A first-hand account of market and society--Paper代写范文

Paper代写范文:“A first-hand account of market and society”，这篇论文主要描述的是随着科学技术的不断发展，人们开始用技术模拟出一个新的世界，例如一间瑞典的私人公司宣称希望能够打造出专属于虚拟化购物的网络接口，使得人们能够加入虚拟化的世界当中，并且能够在虚拟的商店中使用信用卡进行交易，并得出虚拟世界有着非常大的商业发展潜力的结论。

Journal entry, 18 April. I have called my avatar 'Alaniel.' I land in Norrath for the first time, in a town called Freeport. I am standing in a stone courtyard behind a gate. I see several lean-tos and a firepit. All around I hear the sounds of footsteps and I see humanoids of various shapes and sizes running back and forth, names like "Zikon" and

"Sefirooth" over their heads, wearing odd costumes, carrying strange implements. Are they people? Or merely beings created by the software? Statements flow into my chat box at a rapid rate. "Galadriel shouts: Looking for bind at gate." I see a being with the name Galadriel. Is he talking to me? What is he saying? "Friitz says out of character: brt - omwb." What? No sign of anyone named Friitz. "Ikillu auctions: WTS bone chips." An auction. What should I do? I feel the presence of humanity, but I suddenly feel like a

stranger in a very foreign culture. I become afraid of breaking some taboo, of making a fool of myself. Clumsily, I maneuver Alaniel toward the nearest lean-to and hide behind it. No one can see me here.

On March 16, 1999, Verant Interactive, a holding of Sony, launched an on-line computer game called Everquest on five servers in San Diego, California, USA.1 With that act the company called into existence a new world named "Norrath" that has become a meeting place, a market place, and even a home, to tens of thousands of people. This paper offers a first-hand look at the people, the customs, and especially the economy of this New World.

Why bother? Isn't Norrath just part of a silly game? Perhaps it is, on an abstract level. But economists believe that it is the practical actions of people, and not abstract arguments, that determine the social value of things. One does not study the labor market because work is holy and ethical; one does it because the conditions of work mean a great deal to a large number of ordinary people. By the same reasoning, economists and other social scientists will become more interested in Norrath and similar virtual worlds as they realize that such places have begun to mean a great deal to large numbers of ordinary people. Almost 1 million people already have active accounts in Virtual Worlds. At atime when many ecommerce concerns are going under, revenues from on-line gaming will grow to over $1.5 billion in 2004. Some 60,000 people visit Norrath in any given hour, paying for the privilege, around the clock, every day, year-round. Nearly a third of the adults among them – perhaps some 93,000 people out of Norrath's 400,000 person user base – spend more time in Norrath in a typical week than they do working for pay. The exchange rate between Norrath's currency and the US dollar is determined in a highly liquid (if illegal) currency market, and its value exceeds that of the Japanese Yen and the Italian Lira. The creation of dollar-valued items in Norrath occurs at a rate such that Norrath's GNP per capita easily exceeds that of dozens of countries, including India and China. Some 20 percent of Norrath's citizens consider it their place of residence; they just commute to Earth and back. To a large and growing number of people, virtual worlds are an important source of material and emotional well-being. Virtual worlds may also be the future of ecommerce, and perhaps of the internet itself. The game designers who created thriving places like Norrath have unwittingly discovered a much more attractive way to use the internet: through an avatar. The avatar represents the user in the fantasy 3D world, and avatars apparently come to occupy a special place in the hearts of their creators. The typical user devotes hundreds of hours (and hundreds of dollars, in some cases) to develop the avatar. These ordinary people, who seem to have become bored and frustrated by ordinary web commerce, engage energetically and enthusiastically in avatar-based on-line markets. Few people are willing to go web shopping for tires for their car, but hundreds of thousands are willing to go virtual shopping for shoes for their avatar.

