Gaming assets — where art thou?
My first MMORPG, literally the first online game I’ve played was Ultima Online (UO) back in 1998.
I was so obsessed with the game where I basically spent an average of 6–8 hours minimum a day playing it (that’s during my school days in the US/Canada so you can imagine the hours of sleep I get on a daily basis).
For those of you who haven’t heard of UO, it’s almost like living a dream in the digital world, where back then it was still an extremely new concept (unlike what we’ve seen recently from the movie Ready Player One).
I played a Tamer character in game where I get to tame different creatures and have made myself a name out of it (I think my character name was Grandmaster Tamer Lich Lord in Lake Superior, which is one of the deadliest critters in the dungeon).
Playing a tamer’s role requires your character to level up on your basic weapon & melee skills (along with various sub-skills like mining/lumber jacking/poisoning etc.), mastering your taming skills (to 100) by taming various creatures/animals and train yourself up to tame special and possibly rare creatures within the game.
Most of these creatures (rare ones) are normally found deep inside the dungeons, various skills and tricks are required, for example camping at a certain spot and waiting for the rare breed to spawn while fighting off monsters and other PKs (player killers). Those were the good old days and I have spent countless hours enjoying every bit of it.
So much so that I have even made serious contribution on a rather popular UO fan site (MarkeeDragon) and moderated a tamer forum to share my experiences, writing game guides and such …
A hardcore UO player enough to travel to Austin, I visited the Origin Systems headquarter and met with their game design team plus attended a fan-only event “UO Faire”, where real players gathered and dressed up as their game character or in-game creatures.
What’s intriguing about UO is that the form of ‘in-game economy’ and ‘character assets’ already existed (before year 2000), there were multiple ‘rare’ items (scarcity depends on the difficulty and spawn rate of such items) and there were also ‘bugged’ items (possibly wrong coding resulting in a one of a kind item whether it is in color or comes with a weird name) you can obtain during normal game play.
These items (along with my favorite tamable & rare spawned creature “pure black nightmare”) were being sold on eBay and other online marketplaces for real cash. You can also purchase in-game ‘gold’ with real cash and the transaction will be completed in game (e.g. meet at this place at this hour and the in-game gold will be transferred to your character at the in-game bank; a drag and drop interaction within the game).
Security issues existed, scammers may take your money transferred via paypal and you ended up not getting a response from the seller (yes you can report them on eBay as fraud seller etc.) but still … My point here is that this is the root of the online/offline society, you role-played a character in a digital world, you used real life money to purchase items within the game, you have houses that
you own (scarcity of in-game land to place the property is an exciting side topic) and you could sell them on eBay (I have sold a castle for over USD2,000 on eBay); you are living a life beneath your real life, you have in-game friends where you haven’t met before (AOL is at its prime, ICQ is only beginning to be popular, MIRC is still a great channel of meeting new ‘online’ friends back then); all of this has already existed prior to year 2000.
However, game assets do not belong to the players, you don’t actually own the items (the houses, the nightmares, the weapons or the gold etc.), these assets belong to the game developer, and they could be taken away from you any time. The ‘ownership’ aspect does not exist (you would ‘think’ you own it, and yes you own it in-game but that’s about it).
With the recent breakthrough of blockchain technology, all these are about to change where players will be able to own these in-game assets, trust/security issues will no longer be a major issue.
Imagine having your own character, avatar, pets, weapons, armors, houses, all your assets are transferable & inter-operable; imagine I still own my UO character along with all my goodies today, I can use it as my avatar to play on my Wii Mario Kart race, my weapon in UO became my Mario Kart booster; when I play my Mario Kart game in an eSports arena in Las Vegas, I will be able to race in a Las Vegas track, collect special items and points in LV because I actually played there (a bit like Pokemon Go).
It’s an endless imagination route, casino games can be entertaining, console, PC, mobile, social, eSports, online games can all have inter-operable assets.
To me, that’s the future of gaming, in a blockchain world.
Embrace it, it’s gonna be a whole lot of fun!
