online gaming

online gaming, electronic game playing over a computer network, particularly over the Internet.

Electronic game worlds have generated billions of dollars, with millions of players around the world fighting, buying, crafting, and selling in a variety of online environments. One of the most populous was Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. The massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) drew millions of subscribers, who brought the company an estimated $1 billion per year in retail sales and subscription fees from 2007 to 2010. MMOGs differ from traditional computer games in a number of important ways. First, Internet connectivity is a prerequisite for all MMOGs, as the games can be played only after logging in to the server that hosts the game world (popular MMOGs require dozens of such servers to accommodate their larger player bases). Second, the social networking aspect of interacting with thousands of players worldwide frequently overshadows the game content itself. A 2006 study found that almost one-third of female players and nearly 10 percent of male players had dated someone they met in a game. Third, most MMOGs operate on a subscription basis, charging a monthly fee in addition to the initial purchase price of the game software. Some companies offer frequent downloadable “patches” of new game content to make these monthly fees more palatable to players, while others offer their games free of charge to players who are willing to tolerate a stream of in-game advertisements.

From MUDs to MMOGs

Though World of Warcraft and other MMOGs utilize the advanced graphics and high-end processing power typical of the current generation of personal computers (PCs), online gaming had its roots in some of the earliest computing technologies. By the late 1970s many universities in the United States were linked by ARPANET (see DARPA), a precursor to the Internet. The structure of ARPANET allowed users to connect their computers or terminals to a central mainframe computer and interact in what was close to real time. In 1980 ARPANET was linked to the University of Essex, Colchester, England, where two undergraduate students had written a text-based fantasy adventure game that they called MUD, or “multiuser dungeon.” When the first outside users connected to MUD through ARPANET, online gaming was born. Soon other programmers expanded on the original MUD design, adding graphic flourishes, chat functions, and player groups (or guilds). These basic features, as well as the fantasy setting, carried over into the next generation of online games, which were the first true MMOGs.

The first wave of MMOGs included such games as Ultima Online (debuted in 1997), the South Korean blockbuster Lineage (1998), and Sony Corporation’s EverQuest (1999). Growth for these early games was relatively slow but steady, with the exception of Lineage, the explosive popularity of which was mainly due to the early and widespread availability of high-speed Internet connections in South Korea. This popularity did not come without a price, however. A number of Korean players died of exhaustion after marathon gaming sessions, and a 2005 South Korean government survey showed that more than half a million Koreans suffered from “Internet addiction.” Game companies funded dozens of private counseling centres for addicted gamers in an effort to forestall legislation, such as that passed by China in 2005, that would force designers to impose in-game penalties for players who spent more than three consecutive hours online.

By the time World of Warcraft debuted in November 2004, the global gaming market was ready for a change. With the notable exceptions of EVE Online, a game of interstellar corporate intrigue, and the superhero-themed City of Heroes, the market was saturated with “swords and sorcery” fare. World of Warcraft’s attention to humour and team play and its shallow learning curve brought in millions of casual gamers who had never before tried an MMOG. This widespread success brought its own challenges for Blizzard, however, when the company temporarily suspended the account of a transsexual player over freedom of speech issues. While that incident seemed to have been the result of a terrible miscommunication on Blizzard’s part, it did open a dialogue on the nature of virtual reality worlds. Are they like private clubs, where the management can restrict both membership and speech? Or do they fall under the scope of a public accommodation, where discrimination is expressly prohibited by U.S. law?

Birth of virtual economies

Another issue that game publishers have had to face is the rise of secondary economies outside their game worlds. Ultima Online designers were the first to observe this phenomenon at work when a castle in their game world sold for several thousand dollars on the online auction site eBay. This was the beginning of a market valued at more than $1 billion by 2006. Players spend hours earning in-game wealth, hunting for rare weapons, and gaining power and prestige for their characters so that the fruits of their virtual labours can be exchanged for real cash. The buyer and seller agree on a purchase price, the funds can be transferred electronically, and the two can then meet in the game world to complete the transaction. Some Chinese companies have turned this into serious business, employing hundreds of “gold farmers,” who play games in an effort to hoard resources that can be sold to players in South Korea or the United States. Most MMOG companies sought to control this behaviour by banning the accounts of suspected gold farmers (e.g., Activision Blizzard has closed tens of thousands of such accounts since World of Warcraft went online), and eBay began enforcing a ban on the sale of virtual items in 2007. Sony co-opted the secondary market when it launched Station Exchange, a service designed to facilitate the buying and selling of virtual goods in its EverQuest games. Linden Lab was the first company, however, to design a game around a virtual economy. That game was Second Life.

In many ways similar to The Sims, the top-selling PC game of all time, Second Life was less a game and more a virtual world. Though The Sims Online was a relative failure when it was introduced in late 2002, Second Life became a runaway success soon after its launch in 2003. The difference was in the economic models adopted by the two games. Whereas The Sims Online was criticized for its lack of any clear goals for players, Second Life offered players the opportunity to use the game world and their own talents to make as much money as they possibly could. For a monthly subscription fee, players received an allowance of Lindens (the in-game currency) that could be officially exchanged with U.S. dollars at a rate of approximately 250:1. Players could then purchase in-game items, customize those items by using 3-D imaging software, and resell them at a profit. For some, crafting items and managing virtual real estate in Second Life became a “first life” business.

Social gaming

With the explosive growth of social media in the early 21st century, developers sought to capitalize on the opportunities presented by Web sites such as Facebook and Myspace. They utilized animation programs such as Flash to create a Web-based gaming experience that was comparable to older home consoles. With their simplified game play and cartoonlike graphics, these games had wide appeal, and many of them offered incentives for players to recruit additional players into the game. The most successful “Facebook games”—notably Zynga’s Mafia Wars (2008) and Farmville (2009) and EA’s The Sims Social (2011)—maximized revenue by rewarding players for interacting with advertising partners and selling in-game currency.