The BBConline highlights an excellent example of the evolving, seamless transition between “virtual” and “real” economies. Cash station cards that allow players to convert games doallars to real dollars. There is a part of me that believes that virtual worlds really are a consequent and cause of a widespread acceptance of modern-postmodern questions concerning the subjectivity of the real. If our own economy were not a construction, than these currency transactions between virtual and real spaces would not be acceptable. You also have a “pegged” currency rate, akin to the world economies half a century ago.

Note that the game authors introduced features of scarcity (e.g., useful life) to otherwise unscarce information/digital goods. For the techie, this capacity to “code” scarcity into games is actually more plausible than the scarcity of real life- where innovation can alter the nature of products. In coded worlds, the social and economic facts are more truly facts… the average and even above average citizen in virtual worlds lacks the technical capacity to deviate from the coded order. Not to mention, maybe we will see a return to Deist theologies, since coded worlds more reasonably reflect a powerful creator who simply set the world in motion, bound by certain rules, and now sits back rarely interceding.