On February 14, over 800 accounts which repeatedly violated the PlayOnline Member Agreement were permanently banned from PlayOnline. The users of these accounts would form groups to monopolize the hunting spots of notorious monsters (NM). They also repeatedly performed harassment and MPK actions against other players. Grief tactics, including harassment, are listed in the PlayOnline Member Agreement as violations and are not allowed for any reason. Also, interfering other players' game play in order to monopolize monsters which spawn in hunting spots is not allowed. Based on the above, we have taken strict actions against players who have violated the PlayOnline Member Agreement. If you become a victim of harrasment, please make a GM Call and report the issue directly to a Game Master.

Danny Vogely sent us a query that follows on from a comment by Euphrosyne in an earlier post: "A possibility this model brings up is DRM for game items. If you can only buy items from the developer, then it is relatively easy to make sure that you don't sell/give that item to others (via internal or external means). Avatars and possessions could be checked against each other for "proper authorization". Seems likely to infuriate players, but is still a possibility." Vogely is writing a piece for Indicare and asks if we know of examples of DRM in VWs. I don't but the hivemind might. Comments welcome. My one observation on this is to ask whether DRM is necessary in this context. Locking content makes a lot of sense where you need to gain commercial return from investment and the only way to do this is to send the content out into the big bad world, with nothing to protect it but an electronic chastity belt.

Ilya Vedrashko has a post about a virtual keyboard. Another step from the big tangible stuff of the past to the small ephemeral stuff of the present. Of course, moving from books, letters, and vinyl to email, blogs, and mp3s may free us from some clutter, but it creates new problems. For a few examples, see Nick Monfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin's Acid-Free Bits, regarding the difficulty of preserving electronic literature. And see this story regarding a family's attempt to get access to their dead son's email account. (If these were physical letters, they'd almost certainly be returned to the soldier's family.) And of course, DRM'd digital music can restrict the user's ability to use, leading to this sort of stuff. Does the virtual keyboard raise any similar issues? Probably not. Any other candidates for virtual replacements?

Look at all those sponsored links. Those cost money, and every variant combining game names and their currency kicks up a crapload of them. And in case you think it's just a fluke: Worse yet, because players can switch easily with only modest penalties - why not deconstruct the game into many subgames and have everyone engage in most of them! And still worse, because world design often encourages simultaneous engagement - multi-tasking across activities... don't you hate it when someone in your group just closed a big deal and needs to run back to town for 15 minutes?! Easy transitions is liberating, but also damning: fluidity between option categories prevents deep specialization. If game developers make distinctions between choices too arduous, too costly, then the players seem to resent it - infringing upon a player's sense of fun fairness: I really should be able to roll-back choices and do (almost) anything I want to.

We’re incredibly happy to welcome Unggi Yoon to our list of authors. Unggi was born in Seoul on 18 November 1971, and since then has been busy: played a lot of Ultima, Rescue Raiders, and Wolfenstein; got a law degree from Yonsei University Law College and a graduate degree from Yonsei Graduate School; and became a judge in Busan, Korea. Nowadays he plays Nexon's MMORPG Mabinogi and Blizzard's WoW, and acts as a member of the Gamestudy group. When not gaming or judging, he translates works like Larry Lessig's "Free Culture" into Korean. He is going to provide us with some much-needed insight into the Korean virtual world scene. We couldn't be more pleased. Welcome Unggi.

It is humbling almost to the point of despair to discover that fifteen dozen screenfuls of ponderous commentary produced by a small liberal-arts faculty's worth of beardy gamer geeks can, with almost zero loss of insight, be reduced to the three panels of a Penny Arcade cartoon. My gut feel is that probably only 5% of the players are "hard-core trader types" and the rest, while they necessarily engage in it from time to time, they really care much less about it. [If any of you can cite harder figures and distinctions along these lines with MMOGs - 'much obliged ]. So here lies a question on the road towards trying to understand in-game markets. How important are markets to you as a player? And should they play a central role in a virtual world, does that then mean that there should be real choices with winners and losers? Do players begrudge the mercantile opportunity?

While the game operators and developers have had their heads in the sand, this *huge* market has been growing and maturing. I always said that sooner or later the ostrich approach was going to bite us in the ass. Looks like Sigil just felt the sting. Well spotted Dave! They say that in a gold rush the only ones that really make the money are those that make shovels; there is obviously a market in advertising, what’s next out-of-the-box currency trading portals? And how soon before we will see weirder instruments like Futures being traded on virtual currencies? In game worlds, however, it sometimes feels like choices are too easy, the switching costs minimal. How many times might have you preferred to dump some mid-valued goods on an Non-Player Character (NPC) and be done with it and move on, but instead decide to try to sell it yourself on your local in-game market.

Gaming Open Market and PayPal seem to have kissed and made up. In what could be characterised as an intense focus on customer sentiment or a sudden 180 degree hand-break turn of a policy change GOM have just announced that, despite previous statements, they will be using PayPal after all. A couple of weeks ago I reported that GOM had suspended trading (See: GOM Off-line) due to an alleged fraud. The incident sparked off a massive discussion here on TN about the legality, ethics, impact and mechanics of virtual item trading. On 26th of June GOM announced: As of midnight eastern time on July 9 2004, Gaming Open Market will no longer take deposits from or send withdrawals to PayPal accounts.

A salami slicing exploit is a computer crime technique premised on stealing lots of little bits of value (e.g. rounding down in financial transactions) that is hard to detect. Clay Shirkey once argued this to be a false analogy when used to justify micropayment systems (September 2003, Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content). Those "salami slices" don't turn out to be as thin as they would first appear. His argument revolved around What Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price. For example, Clay suggested, that the mental transaction costs may actually rise as the cost of each slice of salami decreases, e.g.: It's easy to think a newspaper is worth a dollar, but is each article worth half a penny? Is each word worth a thousandth of a penny?

eGenesis’ A Tale in the Desert (ATITD) is unusual in many ways. There is no killing (well if you try very hard you can kill yourself – permanently), there is a highly evolved legal system, and the player voted to the position of Demi-Pharaoh has the power to terminate the account of another player. ATITD also ends. When the players, or citizens as they are called, reach a certain level of development and the story arc reaches its climax – that’s it. For a long time players and commentators have been wondering what comes next. We knew that after the First Telling there would be a Second, but what? Would eGenesis just re-boot the servers and off we go again? Oh, no.