Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.
The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.
Wired News just published a story in which I'm quoted on the new GamePal account rental service, a system that allows players to pay a fee to visit MMOGs with characters of their choosing. Here's how Wired explains it:
The article has since been Slashdotted, and general sentiments in the /. posts as well as the Wired article are negative. Many of the qualms resemble those about buying characters outright; players are concerned that character renters will have no investment in the game, disturb existing communities. Even the makers of IP-friendly world Second Life object: the article quotes Linden Labs CEO Philip Rosedale arguing that character rentals risk undermining the identity of players and undermining the world's community. Nate Combs agreed that rentals might dilute social environments in MMOs.
We usually leave discussions of MMOGs and Virtual Worlds to Nate and our many other friends over at Terra Nova, but I'll make an exception since I've gone on the public record with a comment. I actually think character rentals are a very interesting idea, albeit not one without potential problems (what's the deal with the busty blue haired girl on the GamePal page anyway)
The point I tried to make in the Wired article is that renting a character implies a qualitatively different play experience than playing one through. As such, character renters are likely experiencing an entirely different social dynamic than residents of these worlds. I tried to draw the analogy of Virtual World Tourism. Renting a character is more like renting a car for a weekend than it is like invading an existing social space. Trying out a game at different stages might encourage players who otherwise would not play at all. But more interesting to me, if these games are in fact virtual worlds, not games but places (as Richard Bartle has argued), then virtual world tourism seems like an activity potentially orthogonal to "normal" gameplay itself. I am never, ever going to start playing EverQuest or Lineage. But I might be interested in visiting, especially if I could visit my friends who do play those games and see them first-hand.
Of course, one can't bring up the notion of tourism without bearing the burden of exoticism and the postcolonial critique of tourism. But I am not convinced that virtual world tourists would be so detached from the virtual world qua third world. In fact, virtual world tourism might actually improve broader awareness and interest in issues of governance, property, and social structures in these worlds. For what it's worth, the character renter does have some responsibility to the world: he is liable for any "damage" to the character he rents, such as level demotion or violating the terms of service. Another, alternative way to look at virtual world tourism is as hospitality (in the classical sense) extended by residents to visitors, as a way of cementing and extending their relationship to the outside world.
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