Cmdr James wrote:But if currencies float against real world money, then it takes a lot of the grind out of online games. Why work your way up, when you can put down x dollars and buy your way to the top?
This happens already, but I can see that it's an issue. Maybe the virtual currency trades could only go one way ... you could sell gold zonkers and buy dollars, but not the other way around.
Or – and this is getting more hypothetical by the minute
– this could have an interesting effect on the global economy. At the moment, capital is free to move anywhere it wants, but labour (i.e. people) cannot. Obviously capital can move electronically, but physical labour can't. But I can see how, if physical labour became virtual, then people in poor nations could earn money by, essentially, being background characters, shopkeepers, traders, orcs etc. in the gameworlds of the rich.
This is obviously not a morality-free proposition, but it's potentially interesting. Just as Western corporations farm out call centre services and indeed computing jobs to places like India and the Far East, so it might be possible for a truly massive online game to pay people in developing countries to be "actors" in a persistent online world – and indeed to allow them to set up shops selling virtual junk to people with more money than sense.
In many respects it's no more immoral than setting up Third-World sweatshops to manufacture trainers and jeans for a few pennies a piece then selling them for ridiculously inflated sums to people who want to pay to display some corporate logo somewhere on their person. In fact, it might be
less immoral, since it could conceivably allow someone with skill and talent to access a rich market directly, with no resources consumed (except the power to run the computer). Such a game would be vastly more involving: NPCs who can think, and talk, and act and react realistically. Such a game could be very appealing to those people who want to play out fantasies online, and could charge appropriately high subscription fees.
Cmdr James wrote:The other thing is that there may be serious legal implications for having tradable currency. Im not an expert, but people like the SEC might start to show an interest, and I dont think Blizzard et al. want to be involved in audits and all that kind of stuff. They are games companies, not banks.
This also is true. But as – or rather if – these games get bigger and bigger, and more and more complex, then things would change. Games servers could be located in countries who, in return for a slice of the action, could legitimise the currencies.
It's all totally hypothetical. But (at the moment, anyway, and to me at least) it seems like a definite possibility. Entertainment is a huge, vast industry, right up there with oil. Online games are obviously popular, but right now they're not very good: everyone in the game is either a player or a bot. Players want to play, and the bots are pretty awful. In the absence of anything like real AI, it might be worthwhile letting human beings fill in the gap, in return for the chance to earn money.
There is more than a whiff of something distasteful about this idea: the poor scrabbling along, working away while the rich disport themselves. But in all honesty, is it any different from current reality?
I shall see and report back!
. I see a world where mmorpgs are funded by microtransactions for in game items, currency instead of subscriptions.
and this :- 
in game play terms they do EXACTLY the same job. The first one takes 5 minutes of danger free game play to obtain for free. The second one you had to buy a new retail version oof the game to get - but could add it to your existing account. The two perform exactly as well as each other, but players were happily paying out £20 a time just to get the second one.