Too Lazy to Play the Game?

Aug. 7–The latest answer to the question “What has the world come to?” is this: People are paying other people to play video games for them.

It can take hundreds of hours to work through the beginning stages of online video games, fighting off virtual enemies and building up cool powers and weapons. But a new service will let gamers skip all that mundane effort, allowing them to rent virtual characters that are already beefed-up and powerful.

The rental service by GamePal.com, which costs $349, followed by $129 monthly payments, is a way to outsource what is supposed to be fun. Call it laziness or just the latest obituary for the attention span, but it points to a real change in how people experience leisure: The notion that you have to earn your fun is going out the window.

“We have been in a period where, because of the strong underlying desire to have a refuge from daily life, people put up with boring work [within video games] to get to that fantasy,” said Indiana University Professor Edward Castronova, who has a forthcoming book on video game economics.

“Now people realize they can outsource the work part and go right to the fantasy.”

And that’s not all. There are companies that employ people to play video games, only to collect virtual weaponry, money and powers. The companies then take the virtual items and sell them on eBay and other sites for real money.

Very real money. Castronova’s book “Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games,” being published this year by the University of Chicago Press, reports the secondary market from the games, that is, the extracurricular, or black-market, trade of virtual goods, is about $30 million in the United States and another $75 million globally.

At least 10 million people worldwide play the games, called massively multiplayer online role-playing games, with most playing about 20 hours a week.

The real money the players in those virtual worlds are generating through the sales of swords, armor and other virtual items is, per capita, almost what the real country of Jamaica produces per year, Castronova reports.

Many players use a service called “powerleveling,” in which they hand over their game characters to an outside service to be bulked up and carried to a higher level of a game.

In a virtual version of handing your body over to someone else for a week of dieting and going to the gym while you stay home and watch TV, the firm works on your game character and then hands it back to you, for a price. Sometimes it is as high as $800.

With that, it is no wonder companies are paying people to play online games all day, providing services to willing buyers. Some companies have set up virtual “sweatshops” to collect virtual items for resale and power up characters.

One U.S.-based company, Gamersloot.net, has a dozen workers in Romania playing online games 10 hours a day, collecting goods and building up powerful characters for sale. Some of their characters, which can take its workers a week of nonstop work to build up, cost up to $269.

That is on top of the normal costs associated with online games. The shelf price of games such as Matrix Online or World of Warcraft is $30 and $40, respectively. Users also pay monthly fees to access the game and need a good computer with a fast connection.

Patrick Bernard, owner of Gamersloot, said the practice of powerleveling and other shortcuts was growing.

“A lot of the potential customers are not yet aware of the secondary market, or at least not of its benefits. It just takes one purchase, however, to realize how much ‘game trudging’ they can avoid with just a few dollars,” he said in a recent e-mail.

The secondary market from virtual goods and characters has become so large that they not only are auctioned on mainstream sites such as eBay, but also on sites that cater only to online games, such as IGE.com. Business for IGE is so good that it bought out a rival gaming auction site for $10 million.

Seeing so much money going out the door, and warning players they could get ripped off by buying virtual merchandise, Sony Entertainment launched its own auction technology this summer for its game Everquest II. Suddenly, the black market is getting legitimized.

With business booming for these services, the idea that gamers will spend days at a time slowly learning how to empower their characters is beginning to seem hopelessly old-fashioned. Why spend hours learning about games by slogging through small-time prey such as rats, in some of the games, when they could be on the virtual version of steroids, killing much cooler monsters?

“The rallying cry of game developers in massive games right now is, ‘Who wants to kill rats?’ i.e., fun equals power, and who wants to be powerless?” said Michael “Zonk” Zenke, editor of Slashdot Games, an online gaming journal.

“Taking it the extra step, buying a character to ‘start’ the game at level 15 has to be even more fun, right? I think it’s a slippery slope,” he said.

Many traditional gamers deplore the other players who are only there to make money off their games, calling them “farmers” who poach off their virtual worlds. But while the community constantly debates the ethics of farming and buying or renting powers, it seems the cultural shift is here to stay.

Not only are video games simply a big business themselves, with $29 billion in global revenues, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, rising to an estimated $55 billion by 2009, but money is becoming a part of playing games.

Paying for online poker games is an expensive obsession for many. Now paying is increasingly becoming part of fantasy video games, too.

Gaming experts such as Castronova worry that if too many people use their wealth to get ahead in games, rather than game skills or experience, it could ruin what is supposed to be a fantasy world.

“You don’t want to play Monopoly with somebody who whips out a checkbook when they don’t get Boardwalk,” the Indiana professor said.

Outside these virtual worlds, there could be other major, but related, changes to gaming culture coming in future years through government regulation.

With at least $100 million in real money being traded for virtual objects worldwide, Castronova reports, there are many cases, especially in Asia, of hackers stealing virtual items and even of disputes over virtual property. In March, a man in Shanghai, China, stabbed another man to death for the $900 sale of a virtual sword they shared.

Due to the disputes, which also are going to civil courts during divorce proceedings, lawmakers may be compelled to write laws to govern the virtual goods, just as there are laws for other intellectual property.

There is another good reason to regulate the worlds, he said. The largely anonymous world of trading millions of dollars for swords, armor and other virtual goods is a great way to launder money.

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