Paying for Points
This article examines the sociological implications of the different reward systems used in virtual worlds.
The original WeeWorld article attracted a lot of feedback from WeeWorld’s users. One common question was, why do we have to pay for points? Or even, “WHY DOWE HAVE TO PAY FOR POINTS!!!!”
Why indeed?
- WeeWorld has 2 kinds of points: Gold points we buy with Dollars (“monetary rewards”), and green points we earn by doing things in the world (“achievement rewards”).
- Gold points can buy more things in WeeWorld than green points. So the things we want most, tend to be bought with gold points. In other worlds, achievement rewards (like green points) are more important.
- The things we want are things that not everyone has. We want those things because it helps us make friends. To stop everyone having them, those things cost points. If those things were free, everyone could have them, and then we wouldn’t want them.
- Gold points are bought with our parents’ money. So some of our friends have less points, because their parents don’t have as much money. We may want to help them by giving them some of our points. That helps us keep friends.
- Unfortunately, in WeeWorld, gold points cannot be easily shared. So WeeMees with lots of things tend to have those things because their parents’ have lots of money to buy them. This is “unfair”.
- In other worlds it is easier to earn achievement rewards (like green points). This means we could earn our own rewards, instead of our parents earning them for us. But those rewards cannot be shared. That means we cannot help our friends who have fewer rewards. That might also become “unfair”.
- Perhaps gold points would work better if we could share them, and we could earn gold points ourselves?
That’s the simple answer. With apologies for “we” and “our”. This article explains and expands those ideas. Read more of this article »
Why We Travel
If we could eliminate transportation from our daily lives, would we want to? Or do we still need to travel, even if we have nowhere to go?
This article explores the desire to travel – to make economically irrational transport journeys. It ponders the apparently unnecessary role of travel in virtual worlds. It considers how travel contributes to immersion within the world, and how such travel can be substituted. Finally, the article addresses some of the difficulties in bringing lessons from the virtual back into the physical world. Read more of this article »
