For some time, online
gamers have been treating
their virtual lives as just
another part of their offline
lives.
Millions around the world play,
meet up, battle, buy and sell
in online games and virtual
worlds, such as Second Life
and World of Warcraft.
But to many, these virtual
goings-on can be a total
mystery.
Armed with his lens, photo
journalist Robbie Cooper has
been facing up to gamers,
revealing their intricate lives
and identities to the rest of
the world.
Last year, his Alter Egos exhibition in London showed off the people
behind the avatars - their virtual representations. It
was a fascinating and comforting peek into the very ordinary
and familiar faces of gamers and virtual worlders.
This year, he has cast his lens further afield into China and
Korea to get the stories behind the avatars.
"I wanted to build on what I had done before and get more
cultural variety and more personal variety," he told the BBC
News website.
Part of life
"I wanted to see people who use female avatars, women who
use male avatars, and also people who earn their living from
doing this - from buying and selling virtual goods, or creating
to operate people's characters."
One player he met in the virtual world, Second Life, earns
$70,000 a year creating female avatar clothing, he says.
Another player, Mark (aka Marcos Fonzarelli in Second Life)
has turned himself into a "robot tailor", designing robot
costumes that characters can wear. Admittedly, it is a niche
market, says Mark, but he still earns $250 a month.
Pictures: Gamers unmasked The only resource is his time'
'which people pay; there are 60,000 members who
could potentially pay.
According to the robot tailor,
the real money is in the female
clothing market. Mr Cooper
says that makes sense when
one considers the hugely
lucrative beauty and
market in the physical world.
It seems natural that the same kinds of rules and practices
that occur in physical life will happen in virtual worlds too.
That became evident when residents were urged to
donate to the Katrina Hurricane aid effort, via the game. A virtual
memorial with candles was even created.
"We live in a virtual world anyway," says Mr Cooper.
"Democracy is virtual, politics is virtual; all this stuff and
information we get in the newspaper - a lot of it is public
relations stuff."
When virtual turns real
But Mr Cooper's pictures show that those boundaries between
the virtual and the "real" are blurring in other parts of the
world, particularly in Asia.
The photos captured the fascinating and largely unseen world
of workers in China and Korea who earn their keep by looking
after people's characters in games while they are at work, or
asleep.
"A commodity is a commodity. If it is worth
something, people are going
to work hard to make the
money. In China, there is
matter of fact attitude about
it"(Robbie Cooper)
Qing Xu Wei, for example
used to make 10,000 yuan
(£692) a month by power-
levelling other people's game
characters while they are
away from the game.
The programs he creates runs
on seven computers, each
churning out power points so that gamers can get their
characters up to a certain strength and status.
"From their point of view it is understandable. When a new
game comes out, do you want to start at the bottom or have
someone do that for you to get to level at which it is fun to
play?" he explains.
One shot shows what, at first glance, might be mistaken for a
virtual room from within a game. With newspapers as
wallpaper, posters of fantasy figures, and scruffy bedding, it
is in fact a room in a net cafe in Tianjin, China.
It is used by employees who work for a dollar a day levelling
up player's characters. Up to 30 will work for 16 hours, using
the room to sleep in shifts.
Dark economics?
To Chinese gamers, it does not seem unusual that there
would be people working on every level of the economic food
chain, says Mr Cooper.
The gamers there, he added, had reams of stories about in-
game cheating and stolen accounts.
Buying and selling gaming items such as imaginary weapons is
a booming business on the web. The internet games section
of Ebay saw more than $9m (£5m) in trades in 2003 alone.
"A commodity is a commodity. If it is worth something, people
are going to work hard to make the money. In China, there is
matter of fact attitude about it," he says.
Earlier this year, a Shanghai 
online gamer was given a
suspended death sentence for
killing a fellow gamer when he
found out the friend had sold
his virtual sword, which he had lent him, for 7,200
(£473).
This kind of criminal activity
which happens as a result
events occurring in a game
could become more common.
China has no laws to deal with the theft of virtual property.
in South Korea, where gaming is treated as a mainstream
, there is a police unit that investigates in-game crime
According to Mr Cooper, this shows how seriously gaming is
taken, especially when real-life money and value plays
part
"A lot of people I met did not have as much sentiment about
the games as they do in the West. In China you do what you
to do to get by," he explains.
But there is more to "value" in game playing than just
economics, says Mr Cooper.
"This whole thing is about value and if people are willing to
pay money for something, it has some kind of value to them.
Value is more than money; it is emotional value, time, and
work."
When gamers find emotional value and a sense of
accomplishment through online games and virtual worlds, that
can sometimes be just as worthy.
Mr Cooper's most recent photos will be on show at a
PlayStation 2 supported exhibition tour starting 9 November in
Amsterdam.