The business potential of this interest in avatar shopping is not lost on everyone. Mindark, a private Swedish company, hopes to use avatar-based shopping to build a global network monopoly in internet interface. The strategy: start a virtual world in a game of truly massive scale, so that millions can use it at any time. Make the game free.

Allow people to use their credit cards to make transactions. Then wait for the society and markets to develop, and invite Earth retailers to open 3D stores in the virtual space. At that point, your Lara Croft lookalike avatar will be able to follow up her tough day of adventuring with a run into the nearby virtual JC Penney -- to buy her owner a new suit,

for real money. The commercial potential of the new virtual worlds is impressive, and makes them well worth a first look.

In the past, the discovery of new worlds has often been an epochal event for both the new world and the old. The new world typical has a herald, a hapless explorer who has gotten lost and has wandered aimlessly about in strange territory, but has had the wit and good fortune to write down what he has seen, his impressions of the people, and the exciting dangers he has faced, for an audience far away. In similar fashion, I stumbled haplessly into Norrath in April 2001, and then spent four months wandering around there. It took me about six weeks to get my bearings. I began recording data in May. And I assure you, I faced many dangers, and died many, many times, in order to gather impressions and bring them back for you. In the end I have been able to include only a small fraction of what I have learned, indeed only enough to give a flavor of what is happening. I apologize to readers who find that I have left out something of great importance.

My report is structured as follows. Section II, below, describes the universe of virtual worlds of which Norrath is a member, and gives an overview of the economic and social impact these worlds have already generated. Section III, focusing on Norrath alone, describes the organization of society and economy and provides some indicators of macroeconomic health, such as the exchange rate, the inflation rate, GNP per capita, and the poverty rate. Finally, Section IV sketches the forseeable near-term future of virtual worlds, with some thoughts on the broader implications of virtual worlds for everyday human life. Appendices containing technical material an be found in a longer version of the paper available in Volume 2 of the Gruter Institute Working Papers on Law, Economics, and Evolutionary Biology .

For those interested in doing research on Norrath, that paper also offers a list of potential projects that came to mind during my tour. They made a town and an open field and let users manipulate the environment by issuing keyboard and mouse commands to a graphical representation of themselves. This virtual persona, now known as an 'avatar,' could be told to walk here and there, pick up a sword, look behind a bush, and hit whatever was there. 3 To make things interesting, you could chat with others, and there were biots in the world: computer-driven beings, also known as mobile objects or MOBS. In essence, biots were either monsters who would attack and kill an avatar on sight, or merchants who would talk to the avatar from a script and buy and sell things.4 Given the circumstances presented by the objective functions of the biots, the avatar's survival and success depended on its ability to deal with merchants and defend itself from monsters. The avatar could join with other avatars to kill powerful monsters, and loot the corpse to become the new owner of whatever the monster held. Items could be traded back and forth between avatars. All of these events unfolded on the user's computer screen like a moving picture, and communication went back and forth via text-based messages. When the user left the world and came back hours later, their avatar was returned to the spot they left, still possessing whatever she had held before. M59 made its debut in October 1996 and survived until August 2000, when competitive pressure from much larger VWs forced its closure. At its closing, hundreds of people mourned its loss. They felt that theworld had been a significant part of their lives in the few years it had existed. People had made friends there and were loathe to leave.5 M59 was quite small by contemporary standards; current VWs can support several thousand users simultaneously on a single server. The first VW on this scale was Ultima Online (UO), launched in Fall 1997. UO is owned by Electronic Arts, a California-based publicly-traded software company with 3,600 employees and $1.3 billion in annual revenues.6 Its popularity led to the development of other VWs, especially Sony/Verant Interactive's Everquest, launched in Spring 1999 and now the industry leader in terms of subscriptions. Everquest undergoes its third major expansion in December 2001. Microsoft entered the competition in Spring 2000 with Asheron's Call. Recent new competitors include Anarchy Online, released in June 2001 by Funcom, a 120-employee Norwegian company, and Dark Age of Camelot, by Mythic Entertainment, a small Washington DC company. The first VW not based on killing and adventuring will appear in 2002, when Electronic Arts releases The Sims Online.

