Gameopoly
I'm not sure how to classify this, but trust me, it's significant. A popular online role-playing game, Project Entropia, is offering a cash card that works in ATM machines, but draws its money from the virtual world of the game. link. Yes, that's right. Earn money in this alternative world and then spend it on something real. It also goes the other way around, you have to buy things in the game with real money. A gamer named Jon Jacobs recently bought a space station for $100,000. Yes. A hundred thousand real dollars. He says that he is developing it as an outlet for media companies to sell music and video for players.
So why is this significant? Most baby boomers have never seen one of these before, but they're big business, generating billions of dollars in revenue.
These games are models of the world with fun twists like magic. But most of them have economic systems. If you get ahead you can buy things like furniture, better weapons and bigger houses. Typically these currencies are self-contained, based on points earned in gameplay.
This is different. No one has ever crossed the blood-brain barrier between real and virtual world economies. Like Neil Stephensen's Snowcrash, this helps creates "avatars" or online personnas that have some standing in the cyber world, yet ties to the real one.
This economic cross-over is not only significant, but subversive. Nothing undermines institutional authority more than a new underground economy.
Posted on May 03, 2006
