In and Out of Virtual World

Talking about the virtual world, especially games, I feel honored because I love games, but not to an extent of an addict. It is true that the virtual world Second Life leaves a lot of impact to the players, but that is just a glimpse of the real thing. There are a lot of similar simulations of the world, namely MMORPG (Massively Played Online Role Playing Game) where a human being creates an avatar to his or her liking and explore the animated world, either an almost real world like Second Life or fantasy world.

In these worlds, they are totally free to do whatever they want with their avatar. They are free to an extent where the games limit. Which means there is nobody that could say stop if they want to do a certain thing or talk about a certain topic unless it affects the game system. This worried some individuals and party as they have no whatsoever control over what they could do, especially about free speech. Yes, the virtual worlds, is limitless. Remember capitalism? Yes, they even exist in the virtual world.

World of Warcraft (WoW), that boasts an amazing 6 million registered users is a good example. Due to its popularity, a lot of people became "gold farmers", players that uses their avatars to collect as much as money as possible and sell it for real cash. This became a problem because it causes imbalance to the game system. in Second Life, real property owner used the limitless tool provided in it to advertise their products, selling virtual items, hoping that this new kind of advertisement could attract them to buy the real things in the world.

Blizzard, the creator and owner of World of Warcraft (WoW), also faced problem about the owner of the in game money, about the intellectual property of their game. The players claimed that the in game money they earned because they work for it but Blizzard claimed that its theirs as they own WoW, thus they own everything in it. At last, blizzard took the action of claiming that the items in WoW or not saleable for real money and banned all auctions in eBay, in the name of intellectual property.

The virtual world is not only confined to our actions and emotion but also it affects our future. There are a lot of thing happening in the virtual world, and we know very little of where it is heading. It is up to us to shape it.