Filed under: Applied Gaming
Today on the Real Life Application of Video Games, we will be taking a look at money and The World of Warcraft.
One of the key features of the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (or MMORPG) known as The World of Warcraft, is a place known as The Auction House.
Located in various high profile cities throughout the world in the game, these place offer a front for the buying and selling of trade-items, from pieces of scrap to extremely rare pieces of treasure from around the game world.
The auction house itself is reminiscent of eBay, with very rare items sometimes going for extremely low prices or pieces of junk selling for exorbitantly bank-breaking amounts of gold. It offers bidders the ability to see the most current price the item is going for, what the buyout price is for that particular piece, as well as an indicator for how long the auction has left before it is all over. There is even a handy feature which alerts potential bidders as to when they have been outbid on an item they are attempting to win or even a notification letting them know they have won (this usually has with it the actual item they were purchasing).
On the bidder side, you are able to choose what it is you have that you are wanting to sell, how much you want the starting bid to be, as well as a price of buyout (which allows instant purchasing of your item).
The Catch: Unlike in real life, the economy in a virtual world can fluctuate on a day to day basis. This leads to insane inflation on the values of certain goods over short term time frames. To go along with this is the factor is multiple gaming servers. Each server has its on economy which runs completely independent of any of the other servers that are available to play the game on. So if a person has a character on one server, selling item X, item X may be worth Y amount of money. Now this same person has a character on another one of the dozens of available servers trying to sell that same item X. The problem is that the current value of item X on this other server is Z.
Results: An unrealistic view can be made upon the uneducated of how economy and auction type situations work.
First, the economy of the real world does not fluctuate as drastically as that of the virtual world. While the economy can still drastically fluctuate over the course of a single day. It does not do so every single day like the economy contained within the virtual world.
Second, auctions in the virtual world don’t work like eBay. Many times you can bid for an item on eBay, but you do not have the simple option to buy the item at a preset price. Next to that is the functioning of a real life auction. Very rarely do you see an auction (with auctioneer and all) which allows you to simply buy something that is in the process of being bid on, as is possible in the virtual world.
On a more positive note: this system has taught value to many, as one must decide if one would rather take the time bidding….risking losing the item they seek, or paying an exorbitant amount of money to have it right away, or even more still on whether or not they should go and spend the time themselves to see if they can obtain this item out of their own hard work.
Finally, I have just finished completely over analyzing a completely pointless thing.
For some reason I have had The World of Warcraft on my mind quite frequently over the past week or so and it has led me to doing this ludicrous post about fake economic systems and auctions.
Well I hope you enjoyed my completely pointless WoW analysis .
-Take Care, God Bless-
Acrid
Filed under: Applied Gaming | Tags: application, gaming, half-life, logic, orange box, teaching, valve, video games
I recently picked up the new gaming compilation released by Valve, known as The Orange Box.
One of the 5 games included in this compilation game is known as Portal.
In portal, you are given a portal creating device which allows you to create two portals linking two locations which can be crossed instantly by running through the portals. Also in this game you can pick up and drop objects such as boxes, crates, broken robots and the like. Towards the end of the game, I was chatting online via Xbox LIVE’s voice chat with my friend James (SOG DMNHUNTR), because I was stuck at a point during the game and could not figure out where to go. He helped me out and we continued through the game together helping each other get through tougher parts of the game. We reached a room where we had to crawl through a vent that was in an elevated position on the wall, too high to jump up into and too small of an opening to be able to jump from any other position nearby to get in. What we needed was a box or something to climb up to a level where we could crawl into the vent. We struggled to figure out what to do because there wasn’t an obvious answer anywhere in sight. Then I hear James yell out “Dude, I got it!” He actually had retrieved a chair from a room nearby and used it as a stool to climb into the vent. That’s when it hit me, video games truly are implementing applications of real life.
Just this one instance, makes me believe that video games can actually be used to teach skills or implement logical thinking. Video games can truly be used in conjunction with education, logical thinking, as well as developing complex problem solving skills. Using Portal as an example, the game is all about problem solving. You are at Point A, and you are tasked with getting your way to Point B, a very basic concept but something that can become very complex when you add pressure switches as well as seemingly unaccessible ledges or doors.
I truly believe that video games can teach real life applications to people. Some would argue that video games teach you to kill people or to drive way beyond the speed limit crashing into people, but such stipulations in my mind are far-fetched and just the product of anti-video game agenda’s.
This segment will become a regular addition to the blog, so keep your eyes out for it.
See Ya Next Time
-God Bless-
Acrid
