YouMeiTI 有媒体

eBay and Yahoo Auctions agreed to ban virtual sales, including Everquest & WoW goods. Sony, the owner of Everquest, joined VeRo (Verified Rights Owners Program), a program that allows companies to claim violation of IP rights when they see their goods listed. What is interesting is that Sony and Blizzard are reinforcing their policy that they own all goods produced in-game. But underlying this I think they are saying that they own the labor produced in out-of-game settings. For example, in Jin Ge's research on Chinese WoW goldfarmers, the gamers state they feel they have the right to sell their goods because they spent time and labor leveling up or obtaining the gold points.

eBay and Yahoo's acquiescence to Sony & Blizzard is indicative of the contested space of what constitutes ownership and labor in virtual economies. How will the law be interpreted to deal with the nebulous space? Many lawyers and researchers are writing about this (Edward Castronova, Richard Bartle and one of my favorite papers on this topic is, Who owes (or owns?) what to whom? Ownership of Player Created content in MMOPRG, written by Javier Salazar)

But before we explore the legal space, it's important to understand the material conditions of the offline world and how deeply connected it is to the virtual world. It won't be easy for virtual games to create a truly contained world that abolishes the market and open-market-like-behaviors. Players will continue to bring their offline behavior into the online world.

I strongly believe that there is a deeply intertwined relationships of offline economic behavior and online playing behavior. In analyzing of World of Warcraft, we see that even a game that is supposed to provide entertainment within a contained virtual world can't escape the internal logic of rational capitalism - free markets, mass production, and expansion. We can see this with Jin Ge's research of goldfarmers in China, that the complex global economy of WoW reproduces the inequitable exploitive relations of a material capitalistic economy.

I believe that we really are witnessing a new transition in capitalism, a transition to a virtual economy that transforms the medium in which capital is exchanged, labor is sold, production is organized, and value is created. But a new medium does not mean new forms of capital or labor relations. The new medium of virtual markets still reproduces the same structures of labor and production of material capitalism.

I have argued in my last paper on WoW's economy that as long as value is a measure of wealth, the commodities in a virtual economy will reproduce the same relations of labor as within material real world capitalism. Therefore, it might be in Sony's and Blizzard's best interest to acknowledge this relationship and find ways to provide a platform to manage exchange of virtual goods. Or else, there will always be an underground economy of goldfarmers that deeply tied to exploitation of labor.

The case of global goldfarming of WoW goods provides a good case study on how people will act in a world that is increasingly mediated online - that online behavior is tied to real world social behavior. It would be great to bring sociologists, economists, legal scholars and virtual architects together in creating principles/protocols for virtual goods. US's Prohibition Act wasn't successful, and in the same vein if companies keep treating virtual goods like banned drugs, then I am guessing the ban on sale of virtual goods won't be successful either. There will always be another Lineage-like place around the node. -Tricia

update - I just found a great blog solely about Virtual Economy: News, research and discussion on real-money trade of virtual property globally.

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