Is it Real or is it Virtual
My father once told me that money, cash and coins, has no intrinsic value, unlike, let's say, an apple, which can be eaten. His words came back to me when I read the article by Clive Thompson entitled EverQuest: 77th Richest Country. Thompson details how players of online role-playing games are turning "virtual" money and items from the game into hard cash in the real world. I found this fact utterly amazing as I never knew that online gaming, which I've known about for years, had reached this point. But what does this all mean? If it is possible to give things that are virtual a value in the real world, what does that say about the real world, or at least the monetary system we use in the real world? This point is raised in Thompson's article when he discusses what might happen if one of the companies that created these online games were to go out of business. If the game is shut down, all of the virtual goods would be destroyed along with their associated values to the players in the real world. Now here's an interesting question: wouldn't the same thing happen if you were to burn a dollar bill? All of a sudden that dollar is destroyed, it's value meaningless like those virutal goods in the shut-down game. So what does that say about the dollar bill and our monetary system? Is it virtual too? Is the value of a dollar bill virtual? My father would say yes.