Game Industry – Easy money, painful future

Modern online gaming is new type of addiction. It is, in a way, comparable to drugs, since unlike traditional gaming, you’re always online and you’re always playing, and you also always paying for “virtual good”, that do not exist in any other form than bytes of data.

Online gaming industry brings its owners billions of dollars yearly, worldwide. From conventional internet “breeding and farming” games, to mobile “walk & stalk” role-playing games. A business of fortune arose from your pocket.

You pay for something you can never see or touch, something that does not insures your future or provides you with some eternal knowledge. You pay for bytes of absolutely useless information – consider you put your hard earned 100 cents for a phrase “you’re the tops”. It’s not like a brand slogan, or something, which you could use to make money or attract potential clients. It is not also something you can share with your friends, since being “a top of nothing”, for which you also paid, won’t bring you the glory of the smartest, fanciest or strongest person.

At first, it is free. You just wandering around – what you can do, how you can do it. Then you feel that you are missing something, so you go ahead, and use “free ways” to boost up – in reality it means you flood your device with other similar applications. But free stuff quickly disappears, so you begin to think about paying something, for real.

You start up by a little, turning 1 banknote into 100 credits. You advance your virtual character, and get more adrenalin in your blood. Then you think – “it is not enough” – you go and you pay up 10 more banknotes – now you’re proud owner of a “bazooka” – great investment, considering it has nothing to do with engineering, military or something physical in any way. Bazooka guarantees you 50 successful “frags” – or kills – and you’re the tops, for the moment, until somebody else stalks you. That is where you get so angry, that you go and put 100 banknotes to the bank account of company, who developed this game.

Congratulations! You’ve avenged your death. You’re now the reaching top 100 players, and you’re unbeatable. Meanwhile, company that brought you this drug is 111 banknotes – dollars or euro or yuan or yen or pounds – richer than it was before. What did you got for your 111 banknotes? You got “virtual rating”, “virtual weapons”, “virtual villas”, “virtual cars”, “virtual clothes” – all virtual. No real thing, no real skill, no knowledge or fame, basically you paid 111 banknotes for a sniff of air – or few bytes of data.

You might as well throw out of window those 111 banknotes, and watch their further destiny with even more joy. You could also go and buy some food, some really good food, for yourself, your household, your children, your animals. Or perhaps, you might have bought a nice bottle of wine, to drink with your lady over romantic diner that would, apart from natural excitement, put some bricks into the wall of your future happiness.

You might open online business with 111 banknotes – consider you buy domain name + hosting for a year, or domain + hosting for a month + AdWords from Google. Such small investment could really turn into a goldmine, after all, taken you are smart and affectionate about your line of business.

As every drug, this one most serious consequence is that it directly affects younger generations, in a manner that nobody can really prevent. Yes, you can stop child from smoking, or drinking, telling him it’s bad for his health. Health authorities will help you with enforcing those rules on youngsters. But what about online gaming?

You’ve bought your child some very fancy devices for last New Year, or his/hers birthday – Android or iPhone or whatever. Your child is very happy, and as inquisitive as most children are, he’ll crawl up thru “Market” to find out something new to install. There are serious doubts average child will find some financial package interesting, so one might expect that he, or she, will go straightly to games.

Playing games is fun. Apart from traditional world games, like Chess, which are often pretty suspenseful, games, are developed for sole purpose of entertainment. For young generations to have fun, for older generations to “unwind”. But when we talk about MMO (or MMOG) – massively multiplayer online games – they are made just to “milk” people for money. They don’t bring fun, since moneys are at stake. They don’t let you unwind, since you have to monitor your stats and actively communicate with others, not by words, but by fighting, buying and selling.

Basically, MMO games are social disease of digital era. Some countries with dense population, where such type of disease spreads times and times faster than anywhere else, countries like China, already understood the problem, and trying hardly to fight against it.

Nevertheless, most developed societies, are still seem to be pretty much blind about the subject. They do not seem to accept the fact, that product that slowly makes you addicted, will cause really disastrous consequences later. They do seem to realize it about smoking, only after some hundred years of cigarette empires rule, where many people and their children suffered health related issues.

What is so dangerous about MMO, you might ask. To begin with, it takes moments of your life – moments you could have spend with your family, or friends, at work or at vacation. Instead, you sit with your fancy gadget, running some iMobsters, in hope to score some more kills. You also addict others, which begin to act the same way you do, spend your time on something that gives you nothing. You slowly diminish your eyes, starring at new bright AMOLED screen with small text and pixilated images. Finally, you spend a dollar every now and then, to fulfill the destiny of your virtual character, to make it stronger, to make it undefeatable, and to make it top.

So, you lose your time, you lose your money, you degrade your vision and you attract others to do the same. Also, consider that have started it at 25 or 35 years, but your children will start it from the age of 10 or 12, if not earlier. But the time they are your age, they will wear contacts or glasses. They won’t develop the spirit of responsibility, because they are taught from their childhood to spend money they receive of you to something that brings back nothing.

Results are sad – progress brings solution to one problem, creating others in the way. But keep your hope up, there is a really good chance that in such over-informed society as ours, solutions to common problems will come up much faster, and perhaps, we could resist from greedy and self-destructive thoughts, bringing peace to future generations.