IF YOU can鈥檛 beat them, join them. After years crying foul over the trading of virtual gaming goodies such as the Flaming Sword of Destruction, Sony Online Entertainment is opening its own trading website. Players of its EverQuest II game can now legitimately sell their hard-won virtual objects for real money.
With the explosion in the popularity of massively multi-player online games (MMOGs), in which players inhabit and play in increasingly sophisticated artificial worlds, virtual goods such as gold coins, swords and magic boots have acquired real value. The exchange of these ephemeral objects is now a lucrative $200 million industry, with trades carried through eBay and Yahoo.
Sony Online Entertainment has till now fiercely opposed the trading, and has also seen it as a threat to the game鈥檚 escapism, which allows people to be virtual millionaires even if they are poor in real life. Ditching such altruistic concerns, the company has decided to get in on the action. On 20 April, it announced the creation of its own auction website called Station Exchange, which will be available to all 300,000 players of EverQuest II worldwide in June.
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鈥淭he wall between real and virtual worlds is crumbling,鈥� says Peter Ludlow, a philosopher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who was banned from a MMOG after writing about its lurid goings-on.
