From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 16, 2005 10:11:59 PM PDT
Subject: The Buying Game
Consumed
The Buying Game
By ROB WALKER
October 16, 2005
Station Exchange
Back in 2001, a professor named Edward Castronova began to study the
way markets worked in a place called Norrath. Norrath does not exist
in a physical sense but is the name of the "virtual world" where the
online computer game EverQuest is set. EverQuest is filled with
half-elves, castles, sword fights and such, and also involves a
fairly complex internal economy, whose currency is platinum pieces
used to buy weapons, food and other goods. Although the goods are
digital, it's not quite right to say that they don't have real value;
pretty much from the earliest days of Norrath, Castronova discovered,
game players found ways to pay real-world dollars for fake-world
things.
These black-market, real-money transactions were frowned upon by the
game maker but turned out to be unstoppable. After years of trying to
thwart the practice, the owner of EverQuest II, Sony Online
Entertainment, capitulated to the realities of the unreal marketplace
this summer by creating a site called Station Exchange. Here, gamers
can use real money in an auction format to buy or sell Norrath's
weapons and scrolls and even fully tricked-out characters.
....
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16consumed.html>