i had the occasion to listen to "talk of the nation" on npr today while installing some thresholds & reducers. a very good show today & if you have some time you can listen to it
here.
a decent discussion on pre war intelligence. also neocon military historian victor davis hanson. but what captured my attention was a segment on the world of online games.
now none of this will be news to any cybergamer out there or anyone who thinks "the matrix" was a documentary, but there are whole other universes out there called "massively multiplayer games". at any given time millions of people are playing all over the world. okay, i sort of knew that because my son plays something called "socom seals" & also something called "spacecraft."
the thing i had no clue about is the black market (or gray market) in buying virtual valuables - gold, swords, amulets - with real money. no kidding, a business turning up to several hundreds of millions of dollars. not only that, but there are chinese computer sweatshops where people blitz through missions to obtain ingame items to sell to wealthy americans. (& i'm sure other nationalities) weird.
anyway, just curious, are y'all familiar with this phenomenon? which virtual universe(s) are you in when you are not in the kos galaxy?