Project Entropia & Club Neverdie in the Papers

itto · Jan 10, 2006

Hi
this is Swedish article about PE

http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=2204&a=511528

Feel free to practice your swedish or wait until I or anyone else have a translation for you.

itto · Jan 10, 2006

well that didnt take long :)

A Second Life On The Net

The british filmdirector Jon Jacobs bought a holidayresort in space for 100 000USD. But the resort only excists in a computer game. The border between the worlds is being erased when the games becomes more human.

On monday the 19th of december was the openingparty on Jon Jacobs newly built resort. If you are passing by, the resort is located on an asteroid in Paradise V.

Included in the purchase of the resort was a housing complex with 1000 apartments, a mall, a large sports arena, an amphitheatre and 10 biotopes.
Jacobs sees the purchase as an investment and is counting on getting his money back. Now he's going to sell tenant-ownerships, tickets to sports events, hunting rights on his lands and he has the right to tax all activity on his domains.
All this is a part of the world, the life, that takes place in the computer game
Project Entropia every day and night.
This MMORPG has broken new ground with its virtuel world with real economy. 350 000 players from 179 countries and everything is being controlled from the old facilities of a newspaper on JÃ¤rntorget in Gothenburg.

- The thought from the beginning wasn't to make a game. What we want is still to create a virtuel reality where you can move around in a 3dimensional environment instead of looking at the internet as a flat text page with pictures, says Jan Welter Timkrans, MD and founder of MindArk the company which has developed Project Entropia.
After studies at "Chalmers" Welter Timkrans invented a securitysytem which he sold to several big industries. Then he made a computersystem for purchasing which today is being used by both UN and the Worldbank.

Project Entropia is his latest work och the result from almost 10 years of developing. This year his company has a turn over of â?¬3 millions and he claims that next year it will be doubled.

So what do you do in this other world?

You create your own character, an avatar, and gives it a name and the qualities oneself might would like to have in real life.
Then begins the hunt for success. You build houses or networks; a creative mind could team up with an engineer and togheter make a winning team. Hard work and specific competence is rewarded.

It takes several years to work your way up, to climb in levels och make money on selling services or things. The success is measured in the games own currency which is called PED ( Project Entropia Dollars ). The money can be exchanged following the american currency. 10 PED is worth 1USD.

- I think mainly two things draws players to these games, says Hans Sollerman, MD for E-man, a company that among other things works with solutions for e-trade:

- You enter a social community with very clear rules on how you are allowed to behave. The real world is much more complex och scary with real people who acts unpredictably. Here you get a chans to become someone. You can buy a virtuel island and be king. In a time with a social pressure which says that you're not good enough the way you are, this is a way to succeed, to be seen, to get a value you wouldn't in the other world, says Sollerman.

The examples where the border between the real and the virtual world gets blurry are several. In South Korea, where online roleplaying is so big that 3 tv-chanels, that has live broadcasts of competitons in different computer games, has goten more and more problems with mafia activity.
Older, more established players attacks newbies och demands money - real money - for protection.

In the game "Sims online" a 17 year old boy was caught with having opened a brothel where he sold cybersex to other players. For the brothel owner - who in the game went by the name Evangeline - it was game over.

In China a computergame company was ordered by the court to pay court costs and 150 Euro in damages to the player Li Hongchen who had lost his virtuel stockpil of weapons. The sentence is a precedent och means that virtual assets are not to be valued different than things in the real life.

A Chinese player stole a virtual sword of a competitor. The robbed player looked up the thief and killed him - in reality. In june he was sentenced to life in prison.

A consequence from bigger money being circulated in the virtual world is that many people has quit their jobs in the real world to work full time in the virtual world. For the ones that don't have the possibility to put down the time which is necessary on their avatar, but still wants to climb in levels, it's becoming common to hire someone to take over for you in the virual world.
Most common is that players in the west world hires help from Asia to take care of their avatar. In China "sweatshops" has started to spread where employees takes care of a westerners virtual alter ego.

- It's like in the real life. Some people has money to hire people to do what they consider to be boring. The ones doing these assignments are happy since they can earn money, states Jan Welter Timkrans.

The reports on computer game addiction arrives in a steady interval. A world where it also is profitable economicaly to play alot sounds like a green house for potential addicts.
In South Korea a 28 year old man died in august last year from participating in Starcraft for 50 hours with only short toilet brakes.

- It's easy to get all obsessed by the game, that the game becomes more important than the real life, especially for young people. But in princible it's like any other hobby. I have friends who mountainbikes in the forest. They are totally crazy och bikes with their lives at stake. It can be degenerates from everything, says Hans Sollerman.

Jan Welter Timkrans defends gaming and compares it with watching TV.

- Here you are a participant instead for a viewer.

Lars Ilshammar is a historian with an alignment on technology and politics and
has followed the roleplaying games development on the internet.

He means that many gets their strongest impressions and experience their true passions in this created world and that the grey and dull reality is just a scene you return to now and then to sleep and earn money in.

- It says quite alot about our time that people feel that the life that the welfare state has created isn't enough to satisfy our needs. That you don't find the meaning of life in the everyday routine. For that reason you search for the meaning somewhere else and you get your kicks in the world of computer games instead, states Ilshammar and adds:

- If the real reality becomes less important or nearly sinks away och all the strong feelings is experienced in the created world one could ask oneself a philosophical question: What is actually most real? The physical world or the created world? It's up to ourselves to decide that.
Click to expand...

itto · Jan 10, 2006

hmm something did caught my attention

This year his company has a turn over of â?¬3 millions and he claims that next year it will be doubled.
Click to expand...

3 million Euro ($ 3 535 394) aint much of a turnover !! :-k

Bunny · Jan 11, 2006

Thanks for a great article and especially for the tranlsation. :)

MA expects to double their profit. Hmmmm I just wonder how they plan on doing that........I bet I can guess.

Is profit and turnover the same thing??? hehehe

itto · Jan 11, 2006

Bunny said:

Thanks for a great article and especially for the tranlsation. :)

MA expects to double their profit. Hmmmm I just wonder how they plan on doing that........I bet I can guess.

Is profit and turnover the same thing??? hehehe

Click to expand...

Well I think they really need to atleast doule their turnover (guess that also will improve their profit) to secure that amount of peds that are inGame

A theory for the conspiracy fans: Is the bad loot caused by big withdrawns ?

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