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Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world – and down your street, in The Money Programme.

I suspect there is now a new way to characterise the population Before now, you were either left-handed or right-handed, you could either roll your tongue or you couldn’t or you loved marmite or you hated it….now it would seem you either love MMOGs and spend half your life playing them, or you can’t see the point in them. And if you need to ask what an MMOG is, then you are most definitely with me in the latter group.

Massive multiplayer online games or MMOGs (also sometimes called massively multiplayer online role playing games, MMORPGs) are a range of games played with many others – often thousands and even millions of others -  via the internet. They seem to come in two flavours – either based upon gnomes, trolls and slaying dragons and other beasties or a virtual form of real life, that seems to be nothing like real life as you get to decide for yourself just how beautiful and sociable you are.

As I say, they don’t work for me. In fact the only comment that seems to come to mind when I think about these games is…why? But this lack of understanding may not be my fault. The traditional users of MMOGs are between 18 and 35, and although they are allegedly popular with women, with approximately 30% of players being female, as an older woman (just slightly older), I am not the target demographic. When it comes to online games, older women, or so I have read, ‘enjoy playing short puzzles and logic games’.

'Calvin Klein has announced plans to launch a virtual fragrance'

Whilst these games may not appeal to my natural tastes, as a business and management academic, there may be more professional reasons to give them further thought. These games appear to be offering organisations a new channel to promote, and perhaps eventually distribute, their products and services. Adidas, Toyota and Dell have all created content in the MMOG Second Life. The clothing store, American Apparel, have opened a store in this virtual world, where players can buy items for their virtual alter ego, and Calvin Klein has announced plans to launch a virtual fragrance. 

These virtual worlds have also been identified as a potential laboratory for social scientists such as economists. Economics is an area where it is notoriously difficult to test theories and compare outcomes of different actions. Whilst simple experiments can be set up in classrooms and labs, unless you have a small country at your disposal, it is very hard to set up situations with stakes that the participants really care about or which involve large numbers of individuals over long periods of time. The virtual worlds created in MMOGs meet these criteria perfectly and could provide powerful test beds for new ideas on fiscal or monetary policy or areas of social policy. Indeed, the academic credibility of these games is already established, with one professor in the US securing funding to construct a virtual game world to try out such experiments and Brunel University appointing the UK’s first professor of digital games, whose area of study include MMOGs.

So, perhaps there is something in these games for all of us after all……or perhaps I should just stick to the short puzzles and logic games!

Further reading

•  
• Virtual world, real millions - the Money Programme investiagtes the millions of people opting out of real life and signing up to "live" in computer worlds
• What makes an entrepreneur? - take a test to discover if you’ve got what it takes
• Join the discussion - What do you think of Second Life and World of Warcraft?
• Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games by Edward Castronova, published by University of Chicago Press
• Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, published by IB Tauris
• Understanding Digital Games by Jason Rutter and Jo Bryce, published by Sage Publications

About the author

Elizabeth Daniel is Professor of Information Management at the Open University Business School where she undertakes research and teaching in the fields of e-business and information systems. Elizabeth also undertakes consultancy work for a number of blue chip and leading public sector organisations.

Subscribe to Elizabeth Daniel's posts

 

Blogging about

Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world – and down your street, in The Money Programme.

It would appear from Geoff’s piece last week, detailing his experiences with Microsoft’s Vista, the Open University blogs accompanying this series of the Money Programme, are going to be more personal in nature. This personal theme promises to continue with one of my colleagues sharing his views of living in Spain, whilst working for the OU – and who knows what personal insights we may uncover from another colleague who is set to share his thoughts on the world of male diets and slimming!

Ever keen to follow a trend, I shall share my own experiences of Web 2.0 life. Unfortunately, not being quite on the crest of this wave – I haven’t recorded or posted my own video on-line yet, but like any self-respecting ten year old, my son has. Whilst not in the league of some of the most watched video clips, such as the motivational speaker, Judson Laipply, dancing Barrymore-like to various songs (approx 40 million views) or a personal favourite, the band OK go singing whilst carrying out a complicated dance routine on gym running machines (approx 9 million views). My respect for the latter made greater by the fact I know what damage can be done by falling off such a machine – the belt acts like a sander which is very painful when wearing shorts!

But more interesting to me, than the number of views my son has got (OK – so it’s just a total 45 across two clips), was why he had posted his videos in the first place. After all, he had had no encouragement from me or his school. However, my question to him about why he had posted them was met with a blank look and some words that seemed to be along the lines - you do it because it’s the thing to do. I checked to see if he thought the clips were so good that they would be viewed around the world and he would be famous. No, he hadn’t thought that – it’s just if you have something, you share it. Not a case of everyone might want to see them – more a case of, someone might want to see them.

