Alain Galvan ·Apr 28, 2024 · Updated 7 hours ago
A story about inheriting a large sum of gold in Ragnarok Online, and the implications that has on games and their meta-gameplay.
Tags: blogragnarokonlinezenyinheritancepaladinroyal guardswordsman
When I was younger, I played a popular MMORPG which combined detailed 2D isometric pixel art with 3D environments, called Ragnarok Online.
This was a game that had massive environments and hundreds of thousands of players, PvP and PvE elements, rare items, and a bustling economy of players buying and selling items.
Despite this being a virtual world, the individual interests and incentive structures of the game aligned themselves in such a way that players collaborated to reduce the cost of travel and improving themselves. Thus, like the real world, a large amount of wealth had concentrated in people that had very valuable items and services, with little stopping the accumulation of wealth and inflation.
The amount of money that could be made from mercantile business was astonishing, where simply performing PvE item sales could net you a few hundred or thousand of the currency, merchandise regularly sold for 100-1000 times that amount or even more thanks to the economy's standing wealth, reminiscent of our own where the multiplicative nature of the finance market leads to more standing wealth.
Similar stories exist in other massively multiplayer games, such as Runescape, Tibia, Maple Story, and of course, World of Warcraft. The value of person to person trade is astonishing and serves as a window to how valuable it is in the real world and how societies progress Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
On the close of a typical school day in 5th grade, I ran to my father's HP Pavilion a618x, turned on my 1280x1024 pixel CRT display, and logged onto Ragnarok Online. While exploring the innermost parts of the map alone, a borderland between the Sograt Desert and Payon Forest, I stumbled across another player that proposed something interesting. They claimed their friend was logging off for good and wanted to transfer in game currency to another player, with the promise that I might receive half.
Looking back on it now, it sounded like they were setting me up as a cash mule. Perhaps the player quitting was actually part of some cash-to-currency exchange or sold duplicated items. Maybe they did something socially terrible to their online friends group, or perhaps their parents just wanted them to quit playing so much. I can't say what their motivations were, just that mine were immediately blinded by greed and my 10 year old naivete couldn't see the possible red flags.
In hindsight, they were most likely just quitting, as the amount was a paltry sum in the context of the game economy, but very noticeable to me.
I was to take 3 million zeny, split in 2, so 1.5M to me, 1.5M to the other player. The amount of access this windfall afforded me was astonishing. At the time the most I ever saved was 60,000 zeny (0.04%), so suddenly having access to 1.5M meant the world was open to me. I could buy items sold by players in the capital city of Prontera, build a community via a guild, or travel and explore the greater map quickly through air travel and actually afford the high fare to use airships.
Eventually I'd find myself exploring the entire map, becoming a Crusader, then Paladin, then finally a Royal Guard, and without that windfall I wouldn't have maintained the motivation or desire to keep going since the calculus of time-to-value was growing too high. Thus it became clear how meta-gameplay of economics and social structures also factored into time savings. For the marginalized, the poor, young and lacking, these moments can resonate with them as they discover their real-life analogues later in life.
Games are meant to teach lessons, and socioeconomic lessons are among the most difficult lessons of all to teach and gamify.