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If eBaying isn't a problem, why sell objects at all? Why not just give them away to anyone who wants them? If it's so great that people can just hang out with their guildies, why not let them do so without charging them $600 for their equipment? Why not just let them equip with whatever they want? It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term. The truth is World of Warcraft Gold doesn't HAVE to take a long time to get, especially in the higher levels.  

Julian: Ebaying is no more or less a threat to the magic of the game than people talking about Britney's baby on guild chat is

If someone talks about Britney's baby, there are no tangible effects on their character in the game. If they buy a +5 sword of hitbebabyonemoretime then there is.

Buy WOW Gold here, and then enjoy your excited WoW life! Warhammer Online Goldwill keep your high power. I’m sorry but I do think I have both earned the right and paid for the right to claim some level of ownership in these KAL Account and content. On the other hand, if RMTers persuade the courts that people own what their characters own, the whole concept of a purge might be threatened.

Other kinds of (creative) human activity vanish from its radar screen.

This is an argument that forms part of a chapter I've written for a volume I'm co-editing  with Sandra Braman (Command Lines) that is currently under review, and there the specific example is Second Life and the challenges that the varieties of user content therein make to the multiple ideas about content held by the different teams within Linden Lab. But GDC led me to see this claim as more applicable here as well. Wanna buy new weapons? Florensia Gold can help you realize your dream. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.

After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. You'll be able to acquire six additional Entropia Universe Gold as random rare loot drops. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers. And there are huge gaps in what we don't know. Where is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from it. I hope the audience did as well.

But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown). And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companies. Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

The best way to put the assertion (and this is all it is at this point; and again, please keep in mind that there are a number of familiar exceptions) is that the practice of game software development generates a way of seeing and defining problems (as essentially precise, logical, and algorithmic), and creating solutions (through linear, text-defined code) that makes other ways of accounting for what happens in VWs seem at worst nonsensical and at best irrelevant or quixotic. It's probably easier to implement than a full-blown trading system. I'll tell you why not: it's because it SPOILS THE GAME. If there is no game to spoil, as with Second Life, then fine, this is obviously a reasonable idea. If the game isn't about the kind of things that money can buy (as with Achaea) then it's also reasonable. If you can buy victory, though, it's either not a game at all or it's a wider game with different victory conditions.