A teen coping with anger in real life can, in a synthetic world, release the anger through rituals of harmless combat and violence, much of it in teams. Such release can be both timely and socially appropriate. These three map to three Bartle categories: Achiever, Socializer, and Killer. What about dehumanized loss? The Bartle type "Explorer" does not fit. I would think that someone suffering from loss, someone who has been prevented by social mores from grieving and feeling sorrow, might be assisted by the right kind of NPC mentoring. There is a hint of this in EQ-type games, as when a warrior returns throughout his career to the same NPCs who started him on his path. Many quests and storylines address loss. More could probably be done with this. We have previously debated the relationship of the person to the avatar. Dan Hunter had a character leveled for him and felt uncomfortable playing it. Nate Combs thinks about the avatar as an intelligent agent. Josh Fairfield wonders about avatars as placeholders for a story.

Tringo has finally shipped for the GBA. While that's cool, this article blew my mind: Yoomedia, a quoted company that runs the Avago channel, unveiled what it hopes could be the next big thing — Tringo, a cross between bingo and Tetris, developed by an Australian software engineer. Yoomedia has the rights to develop the game as a digital-TV format. This made me wonder whether Kermitt Quirk will build special versions that tie into the gameshow. Linking back to the physical / virtual / legal. For some time I’ve been banging on about the nature of identity online. In the past I’ve speculated about virtual identity being just as important as physical identity – for certain commercial and thus legal purposes. Notions of right of publicity applying to avatars just as they might to TV stars and their characters, such as Norm from Cheers (see: Wendt v. Host International, Inc., 197 F.3d 1284 (9th Cir. 1999)), seemed a fancy when I started to argue about their application in this context.

Earlier this week Tony Walsh reported that Second Life servers ground to a halt as self-replicating objects ran amok for seven hours. Furthermore, "unlike previous attacks, the self-replicating objects were scripted to emit shockwaves capable of throwing avatars high into the air." Tony also reported that virtual fire breaks (decoupling servers) were used to stem the tide. Events such as these may point to future troubles for online virtual worlds. Mark Walker asks how to protect future worlds from user-scripted content. Perhaps, however, it is evolutionary...In Troubles with Tribbles the focus there was on the challenge of object concurrency confronting large game simulations. The view there was less about how to introduce new objects into an executing game software (or system) than about how to manage those you will have engineered into the world from the outset. Steven Davis speculates that a challenge confronting this outbreak stems from a (virtual) real-estate view of the world.

Second Life’s Anshe is on fire when it comes to PR. At the same time as s/he graces the cover of Business Week -leading this story on virtual economies, a fight has broken out on wikipedia about whether s/he should even have this entry. I hardly know where to start with the questions that all this raises, so I’ll just list a bunch and you can jump in where you want. First, I think this is more evidence of the WoW Wave that I wrote about a month or so ago. When TerraNova started, virtual currencies were still 'out there'. The fact of Castronova’s paper was as controversial as the content. These days – who has not covered virtual currency? What’s more since writing the blog post the phone and the emails have not slowed down with people from all kinds of odd places suddenly deciding that they need a virtual world and they need it now, but could I please tell them what exactly one is.

Having read Rufa's self-described origins story, I asked the "cyber queen" some questions of my own. The following are excerpts from his answers:"Am I really only attracted to women, i.e. straight? I've got nothing against being attracted to a guy... I've just never met a guy I've been attracted too. I've never said to myself, 'Boy! I sure could go for some cock today,' while I've spent plenty of time agonizing over the fair sex. But can anyone who has spent as much time as I have pretending to be a girl for the sexual gratification of other males really be called straight?...Am I attracted to my own character? Easy one first, yes, I'm always attracted to my own female persona, except for a few cases where someone has asked me to play a certain character for them that I wasn't really into.

Once I'm aroused, I have a tendency toward circular writing and purple prose... What makes me attracted to a guy online? Mostly just the fact that he's got more sex in his head than just 'I really want to fuck Britney Spears!' Things I remember people doing that got them added to the friends list: wanted to eat sushi off a girl, wanted to be anime characters, wanted to do it in a car, wanted me to be his secretary. Of course, everybody has to pass the basic 'coherent sentence' and 'no ur' test. 'For' is three letters, 'your' are four: you may have gained two keystrokes, sir, but you have lost my respect. What female names have I used? Back in the MUD days, when you could set your gender in game, I'd take a neutral name.

The guy who goes out and spends $2000 on platinum (which gets you about 15 million platinum right now, or which got you 4 million platinum a couple months ago). These were the people with lots of money or who just had EQ as their main hobby (we all have one of those money sink hobbies to an extent) and had no qualms about spending such money on a videogame as it was fun for them to do so. Then there were the guilds, or guild officers and leaders who would buy platinum to pay for their guild's armor pieces, or high end players who would buy platinum for rare items like amulet of necropotence, mask of tinkering, blade of carnage, or other things their guild did not actively kill, or which were almost required for individuals to make it in a high end guild as they needed a "taunt weapon" or the like. So anyways, after this great decline, things were very stable for the next year and a half.

Prices on platinum dropped from $75 per 100k in late 2003 to $50 per 100k in mid 2005. I spent more time speaking with other sellers, and more time diversifying how we obtained platinum until the point where we, 8 people, were the sole supplier on 4 post merge servers, for everquest platinum to the big three sellers. There was no reason for them to lie to us about this, of course. They did have other sources of platinum at a rate of about 50k per day from people selling bits and pieces here and there, or they'd get a million from someone now and again, but they did not have the steady flow on the 4 servers from anyone else at all other than us. This was about $500 a day per server, or about $180,000 a year, divided amongst 8 people. It was barely manageable when you factor in health insurance and taxes.

Being in the market as we were, it was quite an obvious move to make when a seller would get some sort of single source supplier who could meet all their needs. This is something which happens in games like World of Warcraft, where one supplier might cover all servers with 400 Chinese employees paid low wages to play the game and farm coin for hours and days at a time at a steady rate. EQ has never had that "problem" and even if so, they would be limited to making platinum in the bazaar, as EQ is not modeled as such that you can make money by farming monster kills and getting plat from NPC vendors. This was not a possibility, as a mass influx of chinese farmers would also be noticed within game, unless they were doing Dragons of Norrath crystals, in which case there is not sufficient market for crystals only, in order to supply what this seller needed.

The general consensus was that this supplier got ahold of a dupe somehow, or they had a supplier who had one. When I say dupe I mean any hack, or macro or any way for someone to get money for nothing in game, and certainly something which is not "available to everyone." We didn't fuss too much about it, though. We adjusted to the prices, kept a watchful eye out for any other issues, and kept up business as usual. Until September / October. This is when the major problems started. Two new sellers appeared on the auction sites. These sellers were unknowns, new accounts who had millions upon millions of platinum for sale across any and all servers at crazy pricing. Their price? $25 per 100k if you haggled a bit with them, and they could give you as much as you wanted. 10 million wasn't an issue. 20 million? not a problem. In addition to these two sellers, old time sellers who had been gone since the last dupe era in 2003, and had not sold platinum since then, suddenly re-opened shop with millions per server.