I played Gaia Online for a while back in my day, and recently popped back on for a while to give it another spin and see how it had evolved. It’s certainly different from what it used to be, for sure, and the focus of the game/interactive community/time-wasting site has changed from what seemed to be an anime-lover gathering place to a chibi-person-lover gathering place. The whole point of Gaia has become to make your dude/dudette look cool within an ocean of other dudes/dudettes that look cool.
While I’m not one to bash on character customization (how many hours did I spend in the Rock Band clothing store again?) but Gaia’s focus seems to be entirely on that, making it a tricky thing to really sink into. Their secret lies in getting people to earn Gold by doing stuff they really like to do–like watch videos and play games, post art and talk on forums. Doing fun things earns you points AKA Gaia Gold, and using that Gold you can buy stuff on the market–a market which consists of stores generated by Gaia and a bidding/selling system with other players. On this market, you can get accessories and hats and dark haloes and burning swords of Oblivion–all of this can go on a little virtual representation of you (far cooler than you have ever looked in real life, of course) and you can show yourself off to the millions of other Gaia players who are all wearing similar equipment.
In the end everyone is so intricate and complex and covered in stuff that it’s severely hard to stand out anymore, and it’s gotten me to the point of slowing my insane rampage to find all the cool items I wanted.
In my experience, however, I did get to understand a great deal about this online community and why it works–particularly their market system. I’ve been comparing it to other markets in other games, and took the following examples: City of Heroes, which a friend of mine took the time to explain to me, and elaborated on the confusing market system; World of Warcraft, where I looked at the standard bidding system; EVE Online came to mind; and finally the real world Stock Market, how it works and how it fluctuates.
Surprisingly, out of all those markets, it’s most similar to the Stock Market, somehow, despite that it’s a buying and selling bidding system, with buy now prices and user-placed bidding increments. Basically, depending on the popularity of a particular item, its market value increases or decreases and people begin to buy or sell more as that fluctuates. Items like Naruto headbands, angel wings and the old-school favorite “Ancient Katana” are constantly high in the hundred thousands for cost, where items that you could purchase in a shop or that have only recently been released–even if they are special edition–are pretty much cheap buys. Usually, you’re better off buying new releases directly from the Gaia Stores–players will be itching to earn profit off their own buys and will be selling expensive on the bidding market.
The market has a few broken issues; for example, people can just pull their auctions out at the last minute if they don’t like the buy price at no penalty cost to them, and putting an auction up costs no real money, either. It’s only when you sell an item that a “broker’s fee” is applied, balancing out the market by removing money from the game, but then the prices become a tad inflated from overpricing, so people can earn back that 6k Gold they lose from selling a 300k item.
But that’s not the issue–the real problem is how difficult it is to actually get your hands on some of those items because so many people on Gaia are jerks. I’m not saying all, and if you’re reading this and agreeing with me you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re seconds away from getting an Ancient Katana for 180k Gold, and the seller decides that because their Buy Now price is 250k, they don’t want to settle for that much less, and so they pull their auction out and lose nothing.
All in all, watching the Gaia Market, predicting which items will sell and which ones won’t and collecting your own list of cool stuff is extremely addictive. I really like my little character, even if there’s probably a hundred thousand people who have characters that are very similar. It’s an interesting thing about Gaia–it’s like a game, but it’s not, and yet people play it all the time. There’s games in it. You can make a game of it. It’s just one of those quasi-existential things. Gaia doesn’t even know what it is. I used to call it an art site. I started calling it an anime site. Now, I’m just not sure what it is anymore. It’s a community, filled with all the different things communities do.
Then again, looking on that, doesn’t World of Warcraft fit the definition of a community, too?
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