Replicating certain aspects of reality in virtual worlds, such as currency or the concept of property, has the benefit of making the game immediately accessible to the player regardless of the setting. The familiarity of these foundational elements makes the game intuitive, allowing for quicker immersion into the experience. This intended consequence is not without a cost: Rogue Reality. By importing these familiar concepts, game developers unleash a range of undesirable behaviors that interact with the "real" mechanic. For example, placing a currency in the game may create Rogue Reality behaviors such as gold farming or gold duping. Left unchecked, these behaviors can ruin the carefully crafted balance essential to any successful game.
The solution to Rogue Reality issues lies in a delicate balance between legal remedies and game design remedies. Typical legal remedies include contracts between the player and the game developer (such as an End User License Agreement or a Terms of Use Agreement), informal mediations, arbitrations, or court cases. Game design remedies focus on modifying the game experience to eliminate improper behavior, often by employing increased security for confidential information, patches to eliminate exploits, and changes to the game rules. An imbalance between the legal remedies and the game design remedies may leave gaps in protection that harm game balance or redundancy in protection that curbs play value. Below are two examples that illustrate the challenges of combating Rogue Reality and how the appropriate remedy balance may shift according to the underlying property.
Virtual Economies
Virtual Economies are a driving force behind any immersive experience in massively multiplayer games. The presence of a market for goods creates an incentive for players to invest significant time accruing resources to enhance their power, prestige and personal appearance. Rogue Reality behavior often takes the form of black/grey markets where digital items are traded for real currency on third-party websites. The "real" mechanic of an economy also heightens the likelihood of gold farming, character transfers, and player hacking as rogue players try to capitalize on the real value of the digital goods.
The appropriate response should be tailored to the game's objectives. For example, a combat centric game such as World of Warcraft will typically require less flexibility in the economy than games that place players in more varied roles such as Eve Online. The optimal legal and design solutions for World of Warcraft are unlikely to be the same as Eve Online. A combat centric game may implement game design mechanics that curtail improper behavior by heavily restricting the free flow of goods from one player to another. For example, items can be limited to certain professions or bound immediately to the player upon pickup. This design convention does not weaken the game's integrity, because a truly free market for goods is not required to fully realize the play value of the game.
Conversely, Eve Online must provide a largely free market or it risks the possibility that specializations in mining, ship building, and trading would quickly become disfavored, thereby undermining a substantial portion of the game, which reduces play value. Game design remedies are not optimal, since they are overly restrictive. As a result, Eve Online may be forced to rely more on legal remedies, which are typically external to the game, to stem gold farming or other Rogue Reality issues. Rather than making certain items impossible to transfer, Eve Online may instead implement a more rigorous Terms of Use that explicitly spells out what in-game behavior is impermissible with respect to items. The lack of specific restrictions in game design is thereby balanced by enhanced specificity in the applicable legal contract.
Player to Player Relationships
The diversity of experience that comes from player to player interaction in online games helps immerse players in a way few other game mechanics can.