Xfire “Virtual Gold & Real Money” Debate Today
August 21st, 2007 by Benjamin Duranske
[Editor's Note: If you missed this event, Xfire has made a transcript of the "Main Floor" debate between the panelists available here. There's also a transcript of the concurrent debate among Xfire users, here. Thanks to the Xfire guys for running this, and to Joe Blancato for hosting. Original post below.]
————————————————————————————————————————-
Readers may be interested in a debate / panel discussion on game currency to be held today at 3PM Eastern time, hosted by Xfire. I’m one of the seven panelists. The others include a technology writer, the lead artist for Arden, a professor at USC, ZAM Network’s Content Manager, PR manager at NHN USA, and the CEO of Sparter. The event is hosted by Joe Blancato, Associate Editor at The Escapist magazine, and founder of Waterthread.org. It should be an interesting discussion.
Participation requires a quick software download and setting up a user ID, but it is all free, and the Xfire software is easy to use.
Here is the description of the event from Xfire:
The Xfire Debate Club presents its 7th meeting as a discussion of the driving force behind your favorite game, money. Online games today are more dependant on in-game currency than ever before. With top minds from the industry, journalism, and academia, we will talk about the different design approaches to make virtual exchange useful, fair, and enjoyable.
Edited to add links to transcripts on August 22, 2007.
Related Posts on Virtually Blind
- China Imposing 20% Tax on Profits on Virtual Money: "The Wall Street Journal's China Journal reports that China is..." (1 comments)
- Second Life Gambling Ban Clarified and Enforced; Terms of Service Remain Unchanged: "Second Life creator Linden Lab recently clarified its July 25 ban on..." (14 comments)
- Kwari Wants to Be “Your Virtual Arms Dealer”: "Many debates over the legality of various transactions in virtual..." (7 comments)
2 Responses to “Xfire “Virtual Gold & Real Money” Debate Today”
Leave a Reply
Notes on Comments: Your first comment must be manually approved, but after it is you'll be able to post freely with the same name and email. You can use some HTML (<a> <b> <i> <blockquote> etc.) but know that VB's spam blocker holds posts with five or more <a> links. VB supports gravatars. Got a gravatar? Use the associated email and it'll show with your comment. Need one? Set it up for free here.
[...] Second, where there’s a gray area in the law (e.g. the validity of recent patent applications on virtual world technology, “ownership” of virtual land, and the value of real world currency) I generally try to point that out or approach the issue in a way that makes it clear it is up in the air. Those notes, of course, take a somewhat more neutral tone, and if I do miss a counterargument, readers usually catch it in the comments. Finally, there are some issues that VB confronts — like the illegality of ponzi schemes, the legality of virtual escort work, and the necessity of Linden Lab complying with the UIGEA — where the issues appear, from a legal perspective, to be rather black and white. On those, I’ll continue writing in my usual voice. [...]
[...] economics of them) extremely interesting and I try to read as much as I can. There are actually a few blogs I’ve added to the blogroll lately that focus exclusively on this [...]