SOUTH PARK

Matt and Rowan.

You must see the South Park premiere.
It could just as well have been CoH 4 months ago.
Funny stuff.

Matt and Rowan.

You must see the South Park premiere. It could just as well have been CoH 4 months ago. Funny stuff.

8 thoughts on “SOUTH PARK”

  1. The WoW episode?

    Do you mean the WoW episode?

    If so, I’m trying to see where I can BT it right now 😉

    —
    Matthew P. Barnson

      1. Dude, we’re totally heroes

        “What do we do now?”

        “What we wanted to do… we can finally play the game.”

        —
        Matthew P. Barnson

        1. Done.. and done.

          Yeah.. my gaming days are pobably a bit behind me.. I will probably try Star Trek Legacy when it comes out..

          But after that, nil for a while.

          Visit the Official Justin Timpane Website Music, Acting, and More! http://www.timpane.com

  2. Real Money In Virtual Worlds

    http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2006/1720891.htm

    Background Briefing is Australia’s audio broadcast equivalent of CBS’ 60 minutes, and one of the podcasts I subscribe. This is one of their greatest episodes produced, because it burrows into the global issues and zeitgeist of online gaming. It highlights how people are spending real money in virtual worlds. Lots of money. I had never heard of WoW until Matt’s recent post, and found it unimaginable that people are spending thousands of dollars for virtual property.

    Also, the uncharted legal aspects are fascinating. What type of law rules in these places, where contracts are broken after ‘real’ money is spent?

    Although ABC has taken down the audio, I still have the 23MB mp3. If anyone wants to hear, please let me know and we can figure out a way to transfer.

    1. Staggering numbers

      Last I heard, World of Warcraft alone is related to the employment of about 100,000 people. The majority of these are part of the new type of sweat shops in Korea and China, which are dedicated to power levelling and “gold farming.”

      There are just too many fascinating aspects of this to count. Some of them are:

      1) There are sites devoted to tracking the currency exchange rate from real money to virtual money on a number of different online games. For instance, take Influence in CoH, which is not used that often and is exceedingly easy to come by at higher levels. It’s exchange rate is something like 2,000,000 influence per American Dollar. Gold, in WoW, however, which is harder to obtain and has many more uses, sells something like 1000 gold for $20.

      To get even more complicated, the exchange rate can vary from server to server. If someone on the “Burning Blade” server of WoW (which has about 10,000 people on it) ends up using bots to farm millions of gold before the sysadmins can catch them, which he puts into the market by distributing to friends and selling for real-world cash, then the market becomes flooded with extra currency. Since the majority of major items in WoW are purchased not from vendors but through the Auction House (person to person trading), it can result in massive inflation, since all of a sudden everyone’s got a lot more gold. Correspondingly, the real world value of gold on just that server will go down.

      2) What are the legal implications for Blizzard studios, who now find themselves the drivers of a new industry that employs this many people? If they decide to stop offering WoW, or if the servers crash for a week, can they be sued for costing all these other people money or even their jobs? Yes, WoW does have an end user license agreement (EULA) that forbids using real money in any kind of exchange of virtual goods or services. However, as we can see by the number of places where one can get gold or power-levelling, Blizzard’s not exactly doing a good job of enforcing this EULA. Which means that if someone had a good enough team of lawyers, they could probably find and punch through a number of loopholes in the EULA and put Blizzard in a very precarious position.

      Everything about this is exciting as hell to watch. Suddenly we have not only a brand new form of social interaction and community, but also a new type of industry and economic structure. Something the likes of which we’ve *never* seen before.

      1. Everquest…

        At its peak, the exchange rate for currency in Everquest exceeded that of many third-world countries. I’m not positive what it is for WoW, but given the absolutely HUGE scale this thing has taken on (up to 7 million subscribers now, if I understand correctly, and more expected for Christmas), I’m dollars to pesos that WoW gold pieces are worth more hard currency than many third-world countries.

        —
        Matthew P. Barnson

      2. Second Life

        Reading this morning where Second Life has gone this year from 200,000 to 2M registered users.

        This is the biggest money-making opportunity for lawyers. If you’re a lawyer, you need to be focusing your practice on all the potential torts and contracts cases ripening in these digital worlds. You could strike “real world” gold with the first big civil action case.

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