“Human-Currency Interaction”: Learning from Virtual Currency Use in China, Assigned CHI '08

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1360000/1357059/p25-wang.pdf?key1=1357059&key2=4052441721&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=84571263&CFTOKEN=98591662

Yang Wang, University of California
Scott D. Mainwaring, Intel Research

Comments:
Nate Brown

Summary:
This paper outlined a study conducted on virtual money in China.  The researchers interviewed 50 gamers about their experiences with virtual money.  They wanted to explore the relations between virtual money and real life money and get a better insight into how people perceived virtual money.

With virtual money, eg WOW money, Q points, xbox live marketplace points, gaining a significant foothold into the gaming community it is important to understand the impacts that it has on the culture of the gaming community.  In China a service called QQ is very large and offers things called Q points.  The researchers, when interviewing their subjects, found that many young gamers regard Q points to be just as high as the standard real life currency.  Some however, had a varied view.  One respondent mentioned that while online money attempts to distance itself from real money, there is no real difference.  When we spend virtual money we are still spending real money.

The researchers also looked into how gamers transfer this virtual money from one player to another.  They found that many players didn't trust the internet infrastructure and therefore preferred face to face character transactions.  The players would meet in real life and then sitting next to each other they would conduct the avatar transfer.  While this may seem to be a negative side effect of an poor internet infrastructure, the researchers found that many gamers found this to be fun and exciting.

Discussion:
I think the study brought up some valid points but on a whole it didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know.  I was really shocked at the story of the man who went to meet with a gamer to buy some stuff from him for 400 USD and was shocked to find that the other gamer was an 11 or 12 year old.  I just find it hard to believe that people can get into these games that much.  The feeling I got from this paper was that with these self contained virtual currencies it just makes it easier for MMO addicts to further withdraw themselves from the real world.

The paper only mentioned once that the community needed to make sure that a lot of care was taken to ensure that people were not being taken advantage of however I think more research should go into that sort of field.  Many people fail to see that when they spend virtual currency they are really spending real money with a different label.  We need to find some way to make this more apparent to gamers as a whole.