Lots of press and discussion popping up about cheating in online games, and its effects on the gaming communities in which it happens. The New York Times recently ran this piece, which was an interesting look into the issue, and the wonderful folks over at GameGirlAdvance linked back to the year 2000 piece at the Game Developers Conference on the same topic. All very interesting stuff - but the thing that blew me away was a fairly recent development on the Stormhammer Server of Sony's Everquest Legends.

The names here are removed to protect the innocent, and most of the threads I read this on have now been deleted which is why I [almost] think its ok to talk about. It seems that one of the "guilds" on the Stormhammer server has recently had a moment of crises with it's guild leadership. The group of RL (real life) friends that formed the guild apparently had a very different purpose than those intended by Verant and Sony Online Entertainment. After months of leading the guild on several high-end raids and gaining all kinds of in-game items and loot, this group of friends took those items from the guild vault and sold them on Ebay, and then vanished from the server.

Online identity and trust issues abound. But before you dismiss this as 'oh, well, who really cares about some gold pieces and magic swords that are really just numbers in a database', take a good look at what's happening in online communities of this size. One economic study by California State University at Northridge Professor Edward Castronova placed Norrath (the virtual world of Everquest) as the 77th richest world economy, based on the value of the items in the world adjusted to their value in then-current Ebay auctions. This was reported in WIRED (link above) and several other sources.

So the folks that perpetrated this virtual heist won out with what could have amounted to thousands of dollars in US currency. Now, this is devious, I suppose, but I personally know people who make money starting new characters, powerlevelling them up to god-like status, and then selling them off and starting again. Any cheat program or automated levelling system is just an advantage to reduce the time between character creation and profit on investment. So what makes this different?

In a word, trust. What's interesting as a social phenomenon is the idea that people are willing to sell "virtual relationships" and/or reputation for real world currency. The vault vandals will likely never be able to show themselves on the server again (although they *might* as different characters, which is another interesting issue of online identity), the one thread that holds these communities together is reputation. But in the end, was that worth it? I mean, who cares if you blow off some other folks that play a game - it's not like you *really* stole anything...

The other thing that was fascinating was the speed at which this spread through the community of Norrath. Wildfire doesn't come close to describing it, more like 'instant atomic detonation'. And that's because actions like this strike at the heart of what makes massively-multiplayer games tick - teamwork and collaboration. The games are structured such that in the end-game there really is no solo play. Dragons take 40-70 people to kill, and everyone must work together, even if it is to kill 'the other team' rather than a computer controlled monster. To betray your team is to essentially abdicate from the society. So what makes this so incredibly common? The balance of real-world reward to virtual fame? Fascinating.