Virtual Worlds, Real Dollars

Having never played Dungeons & Dragons, I'm not going to pretend to understand what exactly one does when playing what I imagine to be like-minded online games like EverQuest. What I do understand, though, is that gamers who play EverQuest, The Sims, World of Warcraft and other online simulations are spending countless hours building valuable character accounts and that this value is, like anything of value, now being brought to the market for sale, according to the Washington Post.

For a year and a half, Tod Kellen roamed the universe in the online computer game Star Wars Galaxies, living a fantasy life as a successful Jedi knight. Last week, Kellen decided the game was stealing too much time from his real life as a salesman for a chain of Wisconsin funeral homes, so he took extreme action: He auctioned off his fictional alter-ego on eBay.

The winning bidder paid $510 for the game character Kellen had created and all the winnings he had accumulated in hours of play -- a top-notch light saber, a speeder bike, a nice chunk of real estate on the planet Lok and a bank account containing millions of Imperial credits.

It was a simple trade of cash for the product of someone's labors, except that all the goods exist only within the confines of a computer game, electronic blips to be transferred from one account to another.

Kellen's auction is just one example of how increasingly popular online role-playing games have created a shadow economy in which the lines between the real world and the virtual world are getting blurred. More than 20 million people play these games worldwide, according to Edward Castronova, an economics professor at Indiana University who has written a book on the subject, and he thinks such gamers spend more than $200 million a year on virtual goods. One site, GameUSD.com, even tracks the latest value of computer-game currency against the U.S. dollar, an exchange-rate calculator for the virtual world.

On the Internet, real-world dollars can buy a virtual bazaar of odd items: A St. Bernard dog for the virtual home in The Sims Online fetches $129.99. A "Blood-bladed dagger" for use in the game EverQuest: $40. A two-handed sword for use in World of Warcraft is listed at $66.59.

The Post story isn't exactly breaking news. A professor named Edward Castronova first publicized the phenomenon in Dec. 2001 in a paper with one of the cyber-geekier titles I've ever seen for a scholarly work (Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier). His work has in turn been reported on by Mother Jones, The Guardian and Wired (naturally), to name a few.

New to me, though, is the Post's note that Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox gamers will soon be able to sell the characters they own, and that EverQuest is protecting the characters of those displaced by Hurricane Katrina. It's also always worth pointing out when talking about EverQuest that the virtual world Norrath, where the game's characters reside, has per capita revenues of more than $2,000 a year, making it one of the 75 or so richest countries in the world. That fact blows my mind every time I read it.

Got a few crisp bills and want to move to Norrath without a lot of heavy lifting? Get started here.

[Cross-posted at The Agitator.]