AUTE GODAGER has more power over his economy than Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board does. He has more influence over global politics than Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations. For the inhabitants of his world, Mr. Godager is nothing less than an all-powerful god.
Of course, Mr. Godager's world does not really exist. And deities do not have to worry about their universe's inhabitants' picking up and leaving for a competing reality because they are dissatisfied with their selection of weapons. Last week Mr. Godager was worrying about just that.
His world is the planet Rubi-Ka in the year 29476. It is the universe of Anarchy Online, part of the new breed of so-called massively multiplayer online games that have helped transform the game industry.
Fans of massively multiplayer games like Anarchy Online and EverQuest often spend dozens of hours a week in their virtual environments. In exchange for the subscription fees they pay (Anarchy Online costs $12.95 a month), players are vocal, active and sometimes downright ornery in demanding consistency in their online economies and overall balance in their digital worlds. If they do not like the way a game is going, they vote with their feet (or their keyboards), cancel their accounts and move.
That is what Mr. Godager, game director for Anarchy Online (www .anarchy-online.com), confronted last week. A tentative alteration to a set of rare and powerful game pieces called low-light targeting scopes raised the threat of a mass uprising and widespread cancellations by Anarchy Online players.
Funcom, the Norwegian company that runs Anarchy Online, does not release subscriber figures, but analysts say that the game must have at least tens of thousands of users. Last week many of them posted irate messages on online bulletin boards and sent e-mail to Funcom in protest, setting aside professional rivalries (Metaphysicists versus Nano Technicians, for instance) and interspecies tensions (different sorts of mutants do not always see eye to eye, literally).
"The way the people vote is by leaving the game, and we don't really want that," Mr. Godager said in a telephone interview from Funcom's offices in Oslo, sounding less like a god than like a junior congressman besieged by lobbyists. "People have invested so much time and effort into this and it's a big part of their life, and we were trying to take all of this into consideration when we made this decision for all of those people who feel like they own the game and own the characters."
Mr. Godager faces the difficult task of making Anarchy Online's virtual world as welcoming for newcomers as it is challenging for addicts. As part of that effort, his team announced last week that it was going to "nerf" the virtual low-light scopes, which increase the chances of inflicting more damage on a target. In online parlance, "nerf," after the soft, squishy real-life toys, means to make something drastically less effective. In June, Funcom had decided that no more would be created but that it would not disable the scopes that already existed in the game.
That decision made the few remaining scopes extremely valuable. A newcomer to Anarchy Online might play off and on for a month and accumulate, say, 100,000 credits by killing monsters and selling treasure found on the corpses. The most powerful scopes routinely sell for 200 million credits or more, putting them far out of the reach of all but the most dedicated players.
Some players - especially new ones who cannot afford the scopes - call that situation unfair. The majority - particularly the hardcore players who can think about buying the scopes - appear to believe that Anarchy Online should operate as a market-based economy, meaning that it is acceptable for luxury goods to be available only to the rich. But many of those players complained that the latest change contradicted the company's earlier statement that the scopes would remain in the game.
"When a person devotes a lot of time and energy towards something, a person tends to feel some sense of possession," Jen Kozar, a high-level Anarchy Online player from Hawaii, wrote in an e-mail interview last week. "The biggest problem with nerfs is that it can take what a player did and invalidate it."
Mr. Godager said that in response to the outcry over the planned changes, Funcom might scale back the adjustment in the scopes.
The players, meanwhile, say that in virtual worlds, as in real life, a gap between rich and poor will persist.
"At low levels you barely manage to scrape by unless you have friends in-game with higher-level characters that help you," a high-level player known as Hayake said by e-mail last week. "At higher levels you just keep on amassing funds, as there is nothing anymore that you can spend them on."
"In an hour of playtime," Hayake wrote, "I probably leave more money lying on the floor than a new character can make in a week of playtime. Decadence rules at high levels, I guess."
