Journal #8

In Charles Stross’s Halting State, the not too distant future is eerily believable unlike other stories we have read in class. The reason behind that would be that most the stories we have read were written in the 1980’s where technology was just starting to boom, but Halting State was written in 2007 where many of the gadgets and technologies mentioned and dreamed about in the 1980’s has become reality. The idea of a crime committed in a virtual world being taken into the real world and pursued in real life may seem like an impossible feat, but with some of the immersive online communities available today, this could definitely become a true case.
The game of Second Life is based on the economy of the game engine; the whole point of playing Second Life is to create a monetary gain. In Halting State, the game Avalon Four is the most popular game of the time and, like Second Life, has a way of turning the virtual money into real money (SecondLife.com) With a game as immensely popular as Avalon Four, the game company responsible for the creation, Hayek Associates has a real issue on their hands when, “the game loses players by the millions and everyone's stock prices take a nosedive” (Wagner). The game economy starts to crash, in turn making the real life stock crash. The relation between Avalon Four and games like World of Warcraft and Second Life are incredibly similar. I could see World of Warcraft becoming the real life version of Avalon Four because of the Orcs and how immensely popular the game is.
Online communities have grown significantly since the early days of chat rooms and have now become large groups in three dimensional worlds (Meadows). As Meadows has mentioned, “An avatar is an interactive, social representation of a user”, therefore makes the player responsible for what the avatars do within a virtual world. If an avatar goes against the rules of the game, the user is at fault and should be punished. In today’s games when a player would do a malicious act to ruin the game for others in an unfair way, the user would be banned from playing and if real money were to be attached to the virtual money, the company could refuse the payout. In Halting State, however, there is a mole within Haytek Associates, who is giving away info on how to hack into Avalon Four. This mole is causing the stock of Haytek Associates to plummet.
The story behind Halter State can be seen as somewhat a reflection of what our future may develop into. The gaming world has become so embedded within our normal society that when a crime is committed in the game itself, the real world reacts to it. Today there are problems and “crimes” committed within the virtual worlds and if they are serious enough they are dealt with by the company that makes the game. The reason much of the crimes committed in virtual worlds today are not taken as serious is because these virtual worlds are still considered “games”. Once something has the title of “game” no one would take problems in the virtual world as seriously and they can laugh it off and ignore anything that may be a potential problem. Once a game becomes so immersed within our society that it looked at more like another way to communicate instead of a game and has millions and millions of users, crimes committed in that world will be reacted to in our world. Like Meadows says, “Maybe the more freedom we have, the more rules and roles we need to invent.”