MMORPGs: Is this the Bizarro World 2.0?

For those of you too young to remember, the Bizarro World was a fictional planet that existed in the incredible DC comics universe of superheroes and supervillains. The Bizarro world was also known as Htrae, which was Earth spelled backwards (such a supercool play on words!). Superman, Lois Lane, Yellow Lantern, and the great Bizarro himself were early inhabitants of Htrae.

See, I was a big fan of the Superfriends cartoon when I was a kid. Remember that infamous line: “Wonder Twin powers activate”! OK, back to MMORPGS.

While reading Julian Dibbell‘s “Play Money or, How I Quite My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot”, I could not help but think about the Bizarro world. Humans are a peculiar bunch. For us, the real world can be stressful, tedious, boring, expensive, and filled with endless responsibilites like bills and debt. And, that leads us to create these other worlds. The other world of the 20th century was the Bizarro world. Now, the other world for the 21st century is the world of MMORPGs aka Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.

In MMORPGs, hundreds or thousands of players interact with one another in a virtual world. Think Dungeons and Dragons or Second Life. Like the Bizarro world, MMORPGs can mirror real life in many ways. While refreshing my memory on the Bizarro world, I came upon Wikipedia which stated, “ In one episode, for example, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: “Guaranteed to lose money for you”.

Funny how that line could explain our real world current economic collapse. Some things are just so timeless.

In “Play Money”, Dibbell writes about a real man named Troy Stolle who was a carpenter from Indiana. In Stolle’s spare time, he literally spent every waking hour on Ultima Online where he created characters who were expert hunters and archers, and bought a deed so he could build his virtual dream mansion. Virtual life was so good for Stolle until the real world crashed his party.

Stolle fell on hard times and had to sell his prized Ultima Online account. Dibble writes, “Stolle got to talking about the unfortunate reasons he’d sold the account- about how he’d been out of work since 9/11, and how the bills were piling up”.

And, just like in the Bizarro world, trading and bartering are a way of life. In Chapter 20, Dibbell wrote that he himself “had over a hundred dollars in my PayPal account and more than 20 million gp in my bank boxes”. But, probably hearing the ‘easy come, easy go’ mantra in his head, Dibbell goes on to state that “it was never wise to forget that any or all of your assets could vanish, at any moment, with the flip of a bit”.

All of this made me wonder if back in the real world, why had any of the folks who ran companies that were recently bailed out by the US government missed those words of wisdom?

In trying times, escapism is sometimes necessary. See, us humans like to create other worlds but somehow we always manage to bring our real world problems with us. And, we could certainly use a few superfriends right about now!