Fast Capitalism

[dr_mickey_k]

I had an article published today in Fast Capitalism about massive online games on the virtual political economy. I thought some of you guys might be interested.

www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/4_1/kent.html

Comments

[dr_mickey_k]

Dave, I think you are correct about the differences between second life and WoW. I think that you can actually track these differences back further to the game and outcome orientated multi user dungeons and the more social and player constructed environments such as LamdaMOO, although the different effects of involving out of game wealth are much more prevalent in these two examples.
The rogue line was really more about it being funny that the rogues were playing rogues, although in the report I reference it was quite a significant difference (although as Mikey notes you could already see that the change was already moving towards Hunters).
It is sad that it takes so long to get academic papers like this to ‘print’, especially in this kind of field as you risk that they will fall out of date. I was glad I could get it out before Warhammer was launched.
That being said there is something quite fantastic about these virtual avatars travelling to the far east in order to train to be better at combat. I like to think that they are trained on computers in some ancient temple by the grand masters of WoW.