What experiences engage RMTs with their subjectivity?

How fantastic RSS feed, I must say. I paste RSS feed of a number of popular game research blogs onto my blog and I am updated of the latest buzz in the game researchers circle. Fantastic.

This particular blog post from the Virtual Economy Research Network is about real money trade in MMOG (click on the pic to read the post). And there is a nice piece of article in the Guardian about people who earn a living from playing. A good read.

Anyway, I didn't know that there is going to be a documentary on real money trade coming up soon. Awesome. I know of no researcher who is able to get real money traders to share their trade and so the documentary is something game researchers will be looking forward to. It manages to interview the organizer of RMT (the big boss), people who work for him and the person who creates bots and now wrangling in a court case with Blizzard. The documentary is called Play Money and below is the excerpt what the documentary is all about taken from its website.

" Deep within a digital underworld - a parallel universe composed of ones and zeros where warlocks, wizards, and warriors roam - a secret lies: multi-million dollar economies. Economies where real money meets "play money."

Gamers spend vast amounts of time inside these online playgrounds, developing their characters by acquiring weapons, armor, trinkets, and gold. These virtual goods are used to make their characters more powerful and ultimately more competitive in the virtual world they inhabit. But some gamers don't have the months and years it takes to obtain these goods. Fortunately for them, it is now possible to spend hard-earned cash on the virtual gold and goods that help them obtain the power and status they seek.

The real-world economic opportunities these virtual worlds offer can translate into salaries that many can only dream of making. With a team of workers playing MMO's (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) around the clock, individuals and companies can rapidly earn the coveted virtual items, in turn selling them online to gamers who don't have enough time to acquire them.

But is it so simple?

Play Money explores the complex world of virtual property, the business of real money trade, and the question that blurs the line between the virtual and the real. "

My feelings about RMTs in Granado Espada is mixed. I started hating them at first and I hunted them down in maps where they are most popular to bot. It is so easy to recognize them by their family names and the characters they use. They have this "jumble-up alphabets" names created out of convenience (by typing without looking) like "ahdghad" or "jdajahad". They usually play with at least a high level musketeer and never did I see any of them belonging to a faction before. Once one of them managed to infiltrate into my faction. I guess he did so to prevent being tracked down by the game developer (IAH) or to have a affiliation with a faction as a cover up for his activities. I was so distress when I found it out and ranted out verbal abuse on him while we were on different maps. Eventually I got the faction leader to kick him out.

Then I became more tolerant and saw the importance of the services they provide. On a few occasions I bought vis (in-game currency) from them with real money. To my surprise the transaction was so easy - go to their website, chat with one who man their chat room your intention, do a fund transfer, go to the chat room again to update, meet someone in the Cite of Reblouex in the game (that city is littered with RMTs when I first play the game), follow him to one remote corner of a building where no one is there and he will drop you elemental jewels (EJs) for you to pick up based on the vis you have ordere . Each EJ sells at 10 millions vis. They do not carry a lot of vis in their account in fear fo being tracked as RMTs and have their account banned by IAH.

Things in Granado Espada were so exorbitant in prices because people sells things in the millions and billions (even for stuff I would consider craps). Crazy! To catch up, you have no choice but to engage the RMTs. There were reactions from IAH and players. IAH keeps up with new patches with each new version of the game to make bots and macros useless. But new bots and macros keep on coming up and share among players within hours of the launch of new version of the game. It was only recently that IAH managed to do something more productively with the patch that hit botters and macro users hard. I hardly see any RMTs these days and the prices of items drop so much now that I regret spending all the vis I bought from RMTs in the past. While RMTs services is welcome for those who hardly have time to hunt, they are the reason for inflation in the game all these while for they provide easy access to vis. In my recent visit to their website, I discover that you get a lot less vis as compared to the past for the same price. 100m vis used to cost 3 Singapore dollars (SGD) before but now it costs SGD 9. Wow! 3-fold increase.

Interestingly, some players work independently or organize themselves in a group in trying to maintain a strict non-botting and non-macroing environment in the game. They do so by tracking down botters and macro users and report them. They shame these "offenders" by posting pic of the report (in red rectangle in left pic) in their group forum. I can say that this group of "virtual policemen" is well disliked by many gamers for whatever benefits they claim the community reaps from their effort.

Anyway, what I am most interested about is what kind of stories would RMTs get from playing. RMTs play for a living and I am refering to people who work for the big boss. I am assuming that the big boss is less likely to spend his time hunting for drops and loots because his business looks over not a few but many MMOGs and so I picture him as someone who keep an overall picture not by playing, but by having runners reporting to him. These runners (RMTs) are people who work for him and hunt drops and loots for salary. How would they read the game? Is there a difference since they are playing not purely for the joy, but instead to earn a living? What kind of conversations would their work enable them to take back? Would different motivations of play engender different conversations?

If life is a game, what kind of conversations do we bring back from our work place? Well, we likely share memorable incidents at work with our family and friends. Incidents becomes memorable if they afford us learning to do our work better or when they allow us, in Loyers's word, "dynamic experiences of subjectivity, affect, and emotion". These incidents revolve within the sphere of the community in our working environment. So RMT's could share about tips and tricks how to overcome challenges they face in their work (like how to deal with verbal abuses and grief play from other players). Or they could share moments in the course of their work that effect their emotion and affective domains. I wonder what kind of experience will engage them in a dialogue with their subjectivity. Do they think about subjectivity? They probably should. There must be grey areas that cause them to confront their beliefs and worldview. What could be these experiences be for them? Hmm...interesting thoughts.

Anyway, it seems that I cannot stay away from "learning" as another keyword in my literature review search. Let's see..."learning +mmog or mmorpg". Oh....it's only 396 articles. Manageable.