The Economy of WoW

[Jarulf]

Side topic from that article.  He says:
This seems like a flawed analogy to me.  In a Kinkos you rent a computer, but what you do and create on that computer comes directly from your own mind.  In a game, what you do and create comes directly from the developers.  These games aren't to the point where a player is really creating anything original.  Rather its that players are just creating copies of what the developers have already created. 
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Hmm, first of all, to me, the whole concept of "owning" ingame stuff and even trying to make it equal in whatever way to property is just silly.

Lets set that aside though and see about the "who creates". It immediately ends up with the problem of what it is we create and we are back to trying to figure out what we create. It is clearly not normal property, it is all imaginary. One can say that one create a story and some character and so on. Still, as for "owning" it, I would say it is hard. I would say that it is the player though that creates. Sure, Blizzard has set up the framework, but it is the player that do the work so to speak.

As an interesting side track, there was a case some years ago here in Sweden about game companies (it was for consoles) going after a shop were you could rent computer games (just like you do with movies for example). Now, for movies and similar work (but not books or music for example) , you are not allowed to do that uless you get special permision from the copyright holder. So the case here was if a computer game was the equivalency of movies. The game producers argued that they were in that they created the story and how it evolved, pretty much as in a movie. The court thought otherwise, it was the players, playing the game that "created" the game as they played, hence, renting computer games was perfectly OK. (Sorry if I used bad terminology and made it hard to follow, I felt my english was not good enough here).


As for the topic of the thread in general, I think any game like the one here will get economical problems of inflation. It is not just about too much money. It is not an issue of making enough things to waste money on. As long as there is an infinite item and money generation with no forced removal of it, there will eventually be problems. Sure, one can sell items to waste the money on stuff, but the longer we play, the more of the good items (for example) will be generated and players will not sell them. So of course they will get cheaper over time and so on. In addition, things like casinos, mounts and so on are voluntary and people can instead spend it on the ever increasing ammount of items and such that simply get cheaper over time.

Real world have phsyical items, buildings, whatever deterioating (spelling?) over time, and hence we need to constantly make new, otherwsie we would have the same problem in the real world. However, in a game, such a concept of things gooing "poof" over time is not fun, hence there will always be problems with the economy not working.