The market is quite competitive at the moment, but since VWs are human networks, there is reason to believe that only a few VWs will eventually dominate the

market.7 The tendency to network monopoly is enhanced by the fact that most people seem to be willing to "live" in at most one fantasy world at a time, and switching is costly as it can take weeks to become familiar with a new world. The growth in the number of VWs has been spurred by a growth in user base and revenues; VWs stand out as one area of internet commerce that actually seems to be profitable. With most software game titles, the user pays a one-time fee to purchase the game. With VW-based games, the user purchases the game software and then pays additional monthly fees (from $10 to $20) to access the VW on an ongoing basis. This revenue stream seems to be stable and growing. While most firms do not publish these figures regularly, there are estimates from March 2001 putting the combined subscriber base for VWs at about 800,000, 360,000 subscribing to Everquest and another 230,000 to UO (Harris, 2001; Zito, 2001). By late summer 2001 the subscriber base to Everquest

was said to be over 400,000 (according to off-hand remarks by developers on discussion boards), a growth of over 10 percent in two quarters. And this is for a computer game that is ancient by industry standards, already over two years old. Sony's monthly revenues from Everquest are about $3.6 million; revenues from online gaming were $208 million in 2000 and are estimated to grow to $1.7 billion in 2004 (Zito, 2001).8 A site maintained by VW programmer Patrik Holmsten (hem.passagen.se/ulkis/) estimates that there are currently 18 VWs running and publicly available, with 40 others in development.9 At a time when many ecommerce ventures are struggling, VWs have become a flourishing sector of the economy.

The business success of VWs derives from their ability to attract customers who are willing to pay an ongoing fee to visit the world, and that requires VWs to offer a form

of entertainment that is persistently more attractive than the competition. As it turns out, VWs seem to be able to offer entertainment that is attractive enough to many people that they sacrifice major portions of their time to it. A survey of Everquest users conducted by Nicholas Yee, an undergraduate psychology major at Haverford College, indicates that the typical user spends about 22 hours per week in the game (Yee, 2001). My own survey of Everquest users (see Section III below) indicates that the median user devotes 4 hours per day and more than 20 hours per week to the game. In Yee's study, many people used the term 'addiction' to describe their own behavior, perceiving their time in the VW as a source of serious conflict with various Earth activities and relationships.10 If we take the economist's view, however, and see their behavior as rational choice, we must conclude that VWs offer something that is perhaps a bit more than a mere entertainment to which the players have become addicted. Rather, they offer an alternative reality, a different country in which one can live most of one's life if one so chooses. And it so happens that life in a VW is extremely attractive to many people. A competition has arisen between Earth and the virtual worlds, and for many, Earth is the lesser option. What features of the virtual worlds give them this competitive edge? An overview of the conditions of existence in VWs will provide some obvious answers. To enter a VW, the user is first connected to the server via the internet. Once the connection is established, the user enters a program that allows them to choose an avatar for themselves. In all of the major VWs, one can spent an extraordinarily long time at this first stage, choosing the appearance of the avatar as well as its abilities. Always wondered what it is like to be tall? Choose a tall avatar. Want to be one of the smart people in society? Make your avatar a brilliant wizard. Need to get out your aggressions? Give your avatar immense strength and a high skill in wielding a mace. Think it would be fun to be a beautiful dark-skinned woman? Go for it. These choices occur under a budget constraint that ensures equality of opportunity in the world: Your mace-wielding ogre will be dumb, and your brilliant wizard will have a glass jaw. At the same time, the budget constraint ensures equality among avatars along dimensions that most people think should not matter for social achievement. In particular, male and female avatars have the same initial budget of skills and attributes. Avatars whose physical characteristics (i.e. skin tone, size) are associated with any benefit in the game must accept some compensating disadvantage. Any inequality in the VW can only be due to one of two things: a) a person's choices when creating the avatar, or b) their subsequent actions in the VW.

