All work and all play… April 9, 2007
Posted by Steve Field in Play Money.1 comment so far
“This is really another world,” Caldwell was saying. “The Internet has really affected the world like nobody has understood yet. There’s gonna be greater impac, people are gonna be spending more time on their computers. TV is gonna go the way of the dinosaurs, eventually. There’s more and more people doing stuff online than ever before. There’s more women coming online. There’s more older people coming online. There’s more poor people coming online” (p. 17).
The world of virtual worlds is foreign to me, so reading Play Money by Julian Dibbell was eye opening. From coworkers, I was only vaguely aware that this subculture of people exsited; never could I have imagined that virtual worlds and virtual money contributed to a multi-million dollar online economy in the trade of virtual goods.
Dibbell provides two reasons for why the use of online roleplaying games (also known as MMORPGs, for Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) for monetary purposes has arisen. The first is rooted in psychology. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about a condition he calls flow. Flow is the phenomenon where people get satisfaction out of an action simply for doing the action. This is the reason why many MMORPG players will repeat a task over and over to improve their character, even if the task is repetitive and boring.
The second reason that Dibbell points out is economic. The virtual worlds of these online games operate under scarcity and inequality. There are limited resources, and always others who have more. This fuels a desire to gather more, build more, learn more and achieve more.
Dibbell raises an interesting philosophical question when he notices his daughter playing. Why can’t everyone have the bliss of play? Why does that natural desire to play fade away into, as he puts it “production and reproduction?” I have two issues with this. First, the way he described “play” in the world of professional online gamers, doesn’t seem much like play. It, in fact seems very much like a job. The IM conversation in chapter 21 certainly shows how seriously these games are taken, almost to the point where they don’t seem fun anymore.
Second, I wonder whether the shift from play to work is natural, or chosen. I am reminded of the adage that one can either have a happy life or a meaningful life. It seems that the shift toward work might be from a desire to have an important life and not just a happy one.
The Longer Tail April 3, 2007
Posted by Steve Field in The Long Tail.add a comment
Why does The Long Tail matter? Because, as Anderson points out, it heralds the rise of the economy of choice.
One thing I couldn’t help but think about while reading the second half of Anderson’s book is how he holds unlimited choice to virtually idolized standards. Without getting into why unlimited choices is good, he continues to profess the importance of each person being able to find a niche in which he or she feels most comfortable.
I am glad he cited Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago Law professor who authored the book Republic.com. I first read the book 4 or 5 years ago. In this book, he effectively argues that the fragmentation of media (as a result of increased choice in a digital economy) allows the public to filter information through their own personal prism. People are free to get all of their information from people who share their own political ideology — conservatives can exclusively watch FoxNews and liberals can only read DailyKos.
This also echoes Googlezon and the story of EPIC 2014. If indeed technology advances to the point where it can repackage and create personalized information streams, the we will truly be living in an unlimited long-tail economy.
But at what price?
Is this a good thing for democracy? Sunstein doesn’t think so. I appreciate that Anderson recognizes the other side, but he doesn’t, for me sufficiently address the opposition. He simply retreats into comfortable territory. Choice is good. More voices are being heard.
But are more voices being heard? Or are more voices just out there. To me, it seems that the cacophony of noise out there is preventing other voices from truly being listened to sometimes.
Field Foolery 