Still, there may soon be a more obvious reason to share content on the most successful video sharing site, YouTube. At the World Economic Forum in Davos late last month, the CEO Chad Hurley announced their intention to share advertising revenues with those uploading videos. Commentators have speculated that there may be a number of reasons for this move. It may be that they are reacting to competitors that already offer payment to those sharing videos. Alternatively, it may be that Google is looking to earn a speedy return on the $1.65bn it paid for YouTube last November and will drastically increase the amount of advertising on the site. Sharing revenues with content providers may make this increased advertising more acceptable. However, Nicholas Carr, the former editor of Harvard Business Review thinks there may be more significant reasons. He speculates in his own blog, that a relatively small number of videos will account for a disproportionate amount of the earnings. ‘Locking up’ the content of these videos will become important for ensuring significant user numbers and hence revenues. In return for payment, YouTube may seek those uploading videos to grant them an exclusive licence - currently they ask for a non-exclusive, royalty free licence. This would give them complete control over the video hits of the future, just like more traditional media businesses. So, perhaps we should enjoy sharing for the sake of sharing while we still can.

Futher reading

• What makes an entrepreneur? – take a test to discover if you’ve got what it takes
• DIY TV – the Money Programme meets the everday people who are watched by millions
• Join the discussion – what do video sharing sites mean for TV companies?
• Rough Type – Nicholas Carr’s Blog

About the author

Elizabeth Daniel is Professor of Information Management at the Open University Business School where she undertakes research and teaching in the fields of e-business and information systems. Elizabeth also undertakes consultancy work for a number of blue chip and leading public sector organisations.

Subscribe to Elizabeth Daniel's posts

 

Blogging about

Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world – and down your street, in The Money Programme.

In Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far From the Madding Crowd, Boldwood becomes entranced with Bathsheba, after, in a moment of idle fancy, she sends him a Valentine. He hardly knows her and as the narrator tells us:

The great aids to idealization in love were present here: occasional observation of her from a distance, and the absence of social intercourse with her – visual familiarity, oral strangeness. The smaller human elements were kept out of sight; the pettinesses that enter so largely into all earthly living and doing were disguised by the accident of lover and loved-one not being on visiting terms; and there was hardly awakened a thought in Boldwood that sorry household realities appertained to her, or that she, like all others, had moments of commonplace, when to be least plainly seen was to be most prettily remembered.

Hardy gives us a picture of romantic idealisation; an important part of the process of falling in love. In the psychoanalytic view of love and infatuation, we are inclined to project on to others what we most desire in ourselves. We each foster within ourselves an idealised self and look to the other to complete what we lack. For this to happen, it helps that the other person fits our ideal in some sense. However, it also helps that we don’t see too much detail; thus the other person can become a blank slate on which we write our desires. Popular sayings and songs remind us of this:

‘Love is blind’,

‘When your heart’s on fire, you must realize, smoke gets in your eyes’ ,
‘You know it’s clear that I’ve been blind, I’ve been a fool’.

Internet communication, for many, provides the ideal conditions in which to fall in love. Just enough cues about the other person to hook into our desires, not enough information to shatter the romantic illusion. Candid self disclosure becomes common as it is the only means of getting to know each other and is protected by a degree of anonymity, but it is also easy to build a picture that the other wishes to see. Indeed, as I discussed in a recent column on the psychology of deception, the distancing provided by the internet can reduce the emotional costs of deceiving others. Many are attracted to the internet as a medium for relationships for just this reason – it provides the opportunity for emotional contact without personal risk or exposure.

Face-to-face relationships move from an initial encounter in a physical location and based on physical attractiveness, to the discovery of common interests and self-disclosure. Internet relationships proceed in the opposite direction – the physical encounter comes last. For some the transition from romantic idealisation to genuine attachment happens during the course of an internet romance. For others the fantasy becomes tempered with reality as they meet for the first time. For a few the relationship endures. For many the intense feelings of the online relationship evaporate when confronted with the detailed reality of their amorata.

Rosantonietta Scramaglia interviewed fifty people who had fallen in love on the internet. She describes what they told her about the positive and negative sides of the experience:

It creates ‘mystery’, ‘the unknown’, ‘the excitement of something you’ve never experienced before’, ‘it lets you dream’. It is ‘more fun because you can discover the other person gradually’. People feel ‘the fascination of novelty’…

[but] a relationship can spring up which is, … ‘not as serious because it is easier to leave each other because you do not have to face the situation in person’, or ‘not as easy because you are going into it blind’, or a situation where ‘uncertainty’ prevails, where it is ‘impossible to be sure that the other person is really sincere’, where you have to have a blind faith in what you are told, and you risk meeting the wrong kind of people or being taken for a ride’. And, confronted with these unknowns, ‘the worse thing is that you get your expectations up’, and tend to ‘idealize the partner more’.

An increasing number of online services exist to provide opportunities for online romance. A Google search identifies nearly 8.6 million references on the net to ‘online dating’. As we have seen the internet is a medium which provides mystery and distance. As Thomas Hardy shows us, these provide a fertile medium in which love can flourish.

Is internet romance here to stay? I think I can confidently predict that it will continue to grow and make a few entrepreneurs, who have captured the right mix of mystery, distance and intimacy, very rich indeed.

Further reading

• The dating game – are you loyal? The competition among advertisers for our consumer fidelity is fierce.

About the author

Mark Fenton-O'Creevy is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the OU Business School. His research includes investigations into the performance of traders in financial markets, and the problems that occur when management practices are transferred from one country to another.

He is also a National Teaching Fellow, and Principal of the Centre for Practice-Based Professional Learning.

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