Once the avatar is created, it is deposited at some place in the VW. Because most of the laws of Earth science apply, most of the time, it is quite easy to "become" the

avatar as you perceive the world through its eyes. You cannot run through walls; you can only see where you are looking; if you are at Point A and want to get to point B, you will have to walk your avatar in that direction. If you jump off a roof, you will fall and hurt yourself. When the sun goes down, it gets darker and you will need a light. If you do something over and over, you will get better at it. If you hold things, you might drop them; if you drop them, someone else may pick them up. You can give things to another avatar if you wish. You can hit other avatars and biots. You can kill them if you wish. And they can kill you.

Of course the natural laws of Earth need not apply in a world that exists entirely as software, and much of what defines an avatar's uniqueness is its ability to bend or

break some of these laws and not others. Depending on the skills chosen, an avatar might be able to fly, see for miles, hypnotize, heal wounds, teleport themselves, or shoot great flaming fireballs at other avatar's heads. Again a budget constraint applies: those who can heal or hypnotize often have difficulty summoning a fireball worthy of mention. As a result, avatars come to view themselves as specialized agents, much as workers in a developed economy do. The avatar's skills will determine whether the avatar will be a demander or supplier of various goods and services in the VW. Each avatar develops a social role.

Social roles are defined through communication with other avatars. When an avatar is launched into the VW, it is granted a limited ability to communicate with other

avatars. The communication is in the form of a clipped written English ("chat").11 An avatar may approach another avatar, type a message out on the keyboard, and send that, message to the other avatar. Depending on the nature of the laws of sound in the VW, an avatar may also be able to overhear the conversations of others, as well as hold conversations with avatars hundreds of virtual miles away. These communications allow social interactions that are not a simulation of human interactions; they are human interactions, merely extended into a new forum. As with any human society, it is through communication that the VW society confers status and standing.

As it turns out, the social standing of the avatar has a powerful effect on the entertainment value of the VW. Having specialized in certain skills, an avatar may find the accomplishment of certain goals much easier with the assistance of an avatar who has a complementary skill. For example: When traveling from A to B, the monsters must be killed and so skills in destruction are needed; when traveling from B to C, the monsters must be evaded and so skills in deception are needed; when traveling from A to C, one should form a party consisting of a destroyer and a deceiver, rather than travel alone. An avatar who does not form social relationships on at least an ad hoc basis will generally have a more difficult time doing things in the VW. In some VWs, it is a matter of survival – an avatar acting alone will eventually starve or be killed by a biot. These social relationships are essential, and they emerge under the same kinds of circumstances as required in Earth societies: two people with complementary abilities or resources have an incentive to engage in mutually beneficial trade. It follows that an avatar must have skills to do and see much in the world. However, developing the avatar's skills takes time; monsters must be killed, axes must be forged, quests must be completed. The result of all this effort, which can take hundreds of hours, is "avatar capital": an enhancement of the avatar's capabilities through training. In most VWs, capital is given by a number called the "level," so that an avatar at level 6 who kills 100 kobolds is given an increase to level 7. With that increase comes an enhancement of the avatar's abilities, which then makes the avatar a more attractive social contact. In sum, activity in the VW requires social integration, but social integration requires activity: the avatar faces the same sort of social reward systems as are found in Earth society. The leveling and integration system also draws on the basic human tendency to get self-esteem from the opinions of others, and the result is that users are powerfully motivated to increase their avatars' abilities. Like the humans who imbue them, avatars find themselves on something of a treadmill of social success through avatar capital accumulation: they must work to advance, but each advancement raises the aspiration level and spurs them to still greater work (Easterlin, 2001). It is the success and standing of avatar that makes people devote hundreds of hours to virtual worlds, indeed so many hours that one can almost believe that many people do live there, wherever it is, and not on Earth.

