ft.com/techblog

In an intriguing exploration of the value placed on virtual life, a Chinese company has effectively held internet game characters hostage: demanding players give up their virtual goods or, get this, donate their real blood if they want to continue to play.

Moli Group recently froze the accounts of 30,000 players of its massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) title "Cabal" that it believed guilty of such abuses as using automated sub-routines to generate virtual wealth.

But the company - which is not one of China’s better known MMORPG operators but still claims to have 7m users - has offered the targeted players some interesting ways to win back access to their online personas.

One method was to simply agree to give up all the virtual wealth they had accumulated in the game, but aother was more creative: give something back to offline society by joining company-organised public good works such as street-sweeping and helping old folks. A Moli officials says more than 700  players with frozen accounts answered the call.

Most dramatically, any player willing to join an "entirely voluntary and uncompensated" public blood donation drive would also have their accounts unfrozen.

Still, this part of the unusual effort to promote good works appears to have had only limited results: the Moli staffer says just 80 players with frozen accounts took part in the blood drive. That suggests that, for most gamers, blood is still thicker than bits and bytes.

March 21st, 2007 in Asia, Games, Internet | Permalink