Future online community, the value of virtual property.

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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I know I’m old, but I still like computer games. In the fastasy world of online games, it takes me away from real life for a moment and lets me live the imagination of a little boy again.

But what I see more and more these days are people in the online community bringing what they have found or created in the virtual world to the real world and trading for money.

On paper, the server hosts all say that all content belong to the developers, but community members argrue that they have put in “time” and “innovation” to create something, and they are only selling the “time” and “innovation”.

Of course, we can not put a price on time. Becuase time is not something we can own, or have control over, we can call it one’s property. Its like saying I am going to sell distance, which does not make any sense.

Then others say they are selling their creativity. In a game, you can make something by slowing trying again and again mixing together different ingredients. But this arguement does not hold, because the product created was the already a preset program coding by the software staff of the developers.

None the less, people still use these as excuses to make money off auction sites, such as eBay. Some even do it as a daily earning. This trend of increasing consiousness of property right and property value to online virtual product has only kept expanding in the past years, and I can easily see it do so for the next century. Even some bored, but creditable, economists have done GDP esitimates if the trading was to take place in real life, and showed that this could be as big as Columbus finding new America.

Now that I am done telling the story :wink: I was wondering if anyone out there had any thoughts of the future of online economic development. will there truly be some sort of virtual property right and value that we will finally come to agree and live apon?

or is it just me and my silly thoughts about game? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Do you mean people selling their accounts and stuff on certain games? So say someone playing Planetarion sells their dead 'ard planet for £50 or someone playing a MMOG fantasy game sells their character who can do level 20 spells and has 10 billion hit points for £50 on ebay?

Software companies and the like already make money out of game exploits, they sell guides to games which tell you how to complete levels, tricks, tips and cheats, they pass cheat codes onto magazines to get their game featured to try and boost sales (well I assume it’s the software companies who pass on these cheats to the writers). So to say that other people can’t trade in these ‘virtual’ commodities is pretty lame of them as they already kinda do it.

Also, I don’t see how the account can really be considered the property of the developer. I knw they can write it into the contract, but hell, CD companies have been writing ‘no unauthorised re-sale of CDs allowed’ in their copyright notices and no-one enforces that, there are whole high street shops dedicated to 2nd hand CDs and you don’t see the police battering down their doors.

I think the companies are just being prissy, they should be thankful that people care enough about their game to try and ‘cheat’ like that. Then again I’m against the idea on the principle that if you’re not good enough at the game to make it yourself, what’s the point of pretending that you are? The kind of people who would buy these things are losers.

I don’t think that’s true at all, every worker sells their time to the company they work for, especially unskilled workers as that’s all they have to offer.In fact, think about a management consultant, all they offer a company is their time and innovation and they put a price on it very easily :slight_smile: