Online Games and their Offline effects.

Online games.

Most people think of MMORPGS, like World of Warcraft, MapleStory and such. A game where you can play in a persistent online world with a community that lives and breathes around the world. A game, which, by its best definition, means an activity that is structured or semi-structured, usually played just for fun or education.

However, when online games cross over into offline life, or ‘RL (Real Life)’ as some online gamers put it, things start to get a little complicated. For the purposes of this podcast I’m going to only touch on the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) aspect of it, as it affects the growing Singaporean gaming market much more.

I’m mainly concerned with the economy systems of the MMORPG. Most MMOs feature intricate economies, with a crafting system and countless items to barter, sell and buy. This means that most games have many players buying and selling items and exchanging the in-game currency very often. A good example of this kind of economy is the World of Warcraft economy, where there are many items one can sell on the Auction houses of the various cities. However, there is a dark side to the simulated economy.

Namely, gold-farmers.

There are third parties who make money off earning in-game currency and selling it off online – this is illegal in most all online games, especially those in North America and Europe. Gold-sellers as they are called are notorious in these games, as people who ‘ninja’, or steal rare items while in teams, to sell them off in a trade at an exorbitant price.

They also are said to ‘farm mobs’, or kill enemies over and over again in a single spot for money, and most of them are fiercely territorial of their item-farming spots, taking great pains to dissuade others from coming into their spot by killing the players over and over, as well as getting a lot of monsters to attack the players.

They are generally regarded as menaces, and by proxy so are the people who buy the gold they sell. Still, they are a prevalent ‘black market’ economy, and still plague the online game scene as long as economy systems – and gullible people – are present. A good example of this kind of website, although I do not at all support them, is IGE.com.

Then, there are scammers.

Con-men exist in online games as well, as people who employ age-old conning techniques to sucker people into giving them their hard-earned online currency. However, since it’s a game, it should not matter much when no real money changes hands, right?

It all depends on which game and how much they’re scamming people out of. Recently in EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online space-faring game, two such scams have stolen a lot, and I mean a lot, of money. The first one less a ‘scam’ and more… well, as quoted by a PCGamer article, ‘an act of despicable brilliance’. It involved a corporation – which is an equivalent of a guild or clan in EVE Online – called the Guiding Hand Social Club, whose specialty is ‘assassination to order’. They were paid to kill a particular target… and this target is a high-ranking CEO of another Company, Ubiqua Seraph. The CEO of a very wealthy and powerful corporation, Mirial, was hard to get to. So what did they do?

They infiltrated the corporation.

Over a year, they joined the corporation, gaining the trust of the members and eventually, one of the infiltrators, Arenis Xemdal, managed to gain the trust of the CEO herself. And then, finally, at 18 April, 2005, 5am server-time, Mirial was alone with the double-agent. They exited a stargate – which is equivalent to the entrance to a new star system, and met a known Guiding Hand operative named Uuve Savisaalo.

An hour later, everything was over.

Every Ubiqua Seraph office was raided, the hangers of all of them practically bare, and the CEO’s battleship was destroyed, her pod (which meant pretty much the character itself) blown up and the frozen corpse taken away as proof of their deed. The assassination was done. And the Guiding Hand found themselves staring at 30 Billion ISK(The ingame money) in gains from the hangar thefts. 30 Billion ISK equates to about US$16,500 (This is a rough estimate – people cannot actually sell the ISK for real money, as it is illegal, but this is going by the black market price that most people have been quoting.) All that money and they didn’t even break character. A scan of a PCGamer article that details the raid and assassination is found here.

A beautifully-executed virtual crime. And unfortunately for Ubiqua Seraph, the Developers of EVE Online won’t do anything about it. After all, it’s just business. This sparked a lot of heated debates on the ramifications of such an audacious raid, but as it stands, the Developers don’t look like they’re moving from their decision any time soon.

They also stood by their decision for the next less interesting but involving much, much more currency. The next scam is a normal scam, called a Ponzi scam. Basically, this character called Cally goes around and advertises a corporation called the Eve Intergalactic Bank, where people can ‘deposit’ money and withdraw it at a later date with interest. Of course, many people are interested in this, and soon it starts ballooning… and ballooning… and then suddenly, Cally disappears, along with a whopping 700 billion ISK.

Alright, think about that. 30 billion ISK is about US$16,500. 700 billion ISK is about… US$330,000, thereabouts? That’s a whole lot of money, and it left Cally and the real face of Cally – Dentara Rast, a notorious pirate in the game – very, very rich. There’s even talk of him possibly selling the money for real money, but so far the Developers have been monitoring his activities, so he’s done nothing wrong, so far as the developers are concerned. However, the scammed players are understandably unhappy.

Again this sparked another ‘Is this kind of thing right or wrong’ argument, with many wanting CCP, the developers, to do something about the scam, but yet again the aforementioned decision still stood – that it was a virtual scam, and it had nothing to do with them.

This is the video made by the man himself, Dentara Rast, and his confession to his crime.

Now, in this society where the line between virtual currency and real, physical currency starts to blur, how would one mark the line between a ‘virtual crime’ and a real crime?

What do the plebes think?