Real cash for virtual goods

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multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), which are full of typical fantasy elements such as monster-slaying and weapon collecting.

"The moment you have a community, one of the by-products...is trade," Jacobs said. "We were the first MMORPG to identify this at the get-go. We decided the economy was the most dynamic aspect of a virtual community, and we built that into the game."

"I've never really thought of it as a game. To me, it's kind of place for creative people to show off to each other."

--Chip Matthews,
"Second Life" player

"Project Entropia" includes an extensive auction system where players can barter in-game goods and services and a transaction system to turn dollars into in-game currency or vice versa. MindArk processed $16 million in "Project Entropia" transactions last month.

The system offers a number of benefits. Players who'd rather make money than slay dragons can set up moneymaking ventures such as armor foundries.

"There aren't many people doing it as their job--it's still a relatively young community," Jacobs said. "But a number of people have paid their way through college through the game."

Players who'd rather just have fun can buy their way to success in the game, bypassing the hundred of hours of often tedious skill-building, also known as "skilling," that MMORPGs typically require to advance a player's character. Jacobs said he's hired other players as day laborers to help build his character's skill points to achieve abilities such as teleportation.

Collecting monster manure
"I don't have a lot of time, and skilling just drives me up a wall," he said. "There are other people happy to do it for you for a reasonable fee."

Others hire out fellow players for agrarian work. "One of the common things is you pay people to collect manure from big monsters and spread it on your land to repel smaller monsters," Jacobs said. "You're making your land more valuable by changing the food chain."

While "Project Entropia" still incorporates a number of fantasy game conventions, Linden Lab's "Second Life" has gone several steps further by creating a universe that's almost entirely player-defined.

Players pay a small fee to enter the game and buy a piece of virtual real estate if they wish. From there, it's up to them. They can create and sell items such as cars and clothing using standards graphics tools such as Photoshop, set up events and minigames or develop property and charge admission or rent. Transactions happen in Linden Dollars, the in-game currency, which can be converted into real money at sites such as Gaming Open Market.

Linden Lab founder Phillip Rosedale said the game's open-ended design was his answer to the uniformity of most online games.

"We looked at the scale of what's been done with online experiences, and everything had inevitably been centrally designed," Rosedale said. "That works up to point, say the scale of a shopping mall, but beyond that it gets kind of tedious. Right from the beginning, we were very focused on the idea that if we were going to build something very big...the only thing that would be interesting was to have an environment where you could walk over the hill and discover something totally new."

Once player creativity became the defining aspect of the game, the question was how to motivate players to create.

"We looked at the history of developing Western countries, and the motivator to get people to create things...has always been that there's a sense of intellectual property," he said. "You own something of value,

[Prndll]

Real cash for virtual goods....

This is what it is actually about with ANYTHING regarding the internet.
>MP3 is a virtual good
>mpeg and avi are virtual goods
>porn is a virtual good
>just having an OS or having net access is a virtual good

so....what's new?

[wonky27]

Hmm

it's actually very similar in my opinion--for reasons similar to those that shut napster down, publishers don't want gamers freely trading their assets.

[Prndll]

Real cash for virtual goods....

This is what it is actually about with ANYTHING regarding the internet.
>MP3 is a virtual good
>mpeg and avi are virtual goods
>porn is a virtual good
>just having an OS or having net access is a virtual good

so....what's new?

[wonky27]

Hmm

it's actually very similar in my opinion--for reasons similar to those that shut napster down, publishers don't want gamers freely trading their assets.