In-Game Crime Spree Yields Real-World Arrest
This just in - something I never expected to see. Ever.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7865

So a guy robs some players in a game, and gets arrested in real-life. BIZARRE. I was completely flabbergasted when I read this. WHERE Is the crime?

Some slashdotters brought up a point. Now that in-game merchandise is worth real-world money, cheating in the game is the equivalent to real-world fraud. What happens if you cheat in the casinos at Las Vegas? Well, back in the 60's and 70's, you might end up buried in the desert... but today you'll find yourself arrested and facing very serious jail time. So why should it be different in an online world?

It still blows me away. WAY back in the mid 80's I read a short story called "Catacomb" by Henry Melton (oh, and it's available online - check it out here! ) This story really blew my mind at the time, and got me thinking about the possibilities of what we now call "massively multiplayer online" RPGs. The story was both forward-thinking and naive. The big trick, of course, was the ability to cash in the in-game treasures for real-world cash. That was every young D&D-players DREAM in the early 80's - to convert their awesome playing skills into CASH. My dream was a little different - I wanted to WRITE THAT GAME!

Technologically, it was possible. There were 300-baud modems around, and even early, prototypical MUDs at the time. I didn't like the text-interface of the game in the story (though I was a big fan of the Infocom adventure games, I figured a graphical interface closer to the Ultima games would be more appropriate). I spoke to my dad about the whole money-for-treasure thing, and he explained about gambling laws. That took the wind out of my sails a little bit, but I still pushed forward to make a multiplayer fantasy adventure game.

I got to the point where two Commodore 64's could be hooked up together with a modem, and there was *kind of* a game you could play in single-player. I was having problems with multiplayer because things would get scrambled for some reason when I was passing data back and forth - I think you could see the first room, and that was it. I think the end result wasn't any more advanced than my little 40-hour dev project, Hackenslash.

And now Henry Melton's imaginary world is all real and growed-up - with people getting arrested by real-world police for cheating, and people running sweat-shops in Asia to farm items and power-level characters. And the whole concept of "roleplaying" in any of these games has gone out the window. And I no longer harbor fantasies of creating the game of the short-story. It's been done, and pretty well, and I sure don't envy the companies dealing with the sort of nightmares like this guy in Japan with the bots has been causing.

Ugh.

Labels: Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:09 PM (Permalink)