Wednesday, March 15, 2000
By Brian D. Crecente, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Greg Bachrach spends 20 hours a week living in a fantasy world.
He assumes a fake identity and wanders the city streets and forest paths of Britannia, a virtual realm populated by hundreds of thousands of people from around the world who also live fictional lives through a computer game called Ultima Online.
But before you brand Bachrach and his playmates a bunch of geeks with their heads in the cyber-clouds, get this: He says he makes up to $3,000 a week playing the game.
Ultima Online is what's known as a massively multiplayer online game. It and similar games such as Sony's Everquest and Microsoft's Asheron's Call run 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the Internet. In them, players create medieval fantasy characters, assume
their identities and travel the game's landscape in search of monsters to kill, money to hoard and fame to garnish -- sort of like an online Dungeons and Dragons.
Each game has its own kind of monsters that wander enormous virtual landscapes -- Asheron's Call is the size of Rhode Island -- and its own adventures to choose from, such as finding a lost treasure or saving a damsel in distress. As players fight their way through the adventures, they become stronger and earn gold that they can use to buy better weapons, clothes and places to live.
But despite the cartoon gore and the make-believe quests, real people are online gaming's main attraction. Thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of players are in the game with you, and when you run into one of them, you can ignore them, trade goods with them, chat with them, or draw weapons and fight. Groups of friends from across the country or across the globe often play together, and for most people, the interaction is what makes online gaming fun. No one is trying to beat the game, but they are trying to one-up their online friends and other players by getting better gear, better houses, better stuff.
That's where people like Bachrach come in. The 29-year-old from Miami works by day as a software developer in Boca Raton and puts in the playtime at night to find the treasures, homes and weapons that can turn a digital zero into a cyber hero, and then hands them over for a price.
"You have a lot of people who can't afford the 40 hours a week to get the items you need to enjoy the game," he said. "There are a lot of people out there who would rather part with $20 instead of 20 hours."
Bachrach typically lists items -- houses, pets, gold and more -- for sale in online auction houses such as eBay, where people can log on, view his goods and bid real money for them. When someone sends him real money, Bachrach hops back into the game to deliver the virtual goods.
He's not alone. Recently on eBay, items ranging from $25 for four minor weapons to $495 for a magic belt to $1,000 for a lakeside castle and $1,075 for a fully equipped character -- a troll warrior -- were for sale.
Richard Garriott, the imagination behind Ultima Online and founder of the Austin-based computer game company Origin, said he was amazed to see his fantasy creation spawn real-world dollars for its players.
"I was bewildered and mystified," he said. "It became so much more than we ever expected or intended. I'm in awe at times and in horror at times."
Garriott said he knew Ultima would change the way people played games, but he never thought it would be through the game's economy. Instead he and the game's programmers and developers built complicated virtual ecosystems and ethical codes for Ultima.
They created digital animals that grazed and hunted one another, reacting to the virtual world around them and providing something for players to hunt and eat. They constructed a detailed ethical system that punished the bad and rewarded the good in an effort to prevent mass killings of inexperienced players by more experienced players.
But in the end, as in the real world, plain old avarice became most important and a new brand of meanness ruled. Instead of good-hearted souls admiring the plant and animal kingdoms and helping each other thrive, the game fostered players who looked for ways around the ethical codes, ways to cheat and kill and earn money.
"We had roving bands of carpenters who would quickly surround another player and build walls of wooden chests around them, then taunt them and kill them," he said. So Garriott and his team made more rules and found more ways to keep the game fair. As the players evolved, so did the game.
About a year into the now 21/2-year-old game, Garriott said people started selling online items for cash.
"We weren't surprised at first, when it was for tens of dollars. Then it became hundreds and then thousands," he said. "Suddenly we sat back and took notice."
Garriott said he soon realized how important a part of the game e-commerce is.
"I'm now such a believer in making sure people have the ability to sell goods and services to each other for real money that I plan on engineering it into a future game," he said. "One of my primary design philosophies is to create a game mechanic so people can earn an income in the game, quit their real jobs and live in the virtual world forever."
The "mechanic" might not be in place yet, but plenty of players are jumping the gun and dropping out of the real world in favor of the virtual one.
Christine Luke said the game almost landed her in divorce court.
The 48-year-old Lake Worth mother of two said she was addicted to the game, spending six to 10 hours a day, seven days a week, wandering Britannia as Jadedone.
"It's so addicting I would be playing from the time the kids went to school until they got home," she said. "My husband wasn't really happy with me playing the game so much. It kind of sucks you in, where that's all you think about. It's like being addicted to drugs."
Luke said she has since been able to cut her online time down to 10 hours a week.
"It was my therapy," she said. "Some people go to the gym or watch sports. This was my escape."
Bachrach says he isn't an addict, but that's only because he makes it a point to limit himself to 20 hours a week.
"These aren't games anymore," he said. "They are virtual worlds. Anytime you gather 150,000 people in a small area and ask them to coexist for 20 to 40 hours a week in a virtual world, economies and social interactions form."
Garriott says he expects those social interactions to one day become their own form of entertainment.
"I think in seven or eight years we will start seeing games that are not only good enough graphically, but interesting enough to get people to pay to just watch what's going on," he said.
Garriott is already developing a program that can be downloaded from the Internet and used to join a future version of Ultima Online as an observer.
Chris DiCesare, the product manager for Asheron's Call, says his game delivers a major event -- like an unannounced blizzard that coated and killed much of the land in December or a comet that killed an entire city and everyone in it -- every month, so running the game becomes more like producing a television show than simply maintaining a computer service.
"It's similar to the way sitcoms work on television," he said. "You want to do two things, you want to appeal to someone who may be there for the first time, but you also want to have an overlying storyline for the people who have been playing for awhile."
"A blizzard might hit one day, or perhaps a comet could destroy a city," he said. "This is a living game."