Who owns your virtual life?

Sony has at least faced up to the fact that real-world trading of virtual items is far from being sci-fi, and has set up Station Exchange, a "Secure marketplace for EverQuest II players." Considering companies can also make a percentage from all transactions, it’s even more surprising that Blizzard hasn’t addressed it.

The big issue, however, is how the ‘we own it, you just consume it’ attitude limits gaming and runs contrary to the rise of user-generated content, which you might have noticed is a bit of a big deal at the moment. Just look at Snakes on a Plane, the forthcoming Samuel L. Jackson film: the movie studio is sitting back while a phenomenal fan movement generates gags, movies, pictures, poems and buzz - in fact, all the official website does is point back to the fan sites! Now that’s parity, and it’s coming from the hotbed of IP tradition and technophobia that is Hollywood.

Fanatical Flickr

A couple of weeks ago, while trying to think of a topic for this piece, I was thinking about the games I’d spent most time playing recently. It wasn’t God of War, FFVII, Oblivion or Capcom Classics Remixed, all recent purchases, but Flickr. Flickr is technically a photo-sharing website, but it actually began life as an MMO called Game Neverending, and to me, as a gamer, it still feels very ‘gamey’, only it’s one you play with your own content: your pictures. Having just got back from Taiwan, I had plenty of new ammo to try and reach the holy grails, either the Flickr blog or the Explore page, both of which highlight the best pictures on the site.

After the upload of pictures to Flickr, the first step is to tag them to make them discoverable; then commenting on other people’s pictures (gotta build those community links), then submitting my pics to ‘groups’ (themed message boards-cum-guilds), all in an attempt to get comments and secure ‘favourite’ votes, all of which push your pics towards the top of the tree. The whole of the last week I’ve been checking the site obsessively; I have an RSS feed of the comments people have left most recently sitting on my desktop right now… and the addiction feels just like it did when I first loaded up Doom all those years ago. You can close the browser window, but you’ll be back there within a few minutes, for just one more go.