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Is Free Boring?
This is an interesting article on Wired about how when it comes to virtual worlds, people supposedly get bored unless they are able to amass currency:
What if everything in life were free? You’d think we’d be happier. But game designers know better: We’d be bored.
Economics is loosely defined as choice under scarcity. After all, in the real world, there’s only so much to go around. You can’t always get what you want, and unfulfilled desires give rise to markets. But in a game world, there’s no inherent reason for scarcity. Game designers have given us plenty of utopias where we can have all the mithril we want, to buy whatever we want whenever we want it. Problem is, those worlds turn out to be dull. For example, the developers of Active Worlds made everything in the game free. Players built enormous houses - in which there was nothing to do. The game never quite caught on. That’s why today’s newer massive synthetic worlds make life hard. It’s why we have to scheme, fight, and occasionally beg for food, shelter, transportation, and great big flaming swords. Games show us that scarcity can be fun.
So what I want to know is, are they right? Is free really boring?
I expect that the first thing that’s going to pop into your mind is: no way! And as evidence, you will point to things which you can get for free, like: library books, mp3 downloads, website content, etc. But really, those are freebies in a world which doesn’t work like that. They are islands. Then, on another level we have natural things available for free: sunlight, air, trees, etc. Those things are both free and awesome, definitely. But within the realms of human society, is free boring? What about hugs?
The reason I ask is that when I read this article I didn’t think about video games, but about how the real world works. If we replaced “game designers” with something like “social engineers” or “power elites”, would the above passage be an accurate depiction of the world we live in? Is money something that the designers of our societal games included because we’d get bored without it? Or did they include it so as to control us with it? Or is money just some weird thing, almost an entity unto itself with a mind of its own? Why does money even exist?
- God in games
- Well then I must be one of the best damn workers around
- The Information Universe & Holograms
- The Information Universe & Holograms
- Movies watch us
- Prev: Without being killed or imprisoned…
- Next: Living in Walmart
March 29th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
I think Free is only boring for things we don’t really need… or want. Seriously, I think free is great. I could use a lot more free time.
March 29th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Your quote shows the hole in your analysis: “For example, the developers of Active Worlds made everything in the game free. Players built enormous houses - in which there was nothing to do.” Having free stuff is ok, you just need something fun to do. The nature of a thing makes it fun. The cost is only how much you need to do to get it.
March 30th, 2006 at 12:02 am
Where’s the hole in my analysis? It consisted of open-ended questions. I’ve yet to come to a conclusion as to whether what they’re saying is accurate.
I think what they are trying to say here is that money provides an incentive for behavior. Without an incentive being provided us, it can be quite difficult to come up with one on your own. That much I definitely agree on.
An example from my own life: when I was in art school, I felt really driven to paint all the time. The reason being that I really wanted to excel in art school and be a good artist. At some point, that incentive system broke down for me, and I no longer wanted to excel in art school. And I dropped out. For a long time, I was able to sustain the momentum or the incentive to paint on my own, because I still wanted to be a great artist.
At some point though, that desire too kind of fell away and I lost my incentive to be a great artist, and my painting eventually dropped down to nothing. I think we do often need outside incentives to get us to want to do things - to have there be concrete reasons being handed to us as to why we move forward. The ultimate goal as an artist seems to be to internalize those incentives, so that you’re doing it for the sheer experience of doing it. But getting to that point is more difficult maybe than being a great artist. Anyone can be technical and learn to draw well with the right guidance. But to move forward with no guide - that’s another thing.
That - for me - is what this conversation is about personally. One of many aspects, anyway.
March 30th, 2006 at 5:49 am
My life is filled with computers and math and engineering, and hence filled with analyses and optimization. That tends to spll over into other areas, which is why I misspoke. I apologize. I’ve been thinking about game design a lot lately, and I must have gotten stuck at the game reference.
I think that people come up with their own goals and the accompanying incentives quite well on their own. However, these will often conflict to varying degrees, which would probably impede some strategy of one of the elites. Needless to say, such things cannot be allowed to stand in the elite’s sight. So, they come up with incentives for the masses to do what will move the master plan forward.
Obviously that’s over simplified, but you can probably see my point.
March 30th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Yeah, I think so. You’re saying that people can and do have their own motivations, but that in order to maintain “power elites” those motivations are either replaced by or wrapped around money as a motivator or at least as a necessity to accomplish other things.
My point is looking at that from the reverse. What if without money we got bored and had no motivation? I’m not saying that it *IS* true, so much as I’m examining what else would be true *IF* that were true…
March 30th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
A lot of people would be chasing around money for most of their life, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Not much would matter to them beyond the “artificial” incentives of money and the things they can get for it. Note that this would not be easily distinguished from the situation where the motivations and incentives of money overpowered the motivations of the individual.