Archival Consumed: The Buying Game

Station Exchange

Back in 2001, a professor named Edward Castronova began to study the way markets worked in a place called Norrath. Norrath does not exist in a physical sense but is the name of the “virtual world” where the online computer game EverQuest is set. EverQuest is filled with half-elves, castles, sword fights and such, and also involves a fairly complex internal economy, whose currency is platinum pieces used to buy weapons, food and other goods. Although the goods are digital, it’s not quite right to say that they don’t have real value; pretty much from the earliest days of Norrath, Castronova discovered, game players found ways to pay real-world dollars for fake-world things.

These black-market, real-money transactions were frowned upon by the game maker but turned out to be unstoppable. After years of trying to thwart the practice, the owner of EverQuest II, Sony Online Entertainment, capitulated to the realities of the unreal marketplace this summer by creating a site called Station Exchange. Here, gamers can use real money in an auction format to buy or sell Norrath’s weapons and scrolls and even fully tricked-out characters.

“It was something that, clearly, our players wanted to do, and placed value on,” explains April Jones, a spokeswoman for Sony Online Entertainment. One of the top prices paid for an item was $500 for a set of Shimmering Star Legplates. But the big money involves buying or selling completely outfitted characters; members of the Templar class are particularly sought after and have sold for as much as $721. Jones says so far only one character has sold at the site’s maximum “sanity cap” value of $2,000 – a Level 50 Fury with formidable craft skills.

EverQuest II has an estimated 350,000 players, arrayed over worlds that are tethered to dozens of servers; it is one of many “massively multiplayer games” with millions of participants around the planet. The idea is generally for the player to build up skills and strengths over time, through adventures and achievements. Castronova, whose forthcoming book, “Synthetic Worlds,” looks at the economics and culture of networked games, points out that most of the popular ones have always had built-in (fake) currencies and thus marketplaces. “It’s kind of interesting that it’s considered a core element of the fun,” he says. “There have been some network spaces where everything is free. Nobody goes there.”

Secondary markets have taken many forms, playing out within the game, on eBay or by way of companies that pay people to play EverQuest, World of Warcraft and other games with the sole purpose of building up characters and acquiring goods for subsequent sale. Some gamers object to this; Castronova has likened it to a Monopoly player stepping out of that game’s currency system by offering another player a fistful of 20’s for Marvin Gardens. Even so, he maintains that attempts to ban the practice are futile. “There are too many people who have money, and others who have time but need money,” says Castronova, who estimates that such spending totals $30 million or more a year in the U.S. “It’s a natural market.”

Jones says that Sony Online Entertainment made the move to institutionalize this natural market partly because the free-for-all deals that went bad often led to complaints to the company’s customer service line. Still, she says, the company recognizes that there are many “purists” who insist that the practice is “morally wrong,” so the Station Exchange option is currently segregated to only two EverQuest II servers, where about 25,000 people play.

This virtual bazaar may sound crazy, and admittedly, there’s something astonishing about, say, the Australian gamer who was reported to have paid $26,500 for an island that exists only within a game called Project Entropia. On the other hand, consider the more routine transactions. The most popular item at Station Exchange, according to Jones, is the Pristine Teak Strong Box, useful for hauling around possessions and costing less then $10. Back in the real world, you might buy a physical suitcase for $50, or you might happily spend 10 times that for a similar one with a luxury brand name on it — how much of that difference is “real” and how much is essentially in the mind? In other words, paying for the intangible is hardly exotic; most of us do it all the time.

[This installment of the Consumed column appeared in the October 16, 2005, New York Times Magazine; it was posted on this site some time much later, despite the fiddled-with time/date stamp.]