BBC NEWS | Technology | Gamer buys $26,500 virtual land: “”

That’s pretty amazing, not so much for the amount (although it’s quite a lot), but for the fact that this guy is basically a property developer in a virtual gaming environment – he’s bought the ‘land’ and is building condos!
Trading in virtual goods is nothing new of course, but it’s got me thinking again about this phenomenon. Project Entropia throws up some bonkers stuff, when you reflect on what it’s doing:
1. It’s business model is financial trading within the game environment. Where other games trade on eBay (where ebay makes the rake, not the gaming), Project entropia provides the trading and takes a commission.
2. This sort of model requires a intrinsic trust in the environment and it’s finite control. By definition, this stuff exists virtually, so what’s to stop the owners of the game causing hyperinflation by releasing new islands? The island sold here was described as ‘newly discovered’, or is that ‘newly coded’? It looks like the game environment has a structured plan of expansion – I wonder whether there’s a slow entropy of content to sell to gamers as the game expands…I mean the bloody game’s called project *entrop(y)ia*!
3. Of course this completely blows apart my basic economics theory I learned in college – particularly the laws of supply and demand – unless supply is locked down, how can value be quantified – there’s not even the existing time restriction of building stuff, skills or magic powers etc. that creates a sort of scarcity in other online games. Maybe I’m simply not factoring in the “i want it now”?
I guess this all rolls up into a wonderfully dynamic future – we’re seeing the emergence of parallel, virtual economies & environments where people are highly comfortable within abstracted relationships and trust models.
The currency of future exchange will be reputation. My ebay profile is pretty important to me (100% positive over the last few years) – I wonder whether in a few years I’ll have a generic ‘trust’ virtual profile, proxied by a trusted third party (ebay? paypal? google? (shudder) ms?) that will enable me to work on virtual project teams, transfer services and activities etc.
Of course, relationships, recommendations and trust are nothing new, arguably they’re the oldest pillar of commerce, but I’m seeing the emergence of these in social software (LinkedIn etc.)