this second set of games, it's insanely important that you have an auction house. This allows players to raid dungeons, farm crafting materials, and load up on whatever else they garner in their travels and put it all for sale automatically, so they don't have to stop adventuring to stand around in town and bark at other players. Other players can then bid or buy without having to deal with the person selling (sometimes a great boon to a commercial transaction). At this point, the issue of what the money is actually worth and how much you are willing ot risk comes into account. GamaSutra, a gaming blog site, has a good examination of the early trading system in a game called "Asheron's Call" and how it evolved into a full-fledged economy as I'll explain in the next paragraph.



From this point economies start to emerge and rapidly develop. Prices depend on how rare things are, coupled with how hard they are to get. Crafting materials tend to create their own markets, crafters want to buy raw resources, and the people that "farm" i.e go around collecting the raw materials, just want gold pieces in their pocket. You'll see entire markets fluctuate up and down depending on how many people are farming, how popular crafted items are (this goes up and down, as well, generally up after new crafting recipes are introduced into the game and then down permanently as inevitably the developers put in a new dungeon with better items than can be crafted. Of course, then they introduce new crafting items in the next patch). Being the numbers nerd that I am, I've spent a lot of time watching the markets in the game, and sometimes playing them. With enough free time you can completely crash a market, or build one up. For instance, you can flood the marketplace with tons of items that are normally expensive, bringing the price down to cheap. Then you could buy out all the stock on the auction house, including your own auctions, and relist them slowly at greater cost to consumers. This is providing that someone else doesn't have the same idea, or isn't also trying to play the market. Price wars do erupt between players who make their money from the same areas/crafting skills. I've known players to crash a market, simply because they get frustrated at the other player and want to run them into another market. It's quite entertaining.



World of Warcraft (WoW) is one example of an economic system, but EVE Online (a space-based MMO, as opposed to medieval fantasy-based WoW) takes it 10 steps further by adding trade routes, local, regional, and intergalactic economies that are all independent of one another, and more. A good, resourceful look at the two can be found here.

What exists at this point is a user-created economy that requires constant user input to be maintained. The users create and sell the items they percieve as having the most value.

Players start creating, trading, and sharing modifications to the game based around economics, with lots of feedback and player input and additions. These modifications tend to create extensive databases that feed into a wiki. One of my favorite modifications is called, simply, auctioneer. It does all the math for you and takes a lot of the guesswork out of buying and selling!

Ah, now you see where this is going. WoWHead is a wiki-based end-user format for this databasing that players are more than happy to feed into while they buy and sell. This tells you everything about the item: Where you can get it, what frequency it occurs at, average prices for various servers of the game, and users can edit and comment on it, sometimes providing tips, finding new places to get the item, or places where it no longer exists. Through all working together this wiki becomes comprehensive and relatively accurate. Capitalism at it's finest.

Of course, there are other mods, and other wikis. WoWWiki uses other mods to track how monsters operate and what items they drop. It's also a user-based wiki that covers everything from sets of rare armor to the history of various prominent (and not so) figures in the game, to the best way to make your way through the hardest dungeon. It contains 96,000 different entries: All player-maintained. You can think of it as one giant communal guidebook or strategy guide for the game.

So, we have this culture of gamers co-operating, sharing content, creating model economic systems, and interacting outside the game on wikis and by other means.

The next logical step is an MMO where you can build the world together. I'm sure you've heard of Minecraft, but if not, it's a multiplayer game, where the sky is the limit. You do have to do some work and earn some resources, but the entire game world is user-generated in each instance. A brand new Minecraft server is just one open book with no writing in it. Players have to build everything they wish to interact with. Of course, a wiki sprung up, and modifications, and a model economy, and co-operative and competitive gameplay and everything in gaming up until that point filtered back in to round out the experience. So, Web 2.0 + Gaming 2.0 = Gaming 4.0. Don't quote me on that, because I've never been particularly good at math.

This presentation is an excellent resource for many of the topics that I've covered. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or space to go into it like this presenter did:

media type="custom" key="20721204"

__Works Cited:__

1.) Ludgate, Simon. "Virtual Economic Theory: How MMOs Really Work." // Gamasutra // . UBM Tech Web, n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .

2.) Last, Justin. "The Two Very Different Approaches to MMO Economies." // Snackbar-Games // . Snackbar Media, n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .

3.) Langlois, Mike. "Minecraft & The Uncanny, Part 2." // Gamer Therapy // . Wordpress, n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .

4.) Alexander, Bryan. "Deepening the Chasm: Web 2.0, Gaming, and Course Management Systems." // MERLOT //// Journal of Online Learning and Teaching // . MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .

5.) Wagner, Mitch. "Web 2.0 Expo: Using Online Gaming Tricks to Increase Audience Engagement." // Information Week // . UBM Tech Web, n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .

6.) Norganna. // Auctioneer Addon // . Vers. 5.14. // Auctioneer Addon for World of Warcraft // . N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .

7.) // WoWhead // . WoWhead/ZAM, n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .

8.) // WoWwiki // . Wikia, n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .

9.) // Minecraft // . Mojang, n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .

10.) Brown, Chris. "MMORPG Economics." // Slideshare // . Slideshare, Inc., n.d. Web. 02 Sept. 2012. .