It used to be that all those virtual realities, those mass-multi-online-player-role-playing-games or as they are called among the proponents of that genre in technical terms, mmoprpg’s, were a place were only total losers went for a living. You know the places, like Second Life, World of Warcraft, EverQuest, were you build yourself an avatar, which is greek and means “person I know I never will be, but that looks and acts cool”, then hang out with other faked people, communicate with them about faked stuff and – in most mmoprpg’s – kill them soon after. Whenever there was a cyber-life versus real life article in lifestyle magazines showing fotos of the avatars and the real people behind them, there would be various types you instantly would find.

Like the mighty warrior in a shining armor with the big axe – and in reality it is a 250-pound 16 year old kid that complains about having lost all real friends because of spending 50+ hours online every week, but now is a rank70-warrior in World of Warcraft, and finds the easy satisfaction and respect, that is so hard to earn outside the fantasy world, except probably in sugared soft drinks and fast food. Yes, usually the picture is really cliché, but seems to work on all areas.

Or the wise and powerful (and slender and sexy looking) elf princess with the magic powers – who in reality is an obese mother of three from a suburb of London or Düsseldorf or Houston, who has not had a job for over a decade, but has fostered her interest in witchcraft, natural powers, crystal pyramids and tantric massages instead. She usually says how she values those online-relationships just as much as her real life relationships and has found new and higher levels to communicate online.

There is also usually the highly physically disabled type, usually multiple sclerosis or something, who in real life is unable to button up his fly, but is a mighty warrior and army leader online. Usually, just because a mouse click is within the reach of his abilities and he spends morning to night online working on his online powers. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not judging these people. Okay, so I do, probably, except for the last type, but that is not what I want to get at. It is also obvious, that I am not interested in these games. I used to play a lot of video- and computergames when I was a kid – probably up to 26 or 27 years old, but I don’t do it anymore. I have a real job and a real life now, so I don’t find the time or the will to spend my time chasing pixels around a screen. (I rather listen to and write about music and things that interest me...is that a lot better?).

But then I read something that instantly stroke my interest: the fact that millions of people pay a monthly fee to join these games makes for an enormous market. A quick calculation gives me goosepumps: if one million people pay 10 dollars a month to become online-orks out to slaughter each other, that makes up a revenue-stream of 120 million dollars per year. Now those orks, warriors and gnomes might buy some pixels that form a sword, armory or magic spells, at another ten dollars a piece, that makes up for another few hundred million dollars. Balance that with the cost of running servers and a few dozen people checking the usability of the system, this sounds like the license to print money. Costs for producing goods, like those pixel weapons, is actually zero – those computer geek programmers come almost for free because they are so desperately seeking for work they can do on a laptop.

As the interest for online games is rising from complete loser geeks, to wanna-be loser geeks, who have to balance their time between online gaming and offline working and living, these start to become a very interesting target for a completely different group of online enterpreneurs. Since you can buy yourself the way to the top in these games by purchasing weapons, magic spells, experience points and whatnot, these people can make up their disadvantage in online time and experience by an advantage in spending money. There are virtually hordes of mostly asian computer slaves within these online games that spend their working hours killing and stealing to obtain pixelised goods that then can be sold to other players (mostly in the US and EU). Real players – those losers mentioned in the beginning – complain because it disbalances the “true idea” of the game, which obviously was to spend as much time honing your skills in mouse clicking and learning the routines of the game – and secondly, because it makes it harder for new players to join the game. Because they get killed by the asian computer slaves, and not by the real players, it seems.
Another thing that crops up and up a lot is the businessman or business scientist that opens an online shop in one of these worlds and sells goods to the players. Because the basic rules of economy work just the same in the online world as they do in the offline, real one. Except for openly exploiting sexual insecurities by exchanging old trader-characters with young sexy girls, to increase revenue. The last thing usually mentioned are those crazy fans that attack each other in the real world for things that happened in the virtual one. Another business branch then could be online-game-laywers, counsellors, psychiatrists? I hear that one of the most favorite places in Second Life is a public toilet, because a lot of people want to see their avatar take a dump? What about drug dealers? Seems as if there is more than enough pornography already in Second Life but is there an ork-brothel in World of Warcraft?

Now, what is more interesting than fantasy role playing games? Okay, everything actually, but I am not talking about the interests of real people, but those ten million people out there actually looking for ways to spend time online. Sex, right? Right now I am thinking about a crime-adventure-world inhabited by guys that look like Johnny Knoxville or James Hetfield and female characters that all look like the Suicide girls. Should have the geeks come running in bundles. They will probably complain that it is all a complete GTA ripoff, but I don’t care. I’ll be relaxing in one of the four pools of my new 210-bedroom villa on the coast by then.

Georg Cracked, December 2007