Free The Proteus Paradox by Nick Yee Page B

harvesters. Ihad a twenty-minute head start on him. I hopped on my own swoop speeder and headed toward the travel terminals. Earlier in my career, I had wanted to become a doctor, but the risk and adventure of pharmaceutical manufacturing certainly had its appeal.
Corellian Wheat
    Yes, pharmaceutical manufacturing is a profession in a video game. We tend to think of video games as an escape from work, a mindless diversion. But just as superstitions find a way to flourish in virtual worlds, so, too, does work. As the technical capabilities of games increased, the complexities of play also increased. In 2003, two games launched that both had full-fledged player-driven economies:
Star Wars Galaxies
and
EVE Online
. In
Star Wars Galaxies,
which we will consider first, almost everything that was bought or sold in the game was created by another player. Apart from pharmaceutical manufacturers, players could specialize as tailors, architects, and even bioengineers. 1
    The game captured the mundane minutiae of the manufacturing process from geological surveying to retail advertising. Not only did players have to assemble the components to create the final product, but there was a player who surveyed for the raw resources, a player who harvested the resources, a player who created the product prototypes, a player who used a factory to mass-produce the product, a player who developed the advertising, and a player who created the retail store to sell the product. The player population determined entirely the supply and demand of all these raw, intermediate, and finished goods. This round-the-clock commercial activity occurred in a public market called the Bazaar as well as through privately owned merchant droids spread throughout the galaxy. Truly dedicatedplayers might try to manage an end-to-end production chain, but more often than not, informal cartels formed in which players could focus on a specific segment of the production chain.
    The manufacturing process in
Star Wars Galaxies
was bewilderingly complex for players coming from hack-and-slash massively multiplayer online games. First, the quality of manufactured products depended on the quality of the raw resources used, and the galaxy was populated with a broad array of raw resources. For example, the biological effect controller (an intermediate component) required an organic component, which could be avian meat, berries, or wheat. The quality of the controller depended on the potential energy of the organic component. The math underlying manufacturing outcomes was sufficiently complex to warrant many player-written guides, littered with equations, such as:
    MAX _ EFFECTIVENESS = ((Resource 1 _ OQ + Resource 2 _ OQ )
/ COMBINED _ MAX _ OQ ) * 0.66 + ((Resource 1 _ + Resource 2
_ PE )/ COMBINED _ MAX _ PE ) * 0.33 2
    Knowing what kinds of resources to seek out was only the first part of the problem. Locating high-quality resources required a lot of legwork. These raw resources were randomly located throughout planet surfaces in the galaxy. Once located through trial and error with the surveying skill, these resources could be harvested by hand or by setting down automated harvesters, which accumulated the resource slowly over time. Thus, early comers to a resource patch could take the most resource-rich spots, which yielded larger harvests. To resolve the problem of veteran players taking up all the rich deposit locations, every seven to ten days after a resource had appeared, the game would replace that resource with a randomly generated resource of the same class at a different location in the galaxy.It was a never-ending game of musical chairs, and surveyors had to be on their toes to avoid breaks in their supply chains. Several third-party sites emerged specifically for players to input and collectively keep track of the emerging resources. Owing to the difficulty of maintaining high-quality resource stocks, many players made a living in the game merely from harvesting and