by Byron Mudry on Dec 03, 2005
Here is an interesting article and recorded interview about paying real world money for virtual online items. It is pretty interesting and well worth checking out..
· Sometime today, millions of people -- most of them in the U.S. and the Far East -- will check out of this world and into what economist Edward Castronova calls a "synthetic world." They are checking into online games including EverQuest, Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.
Robert Siegel talks to Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, and Robert Holt, an NPR video game reviewer, about the increasingly popular practice of using real-world money to aquire virtual gold pieces and more powerful characters.
You can read the whole story here.