Other stats:
1 platinum piece is $11 on one server and $19 on the other.
Buy WOW Gold here, and then enjoy your excited WoW life! Warhammer Online Goldwill keep your high power. The best way to make Lineage 2 Adena is to sell items to players, while, the easiest way is to Buy Lineage 2 Adena. On the other hand, if RMTers persuade the courts that people own what their characters own, the whole concept of a purge might be threatened.
Other kinds of (creative) human activity vanish from its radar screen.
This is an argument that forms part of a chapter I've written for a volume I'm co-editing with Sandra Braman (Command Lines) that is currently under review, and there the specific example is Second Life and the challenges that the varieties of user content therein make to the multiple ideas about content held by the different teams within Linden Lab. But GDC led me to see this claim as more applicable here as well. Some players who have more Bounty Bay Coin spend his Mabinogi Gold to buy pets and pick up something entirely could not snatch. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.
After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. If you have enough Mabinogi Money you can go to beat the enemies by yourself in the game. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers. And there are huge gaps in what we don't know. Where is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from it. I hope the audience did as well.
But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown). And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companies. Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.
The best way to put the assertion (and this is all it is at this point; and again, please keep in mind that there are a number of familiar exceptions) is that the practice of game software development generates a way of seeing and defining problems (as essentially precise, logical, and algorithmic), and creating solutions (through linear, text-defined code) that makes other ways of accounting for what happens in VWs seem at worst nonsensical and at best irrelevant or quixotic.
The volume of trade is lower than I was expecting, and the amount per transaction higher. I thought we'd see larger numbers of low-value items traded, but instead it's pretty much the same as on the open market. Maybe the $1 issuing fee is putting people off.
He also said that according to their user surveys, a third of their players liked RMT, a third hated it and a third didn't care one way or the other. It seems we still have an affinity for things like villages, houses and piazzas, much to the dismay of some architects. Cutting edge real-world architecture has apparently moved beyond these hang-ups. Professor Glazer invoked the trends of "lightness and evanescence" in new architectural projects such as the "Blur" building which disappears in its own purposely generated mist or the ephemeral Towers of Light September 11 memorial at Ground Zero. How ironic is it that, as Glazer notes, "architecture is reaching towards digital world and the digital world is reaching through architecture."