Reflection on Halting State

The story plot of the book “Halting State” had a very interesting point of view when we look at the relationship between virtual world and reality. Halting State took place in 2017 which is ten years from now in Scotland. The story started off with cyber crime that was committed by a group of avatars in the virtual world. In one of the MMORPG game, there were a group of orcs and a fire breath dragon break into Avalon Four, the central bank of the game. They stole many important items such as weapons, gold, and magic items from the vault. Then the story was divided into the story of three characters that involved in solving this cyber crime. There were the police Sue, the investigator Elaine, and the gamer and programmer Jack. Those three teamed up to solve the criminal in-game bank robbery.
Jack and Elaine were sent to the MMORPG game called “Spook” to find out who was the man that robbed the bank. They later found out the root of the problem came from the server in China. Chinese hackers got the important key information of the game though black market.
Charles Stross’s idea of the future doesn’t seem too far ahead than what has been happening in the virtual world now a day. Today we have a popular MMORPG game such as World of Warcraft which has similar theme to the story. I feel like Stross’s idea of online crime is already here. Even though I never heard of any game company that has similar issue to Stross’s story yet, I feel like it could happen. I have been in other countries beside US, and there’s a lot of black market of selling illegal software in another country. They could hack the code and generate the serial number, so they can use software for free. At the same time, it could damage the US economy. If the black market be able to get the secret code or the key information from online game such as in-game bank system, it would be a chaos.
Somehow the virtual world economic and the real world economic are actually related. Many people spent a lot of money pay for subscription monthly to the online game company. World of Wacraft already have 10 million subscriber world wide, so when the popularity increases, there’re more demand in the game. We could see many groups of people starting to make the real money by farming gold in virtual world and sell it as the real money. Some people can even sell their own high level avatar to another player. Since the game demands so much time to play, there was another way to acquire those high level characters and gold in a short period of time. Those shortcuts were simply paying the real money for the virtual money. The online game has become the real place for exchanging currency. You can do the same thing in another country and be able to obtain better money than in real life job. For example, if you farm gold from China and sell it to US people, Chinese people will get paid in US dollar.
There were a gap between virtual world money and real world money. I will give the example of Thailand money and US dollar. One US dollar equals to 35 Thai Baths. In the virtual world, if you play in game in Thailand, one gold in the game is still as same as one gold if you play in US. Stross’s idea in the story was trying to point out that stealing money from the game Bank is really the same thing as committing the crime in the real world. It might be because of that virtual world money can, at some certain methods, can transfer to the real money, so if the player steals money from the game bank, it would be the same as robbery the real life existing bank.