But I don’t think it’s true that people aren’t challenged on ethical grounds. I see stories in the newspapers about benefit scroungers all the time – yes it’s grossly unfair to people who can’t work due to disability or caring requirements (if you need to be at home 12 hours a day to look after your sick dad/family then you can hardly work fulltime too.)

But your example also shows an issue with the way the whole banking system was falling over itself to offer people cheap credit. There isn’t much incentive to work if any excess will go straight to your creditors (I mean, unless you’re brought up to think it’s a big deal to be debt free and worth working yourself to the bone for.)

I think I’ll maybe talk about consumerism and the F2P model next week (since that’s the next chapter of the text book )

But also, although you CAN ignore chat, it won’t stop you getting booted if the rest of your group think your blue gear and 1500dps isn’t good enough. Plus is it really a good thing to encourage people to ignore chat?

But increasingly people will think you’re weird if you like your basic racial mount and don’t want to collect new ones

If you stack shelves at a supermarket for minimum wage after 2 years with the company you won’t be stacking shelves and you won’t be on minimum wage.

It’s really hard to convince people of this. We had someone refuse a job this week because she worked out she would be worse off. This is because she had a debt that is currently frozen that she will have to start repaying when she works. She couldn’t see that paying off her debt would actually leave her better off in the long term, just that it meant £10 a week less money now.

In WoW you don’t have to listen to other people at all. You can just do LFD and not read chat. There’s not a comparable downside.

Which leads to the point where if welfare offers a subsistence level of income and someone decides that they’d rather settle for that than work (and it’s pretty much poverty line in most cases) you’ll see their morals and ethics called into question. Similarly in game, if all you cared about was being able to run the occasional heroic so you just geared for that, you’ll still likely get trashed in group speak for having only 3k gearscore and/or only putting out 1.5k dps, even though anyone who played at the start of Wrath knows that’s good enough.

Gevlon has already thought of this (part 2, part 3). In a post-industrial age, raiding isn’t done for progress, it’s done as a display of temporal and material wealth. To show that you can afford to sink X hours and $Y money to get that 0.5% upgrade and that special mount. The diminishing returns from each upgrade have long ago ceased to matter and the only reason to get an upgrade is to keep up with the Joneses.

One of the differences is that although he’s talking about leisure and conspicuous consumption, I’m noting that people are being convinced that the meaningless achievements, and purple shinies are actually luxury items when in fact they’re just part of a bigger scheme to keep players on the production line. And not only that, but used as props to encourage players to call each other losers and noobs if they don’t play that game.

I know I’m not the first person to say this, but I have been reading text books about industrialisation and the welfare state recently so I thought I’d say it again