Excuse Me While I Whip This Out

So this blog is basically about MMORPG's, virtual worlds and the stuff that comes with them. And though we like to think about the gaming world's intersection with Plato's allegory of the cave, Rene Descartes's malevolent deceiver and whether or not one should choose the blue pill or the red pill, we're not just eggheads who can't appreciate creativity and funny.

We first saw Red vs. Blue a couple of months ago, and though it's mainly for Halo fans, we still love it. Not only that, but this could be the future of film-making. I mean, no sets, no crews, no locations, what's not to like? Check out the Halo 3 Beta Video.

Gamer: "I play with real people."
Therapist: "Have you met them, face to face?"
Gamer: "I hear them. It's good enough for the blind."

And for you World of Warcraft fans who's guild duties take up more of your time than you want to admit to anyone who isn't in your guild (you know who you are), there is always The Guild. This great little series is a little window into the lives of people who's gaming lives vaguely resemble real lives.

Enjoy.

Does that earring mean you're a pirate?

Yes, it's Saturday and we're blogging. But we get to play and write about games for a living, so it's never really like work anyway and we don't mind so much.

But we digress. Let's begin, shall we? Ahem...

Ever since Sid Meier first taught us to plunder the Spanish Main with Pirates!, we've been fans of privateer/pirate/war on the high-seas/avast ye matey genre of games. Why? Because it's fun. Duh.

So we were quite happy to see that Pirates of the Burning Sea is getting closer and closer. What a great idea, an MMORPG based not on the mythical worlds of Tolkien-esque magic and monsters. Having just completed their Stress Test (a beta-test stage), the makers of POBS have added some really great features to their new game world, like the ability for players to affect the world in which they play. In POBS, players will be able to change the nature of the game by conquering ports and cities. Instead of merely fighting and plundering, players can have a real impact on the game in ways we haven't seen before. Though we aren't sure how this will play out and how effective it will be, this reason alone makes us want to play the game. It is akin to forming a raiding party in WoW, and instead of raiding Ironforge, you can raid it and then fight a battle to determine who controls it. How fun would that be?

Fake World, Real Money, Real Problems

We've been watching this one for a while, but it appears as if the lawsuit against Second Life avatar Volkov Catteneo (supposedly 19-year-old Texan Robert Leatherwood) has come to a very real and very serious conclusion.

If you don't know anything about this case, here are the basic facts: Eros LLC (owned by SL entrpraneur Kevin Alderman) created and sold the SexGen bed and sold it in Second Life for L$12,000 per copy. Despite the 'no-copy' protections, Catteneo somehow managed to copy it and sold unauthorized copies of the bed for L$4,000 each. After filing suit against Catteneo in July and a lengthy search using IP address searches and private investigators, Leatherwod was identified as Catteneo.

Since then, Leatherwood failed to respond to the lawsuit and, now that the response time has expired, it looks like he will have a default verdict levied against him. This will make him legally responsible for Catteneo's actions whether Leatherwood is actually Catteneo or not.

Let this be a lesson to everyone who thinks these are just games. By failing to respond to the lawsuit, Mr. Leatherwood has taken a very big step towards ruining his young life. Problems like this don't go away. If he has a default judgment entered against him, Leatherwood can have his assets seized, his wages garnished, and his credit report ruined.

This case also highlights the difficulties of copyright issues in places like SL. (Read this article form Reuters SL about some of the current problems, or check out the TerraNova blog for some great articles about MMORPG issues.) Players like Leatherwood probably have a sense of secure anonymity when playing games like SL, but it's just an illusion. When there is money involved, you can be found.

Welcome to the desert of The Real.

Whether it's the World of Warcraft, Second Life, Entropia Universe or any other virtual world MMORPG, we're continually fascinated by the implications of these virtual worlds upon our lives. And apparently, we aren't the only ones.

Take a look at this article by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at Oxford. It is worth reading, but if you don't have time, we'll give you the juiciest part of his 'simulation argument', i.e., the conclusion. Professor Bostrom states that if his simulation argument is correct, at least one of the following conclusions is true:

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;
(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Did you catch that? There is a 33.33% chance that you, me, Napoleon Bonaparte, Billy Jo Robideaux and everyone else who has ever existed is nothing more than a simulation in some computer somewhere that is being run by some advanced species. I mean, I liked 'The Matrix' as a film, and I thank Renee Descartes for all he's done, but I've never really wanted to live it.

So why are we bringing this up?

We've always been fascinated about the world of online games. For example, when you are buying a WoW epic sword of kicka**, what exactly are you buying? A code on a computer somewhere? Some pixels? The right to rent those pixels or that code?

Though it's probably the last of these, it still seems strange that monetary transactions for virtual goods takes place. But a thing only has value if people believe it does, right? If people stopped believing tomorrow that money has value, it would just be paper.

So getting back to the simulation argument, if everything is a simulation, then it makes perfect sense that simulated goods ala the WoW sword has value. After all, WoW itself would be a simulation inside a simulations, and the player avatars would just be simulations played by other simulations...

Oh man, we're getting a headache again.

It Begins

Welcome.

You've found our very important, world-changing, super well written blog devoted to gaming, MMORPG's, virtual worlds, making virtual money, legal stuff and everything else that is big and important and related to gaming.

Though we're doing this as a supplement to our game guide website, we think there is a lot of big important stuff going on in the world of online games and virtual worlds, so we're going to post what we've found to let you know about it.

As our title states, our blog is really important so you should definitely pay attention to it, link to it and read our posts as tenants upon which to base your life. I mean, if you don't form your ideological core upon the anonymous writings of people you have never met, what ARE you doing with your life?