Online Gaming

It’s interesting how enmeshed we are with the Internet, and how “real” it is becoming.

I’m playing an online game, and an in-game friend of mine had just gotten scammed a couple of days ago, losing his character’s full set of equipment. While this may not seem like much, that friend was intending to sell off his character’s equipment which would have fetched something along the lines of a few hundred dollars (USD) on eBay.

Granted, he had spent a couple of months playing the game, but I’ve also heard of other people making thousands of dollars on eBay peddling game characters’ virtual goods in games like Diablo 2 and Final Fantasy 11, to name just a couple.

"It's sad to think that people will be so desperate to do better in a virtual world that they're actually prepared to commit a real crime,” said a senior security consultant at Sophos, a security firm, in an article from News.com about a custom-made virus that steals passwords for a specific game, Lineage.

It’s a little mind-boggling how much people will pay for virtual goods, or objects that don’t even exist physically. Though when you think about it, most people in real life do the same thing. Paying to watch a movie for example, where you take nothing except the memory of the film out of the theatre with you, or perhaps buying a CD, which, in the end, is merely a receptacle to your appreciating the music within the CD.

I guess, at the end of it, most things will fade away, and we shouldn’t put too much emphasis on collecting these things, but rather try to enjoy the moments in the day, before they pass us by in our frantic quests and futile struggles to amass material (or virtual) wealth.

As they say, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

::Shawn Toh::
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