Reamde - Страница 8

Like many serious players, Richard fell into the habit of purchasing virtual gold pieces and other desirables from Chinese gold farmers: young men who made a living playing the game and accumulating virtual weapons, armor, potions, and whatnot that could be sold to American and European buyers who had more money than time.

He thought it quite strange and improbable that such an industry could exist until he read an article in which it was estimated that the size of the worldwide virtual gold economy was somewhere between $1 and $10 billion per year.

Anyway, having reached a place where he had no more virtual worlds to conquer — his characters had achieved near-godlike status and could do anything they wanted — he began to think about this as a serious business proposition.

Here was where the Wikipedia entry got it all wrong by laying too much emphasis on money laundering. The Schloss was turning a profit and appreciating in value and giving him free lodging and food, so it had been years, by this point, since Richard had given much thought to all his unspent hundred-dollar bills. In his younger days, it was true, he had spent enough time worrying about money laundering that he had developed a nose for subterranean money flows, like one of those dowsers who could supposedly find water by walking around with a forked stick. So, yes, the quasi-underground virtual gold economy was inherently fascinating to him. But T’Rain was certainly not about him laundering a few tubs of C-notes.

Video games were a more addictive drug than any chemical, as he had just proven by spending ten years playing them. Now he had come to discover that they were also a sort of currency exchange scheme. These two things — drugs and money — he knew about. The third leg of the tripod, then, was his exilic passion for real estate. In the real world, this would always be limited by the physical constraints of the planet he was stuck on. But in the virtual world, it need be limited only by Moore’s law, which kept hurtling into the exponential distance.

Once he had put those three elements together, it had happened fast. Canvassing chat rooms to communicate with English-speaking gold farmers, he confirmed his suspicion that many of them were having trouble expanding their businesses because of a chronic inability to transfer funds back to China. He formed a partnership with “Nolan” Xu, the pathologically entrepreneurial chief of a Chinese game company, who was obsessed with finding a way to put Chinese engineering talent to work creating a new massively multiplayer online game. During an epic series of IM exchanges and Skype calls, Richard managed to convince Nolan that you had to build the plumbing first: you had to get the whole money flow system worked out. Once that was done, everything else would follow. And so, just as a way of learning the ropes, they worked out a system whereby Richard acted as the North American end of a money pipeline, accepting PayPal payments from American and Canadian WoW addicts, then FedExing hundred-dollar bills to Taiwan, where the money was laundered through the underground Filipino overseas worker remittance network and eventually transferred from Taiwanese bank accounts to Nolan’s account in China, whence he was able to pay the actual gold farmers in local specie.

This Byzantine arrangement, whose complexities, colorful failure modes, multinational illegalities, and cast of shady characters still, all these years later, caused Richard to wake up bathed in sweat every so often, was only a bridge to a more sane and stable venture: Richard and Nolan cofounded a company whose purpose was to construct the new, wholly original game of Nolan’s dreams on top of the system of financial plumbing that Richard now felt he was qualified to build.

When their discussion of the company’s name consumed more than the fifteen minutes Richard felt it deserved, he pulled some Dungeons & Dragons dice out of his pocket and rolled them to generate the random number 9592.

The game that Corporation 9592 built had any number of novel features, but in Richard’s mind their most fundamental innovation was that they built it from the ground up to be gold-farmer-friendly. Gold farming had been an unwelcome by-product, an epiphenomenon, of earlier games, which had done all that they could to suppress the practice, even to the point of getting the Chinese government to ban such transactions in 2009. But in Richard’s opinion, any industry that was clocking between $1 and $10 billion a year deserved more respect. Allowing that tail to wag that dog could only lead to increased revenue and customer loyalty. It was only necessary to structure the game’s virtual economy around the certainty that gold farmers would colonize it in vast numbers.

He sensed at a primal, almost olfactory level that the game could only be as successful as the stability of its virtual currency. This led him to investigate the history of money and particularly of gold. Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall.

It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold (or silver, or diamonds, or various other mythical and magical elements and gems that the Creatives would later add to the game world).

