Abstract
In four ways, massively multiplayer online role-playing games may serve as tools for advancing sustainability goals, and as laboratories for developing alternatives to current social arrangements that have implications for the natural environment. First, by moving conspicuous consumption and other usually costly status competitions into virtual environments, these virtual worlds might reduce the need for physical resources. Second, they provide training that could prepare individuals to be teleworkers, and develop or demonstrate methods for using information technology to replace much transportation technology, notably in commuting. Third, virtual worlds and online games build international cooperation, even blending national cultures, thereby inching us toward not only the world consciousness needed for international agreements about the environment, but also toward non-spatial government that cuts across archaic nationalisms. Finally, realizing the potential social benefits of this new technology may urge us to reconsider a number of traditional societal institutions.
Highlights
Capitalism prides itself on maximizing economic production, yet this is not the same thing as maximizing human welfare and may not be sustainable in the long run
The traditional alternative, Marxism, has degenerated into a rhetorical mask concealing the true ugliness of the Chinese oligarchy, and the term state capitalism is bandied about as if it were not an oxymoron
Sustainability 2010, 2 possible source of insights is the great diversity of virtual worlds that have been developed in the past fifteen years, many of them marketed as massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs or MMOs)
Summary
Capitalism prides itself on maximizing economic production, yet this is not the same thing as maximizing human welfare and may not be sustainable in the long run. The formal game dimension of this virtual world is primarily represented by a series of 7,000 ―quests‖, soon to be increased in the expansion to 10,000, which are adventure missions conducted within a very complex mythology, that provide rewards of increased power, virtual goods, and virtual currency that can be spent to buy other goods from non-player vendor characters and from one of three well-stocked auction systems through which users sell virtual goods to each other. This essay will consider the most obvious topics, with the implication that others will be discovered as research progresses
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