The avatar seems so entertaining that it generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue for gaming companies. Why? Certainly, one can understand why many people would prefer existence in a VW to existence in the "real world." Unlike Earth, in VWs there is real equality of opportunity, as everybody is born penniless and with the same minimal effectiveness.12 In a VW, people choose their own abilities, gender, and skin tone instead of having them imposed by accidents of birth. Those who cannot run on Earth can run in a VW. On Earth, reputation sticks to a person; in VWs, an avatar with a bad reputation can be replaced by one who is clean.

Yet VWs are only one of many different ways of constructing an avatar space; other approaches have not had the same commercial success. Before the explosion in VWs, there were a number of virtual reality avatar spaces that offered similar forms of entertainment, for free.13 Users could create their own avatars and chat with other avatars.

They could build rooms and wander about, looking at other people's houses. Some of these user-built avatar spaces became extremely large; Alpha World began as a virtual plain and was built, byte by byte, into a vast city by hundreds of thousands of users (Damer, 2001). There were a number of ways to amuse one's self in these places: one could look around at pretty virtual landscapes, or simply talk to others, or show off your avatar's skills ("Look what happens when I shoot a fireball at my head!"). However, these first generation avatar spaces failed to sustain any interest from private companies; most have folded or are maintained by private contributions (Damer, 2001). Their failure helps identify the source of the success of VWs, because there really is only one major difference between these avatar spaces and VWs: Scarcity. Nothing was scarce in the avatar space. A user could create as many avatars as desired; all avatars had equal abilities; the user could build without limit, as long as the desire to write code persisted. The activities of one avatar posed no real obstacle and imposed no significant cost on any other avatar's activities.

In a VW, conversely, the user faces scarcity along a number of dimensions. First, not all avatars are the same: the user faces constraints on the creation of avatars and, through leveling, on the development of their abilities. An avatar may die, and death may rob it of some or all of its powers. Second, the avatar is constrained by the physicality of the VW in that a large percentage of important goods and services can only be obtained from other avatars or from biots, always at a price or by risking death. No free lunches. Third, the avatar is constrained by society in the VW, in that social roles are not open to everyone; an avatar must compete against other avatars to fill a role. In a sentence, avatars in avatar spaces could do no work and still do anything that any other avatar could do; avatars in VWs must work to do anything interesting at all.

And, somewhat shockingly, scarcity is what makes the VW so fun. The process of developing avatar capital seems to invoke exactly the same risk and reward structures in the brain that are invoked by personal development in real life. The idea is shocking because it seems to suggest that utility and well-being are not the same thing. Utility 17 always rises when constraints are relaxed, yet people seem to prefer a world with constraints to a world without them.14 Constraints create the possibility of achievement, and it is the drive to achieve something with the avatar that seems to create an obsessive interest in her well-being. Moreover, since the VWs are inherently social, the achievements are relative: it is not having powerful weapons that really makes a difference in prestige, but in having the most powerful weapons in the world. In a postindustrial society, it is social status, more than anything else, that drives people to work so diligently all their lives. In this respect, VWs are truly a simulacrum of Earth society.

The impact on Earth society is hard to overestimate. With the development of voice technology, communication in VWs will move from cumbersome chat to telephone-like conversation, thus greatly enhancing the VW as a place of social interaction. Already one can conduct chat-based a2a meetings and classes in places like Norrath, and soon such meetings will not seem much different from actual face-to-face meetings. Telecommuting, which now involves working on the home computer and emailing reports to the boss, will eventually become "going to work" in a virtual office and holding face to face meetings with the avatars of coworkers. Families living thousands of miles apart will meet every day for a few hours in the evening, gathering their avatars around the virtual kitchen table and catching up. And the day of driving to the store may well be over. Earth roads will be empty because, instead of using them, everyone will be sailing across the azure heavens on their flying purple horses, to shimmering virtual Walmarts in the sky.

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