Other online games did this by fiat. Gold pieces were reposited in dungeons guarded by monsters. The more powerful the monster, the more gold it was squatting on. To get the gold, you had to kill the monster, and building a character powerful enough to do so required a certain amount of time and effort. The system functioned okay, but in the end, the decision as to where the gold was located and how much effort was needed to win it was just an arbitrary choice made by a geek in a cubicle somewhere.

Richard’s crazy idea was to eliminate the possibility of such fudging by having the availability of virtual gold stem from the same basic geological processes as in the real world. The same, that is, except that they’d be numerically simulated instead of actually happening. Idly messing around on the Internet, he discovered the mind-alteringly idiosyncratic website of P. T. “Pluto” Olszewski, the then twenty-two-year-old son of an oil company geologist in Alaska, homeschooled above the Arctic Circle by his dad and his math major mom. Pluto, a classic Asperger’s syndrome “little professor” personality now trapped in the rather hirsute body of a full-grown Alaskan bushwhacker, had spent a lot of time playing video games and seething with rage at their cavalier treatment of geology and geography. Their landforms just didn’t look like real landforms, at least not to Pluto, who could sit and stare at a hill for an hour. And so, basically as a protest action — almost like an act of civil disobedience against the entire video-game industry — Pluto had put up a website showing off the results of some algorithms that he had coded up for generating imaginary landforms that were up to his standards of realism. Which meant that every nuance of the terrain encoded a 4.5-billion-year simulated history of plate tectonics, atmospheric chemistry, biogenic effects, and erosion. Of course, the average person could not tell them apart from the arbitrary landforms used as backdrops in video games, so in that sense Pluto’s efforts were all perfectly useless. But Richard didn’t care about the skin of Pluto’s world. He cared about its bones and its guts. What mattered very much to Richard was what an imaginary dwarf would encounter once he hefted a virtual pick and began to delve into the side of a mountain. In a conventional video game, the answer was literally nothing. The mountain was just a surface, thinner than papier-mâché, with no interior. But in Pluto’s world, the first bite of the shovel would reveal underlying soil, and the composition of that soil would reflect its provenance in the seasonal growth and decay of vegetation and the saecular erosion of whatever was uphill of it, and once the dwarf dug through the soil he would find bedrock, and the bedrock would be of a particular mineral composition, it would be sedimentary or igneous or metamorphic, and if the dwarf were lucky it might contain usable quantities of gold or silver or iron ore.

Reader, they bought his IP. Pluto moved down to Seattle, where he found lodging in a special living facility for people with autism spectrum disorders. He set to work creating a whole planet. TERRAIN, the gigantic mess of computer code that he had single-handedly smashed out in his parents’ cabin in the Brooks Range, gave its name to T’Rain, the imaginary world where Corporation 9592 set its new game. And in time T’Rain became the name of the game as well.

NEAR RED OAK the highway ran past a shopping center anchored by a Hy-Vee, which was a local grocery store chain. Like a lot of the bigger Hy-Vees, this one had a captive diner just off the main entrance, where local gaffers would go in the mornings to enjoy the $1.99 breakfast special. Richard, seeing himself, for at least the next half hour, as a sort of aspirant gaffer, parked the Grand Marquis in one of the many available spaces and went inside.

He was expecting bright simple colors, which would have been true of the Hy-Vee diners of his youth. But this one had post-Starbucks decor, meaning no primary colors, everything earthtone, restful, minutely textured. Big steaming pickups trundled by the window, enhanced, like Lego toys, with bolt-on equipment. Pallets of giant salt bags were stacked in front of the windows like makeshift fortifications. At the tables: a solitary general contractor rolling messages on his phone. Truckers, great of beard, wide of suspender, and huge of belly, looking around and BSing. Uniformed grocery store employees taking coffee breaks with spouses. Small-town girls with raccoon eye makeup, not understanding that it simply didn’t work on pale blondes. Hunched and vaguely furtive Mexicans. Gaffers showing the inordinate good cheer of those who, ten years ago, had accepted the fact that they could die any day now. A few younger clients, and some gentlemen in bib overalls, fixated on laptops. Richard made himself comfortable in a booth, ordered two eggs over easy with bacon and whole wheat toast, and pulled his own laptop out of his bag.