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Examples:
Thief 3 is 20$
Bioshock is 54$ (almost as expensive as my SE)

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KG

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However, I’m of the opinion that none of this should be taken seriously. I mean, why on earth would you pay someone real money for a chair in a virtual environment? What – it makes their virtual selves more comfortable?

Go out, smell the roses, run around like a kid, climb trees. Hell, get a few people together and play a game of cricket or soccer or something. Go to the pub, meet some new people, tell jokes, hear jokes, join a club, do something in your community. In otherwords, live life.

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Question is, how the heck did he manage to flog that much gear? from what i recall, a chair or table or bed or whatever worked out at about one of our lovely aussie dollars. and a pound is what, two-three dollars these days….. This kid wasn’t scamming the stuff because he wanted it, he was proving a point, because, honestly, no one needs 5000 bedside tables.

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If time=money then all MMO’s should be enforced for scamming. But agree with the above comments. MMO’s are there because its a different world and scenario.

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(The threatened lawsuit by that ex-director has to be the best day, but that’s another story…)

Maybe it was the sheer volume of money in the Habbo theft that had the cops involved. Prosecuting somebody over $5 worth of virtual hat in Maple Story is probably not a good use of the state’s time, but $4K might be.

The jurisdiction question is a good one as well–it’s a federal crime if it happens over state lines, but I routinely play games with people on different continents.

Blizzard and CCP and the like have enough player management headaches without being responsible for real-world law enforcement. I’m not sure most governments want to be in the business of managing digital realms, either. Plus, does it open the door for taxation of in-game goods? What schedule do I use to report my capital gain on the sale of virtual minerals?

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Although, if we allow that the basic economic resource is man-hours (the anally retentive my substitute person-hours where appropriate), money being an economic lubricant, then any item owned by a person in an MMO aquires value because man-hours have been exchanged for it. Furthermore, given that other people are willing to exchange items they have invested man-hours in order to aquire those items shows that they ascribe them value (and this carries over into the real world, ergo gold farmers).

So, from this, is it not possible to construct an argument that all MMO objects have “real value”? Not one that’d convince the pigs, I suppose.

With slightly greater legal weight; juristriction. The entire point of MMOs is that it’s a seperate world from meatspace, with its own rules and regulations. Do real-world police have the authority to prosecute for crimes that occur inside them?

Although I’ll allow that the Habbo guys have pre-violated their world’s encapsulation by sanctioning “real-world-money-for-in-game-items”.

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You might want to replace the word my with by :)

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Personally, I agree with Kieron that there is an unspoken deal you enter into when playing online games that you aren’t operating by legally-enforcible rules. Unless of course you’re swapping child porn, but that’s a different matter entirely. More to the point (with regards your nicked scarb sword) is what attitude Linden Labs, Blizzard, et al. take to this sort of thing.

Although I’m not sure the poker analogy is entirely apt: bluffing is part of the point of poker. There’s an acceptance that each player is doing it to some degree. It’s not intrinsic to the game when playing in virtual worlds in quite the same way. The bluffs there are more of the imagination (“you mean you don’t look like that in real life?!”) than of the stakes you’re playing for. However, obviously, a healthy scepticism about scams like this should be a given, and encouraged by the companies producing the games.

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