MMORPGs Have a Larger Economy Than Latvia

Should we be impressed or horrified?

Pity the gamers who grew up in MMORPGs, the medium’s crassest bastard, an unholy amalgamation of our creepiest traits.

World of Warcraft debuted in November of 2004, a few weeks after I entered boarding school as a sophomore. It tore through victims at an alarming rate. Who could care about sine waves amid the real-time, racially motivated warring of Alliance and Horde? Why join club basketball when you could join a faction, dispensing death and justice with your magic mace instead of chucking bricks in your workout socks?

Pimply social maladapts didn’t stand a chance. Even the most severe punishments available to an institution empowered by that fathomless phrase, in loco parentis, proved poor deterrents — exams were flunked, classes skipped. By spring term I heard rumors that one kid in our year would soon take a medical leave due to his deteriorating lifestyle. Guy was too deep in the WoW.

Still, that was just one case. Most students were unaffected by the sudden blight of addiction — including me. Which seemed odd, because I was predisposed to virtual geekery according to every metric imaginable. Within the past year alone, I had logged literally hundreds of hours in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the mere title of which announced fealty to the same dorky aesthetic as World of Warcraft. I had oodles of leisure time tied up in nothing more compelling than TV box sets and boutique sugar drinks. I was ready to develop a punishing habit; I was ready to be tweaked good.

Yet rather than ensnaring me, the game simply exhausted me. Like most role-playing titles, massively multiplayer or not, the majority of gameplay in WoW consists of killing monsters, completing quests, fetching items, and leveling up your character on the basis of those feats. That central mechanic had animated some of my favorite games, and with the right narrative flourishes could make for indelible entertainment. But in WoW the gameplay felt airless and enervating, and it took me years to understand why.

Little did any of us know at the time that we were participating in a vast commercial experiment — one that fondled our darkest pleasure centers in a canny gambit to siphon money over time. World of Warcraft was, by any reasonable assessment, a long con.

High schoolers made for easy marks given their vanity, myopia, and willingness to be early adopters; but the fever soon spread to college campuses and the living rooms of the un- and underemployed. By that point WoW had claimed more global users than heroin: 12 million in late 2010. It was the undisputed king of a new virtual reality, accessible and ubiquitous — though dozens of competitors thrived.

The most popular MMORPGs fought for market share by tapping new genres and offering even more granular experiences. Eve Online boasted an in-game economy of startling sophistication, subject to the same financial hijinks — bear raids, pump and dumps — as our own. The near-Periodic array of resources in Star Wars Galaxies birthed graduate theses on divisions of labor. Second Life, whose developers had the temerity to assert wasn’t even a game, wigged people out with its wildly libertine explorations of sex, art and social intercourse.

It was a great time to have nothing going on in the so-called real world.

Among non-gaming audiences, however, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games had become a predictably stigmatized pursuit. Their subject matter didn’t help. Neither did their revenue models, which mostly relied on monthly subscription payments and which — although necessary for the object permanence of the virtual worlds they supported — seemed to incentivize Pavlovian conditioning over genuine play. Coupled with the notorious personal hygienes and eating habits of many gamers, these features contributed to the prevailing sense that MMORPGs were a pointless vortex of time and attention, and left their devotees worse off in the long run. (One Urban Dictionary entry characterized MMORPGs as “a treadmill that makes you fatter”.)

Such criticisms, obviously, could be leveled at video games writ large, and are beside the point anyway. If fun is defined by the players, then a colossal subscription base had already spoken — and who were outsiders to judge? What made the role-playing of, say, Model UN any different? Certainly not its political or educational dimension; MMORPGs revealed more about diplomacy and trade than most high school history classes. They also provided a refuge for lonely, isolated, or anxious players who couldn’t readily participate in IRL communities.

On a micro level, the argument might go, any less-than-savory aspects of MMORPGs were balanced out by their possible social benefits. At worst, they were just another everyday vice.

On the macro level, it was a different story. On the macro level, shit was fucked.

Imagine a global dumping ground for productivity, humanity’s most precious resource. Millions of players from all walks of life electing to sink their time, energy, and mental and physical capacities into a bottomless pit of purported recreation, meanwhile stoking the flames of a new capitalist machine. Hellscape, thy name is MMORPG.

The evidence abounded. For one thing, real-life markets had emerged to commoditize gold farming, the practice by which MMORPG players earned various in-game currencies in order to sell them online for actual dollars (otherwise known as real money trading or RMT). Its economic opportunity was unmistakable: virtual currencies could be harvested from anywhere, including countries with a very cheap labor force, and gamers already paying ~$20/month for subscriptions could be counted on to drop a little extra in order to speed the progression of their characters.

So, inevitably, a cottage industry dominated by the Chinese arose to exploit global economic asymmetries.

This was not necessarily bad news for the East or Southeast Asian workers doing the actual farming; while reports of harsh conditions proliferated, clicking a mouse is inherently safer than most factory jobs. Rather, it was bad news for the game developers, who now had to worry about the liability of creating and hosting potential havens for money laundering, fraud, and other regulatory noncompliance issues, and who scrambled to find workarounds.

It was also bad news for the user base, who on top of everything else were wittingly or unwittingly tampering with their own game by driving up inflation and cratering what was once a level playing field.

But none of these peccadillos compared to the sheer grossness of what the virtual markets represented in the abstract. At their peak they stored billions of dollars of real value. Even today, with shrinking subscribership, trading estimates put their aggregate GDP as high as $28 billion. That’s a player-produced economy larger than Latvia’s — which is an actual, physical place where people actually, physically work.

You could argue that virtual currencies are not so different from cryptocurrencies, options and futures markets, and other kinds of secondary and speculative bet-making. But by feeding the dependencies of gamers who pay for the privilege of producing this wealth, and essentially don’t profit from it at all, virtual currencies feel orders of magnitude more perverse.

I’ll take the Candy Crushes and Mobile Strikes over World of Warcraft any day. At least the lower-order freemium games come at my wallet with the baldness of a slot machine or lotto ticket and not some blood elf in battlegarb, jonesing for his next fix.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.