How long before nerfing is recognized by courts as a tort?

One of the coolest things is that, where permissible, MMOG currency and possessions are being bought and sold on an open market, i.e. eBay, and you can make a living from doing it.

When I first discovered this, I had a serious dose of future shock. But it makes perfect sense: they're scarcity economies, after all.

K5's Rusty also suggested in a comment that these games could be used to launder money, in a similar way that people do with antiques in the real world. The advantage of using an MMOG is a) no realspace inventory management, and b) you could probably set up a system of scripts and 'bots to make the whole thing automatic.

Thinking ahead a little bit, it's only a matter of time until a dev house backs these cyberspace objects with hard crypto (to prevent forging, or "dupeing") - at which point you have cybercash. The crypto necessary to make cybercash anonymous and untraceable has been around for a while - and an MMOG written the right (wrong?) way could end up making real a longtime cypherpunk goal - to render tax-collecting impossible.

Food for thought :-)

The hitch in all this is that no game company will ever be willing to guarantee the value of virtual property. Motor City Online was shut down recently; EA would have had serious liability issues if the courts believed that the virtual items therein were owned by the players.

In the event that the courts determine that players have real world property interests in virtual objects, the game providers will have a strong disincentive to provide the games. It is not feasible to place oneself in a position where one is obligated to either provide hosting for the game forever or pay a penalty if and when a game shuts down.

Once you click on the "Agree" radio button next to that text no one reads, your rights are as virtual as your +3 shield of invisibility.

It strikes me that online valuta would have to be regarded not as "property" but as some sort of assignable/transferable right or privilege. Clearly there is no fixed value to any of these items, they do not represent discreet units of anything.

The only thing that seems to create any value at all in these is

A) Scarcity, which is not guaranteed, or consistent.

B) "Work" done to produce, as measured in time.

C) Any special skills needed to produce. (Can anyone comment on whether there is any special expertise needed to generate value in these items?)

B.

Booklegger, about scarcity, one of the issues has always been constant inflation. In Diablo 2, some very valuable items ("SoJ"s, IIRC - I don't know the acronym) became debased to the point where they became the basic unit of currency. In EverQuest, new items and new challenges are always being introduced to keep the game fresh. Of course, a side effect of this is that new items start with a comparatively high value that rapidly decreases.

As for work and special skills, those two definitely apply in Ultima Online, where you can become a blacksmith, to take the example from the Wired article.

re B-legger / jetifi:

I think there does appear to be value in these things, based on their exchange on eBay etc. -- and the things in question do appear to be discrete units. Whether they "are" discrete units get metaphysical...

The value fluctuates according to scarcity, yes. But the same happens with real property, doesn't it? And some real property has no market value.

See Stanislaw Lem's stories on "personetics" discussing whether people "living" in artificially simulated worlds have thoughts, feelings and rights.