D&D vs. Virtual Worlds

In my adult life, I have occasionally experienced disapproval or even derision upon admitting that as a youth I once played Dungeons & Dragons. I have always found, and continue to find, such disapproval surprising; for what could be healthier for a teenager than to engage in harmless role play in the company of friends, with the television off, and without (in my and my friends’ case) drugs or alcohol, while exercising our imaginations and our skills at vivid communication? I often think the disapprovers might better direct their criticisms to today’s internet-based virtual-reality sites, such as Second Life and Entropia Universe. It is not simply because they constitute temptations to spend more hours of one’s day in front of a screen, or even to part with hard-earned money. Rather, these sites make its users do what Dungeons & Dragons players were frequently accused of, but never actually did: settle down into a mental space that is in neither reality nor make-believe, but in some unhealthy realm between the two.
An obvious aspect of these sites is that the worlds they present are not completely virtual. Players can purchase specific individual benefits (for example, property) with real money, and then sell benefits (such as access to the property, or tickets to cultural events that take place on that property), again with real money. Since real-money transactions are brought to bear on the play of the game, the virtuality of the world is broken.
When I was a kid playing Dungeons & Dragons, the only way your character could obtain things in the game (treasure, weapons, spells) was by doing things within the world of the game, such as steal the treasure from monsters, buy the weapons with the treasure thus obtained, or acquire spells by a process of “aging” that depended on “experience points” gained only through game play. D&D and other role-playing games were truly closed systems, with no benefits or liabilities transferable to the real world, other than a lingering sense of satisfaction or disappointment when the game was over. If your character did well, you felt good, and if your character didn’t do well, you might feel less good, but you had fun playing the game, and you got your portion of escape from the dreary world of suburban, middle-class America.
Role-playing in Second Life or Entropia Universe, however, is open to constant, continual changing of conditions using real-world equity. Users easily buy what they would like their characters to have and, having accrued profits from their investments, can even withdraw that profit, for use in the real world. If virtual worlds are games, then they are games in which persistent cheating is embraced and built into the rules.
Besides making virtual worlds potential arenas of real-world corruption and manipulation, the ability to import and export real money into and out of these “worlds” makes them fundamentally different from earlier forms of role-playing. The discrepancy is reflected in the language the sites use: they do not call their services games, but “worlds,” participants are not players, but “users,” and the fictional people they control are not characters, but “avatars.” Though this vocabulary has surely been developed for marketing purposes (many adults who use virtual-reality sites would never admit to devoting so much of their time and money to playing games), it is eerily appropriate. For virtual-reality Web sites offer double escape: that is, escape not only from the challenges and limitations of the real world, but also from the challenges and limitations of games.