This is basically an extension of my Diablo 2 article. I personally steer clear of MMO games if I can, though I did play World of Warcraft for a free grace period. I have to work through too many games to ever engage in that massive of a time sink. I instead watch people play and chat them up about the game's intricacies.
As micro-transactions continue to flourish in games, I figured I might as well take a stab at trying to explain what could prompt someone to pay money for something that is not real. The psychology of how the value is perceived, how it depreciates in a person's head, and how you stabilize growth. It's all very much Brave New World in application, which is something I wrote a fairly dark spoof on back in my fiction days. In a society where you can buy anything so long as you work at it, providing new things to buy at just the right pace becomes an art.
I wish I could get better stats on all this. All of these companies are tight-fisted with their numbers and Second Life barely qualifies as a legitimate virtual economy because nothing depreciates in value in a traceable way. Soon enough I suppose. Until then,
A Brief Discourse on How You Suck Money Out of A Person Through Game Design
Are you struggling to make ends meet and looking for an additional source of income? Do you worry that, without someone with more trading experience, you can't make it in the financial world?
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