The underlying problem: There is a social contract in gaming just as there is in sports. This is not a PC reaction to "the way things are supposed to be" so much as it is a warning to short-sighted capitalists that some of their value stems from this contract. Messing with it hurts the product. In sports and games, teams and individuals contest on a level playing field. Cheap and valid command and conquer cd key, command conquer cd keys, with instant delivery. It is meritocratic, not capitalist, nepotistic, classist or elitist, and it is a central underlying reason for the appeal of sports--Joe six pack and Joe CEO can watch and play as equals. When this ideal is violated, there is a violation of that contract--that meta-game. When the ideal is protected, the product is better and more people partake of it.  

It's why people hate the Yankees and baseball's economic structure is a joke. In contrast, it's why the NFL is the best-run and most popular league in US sports. I asked players whether they thought the MS Account mechanics changed. It's why people hate IGE. And it's why this practice will ruin a game and send customers to better systems. It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term. Buy cheap star wars galaxies game cards from the largest mmorpg virtual trading network for everquest 2 platinum. The truth is World of Warcraft Gold doesn't HAVE to take a long time to get, especially in the higher levels. Buy WOW Gold here, and then enjoy your excited WoW life! Warhammer Online Goldwill keep your high power. On the other hand, if RMTers persuade the courts that people own what their characters own, the whole concept of a purge might be threatened.

Other kinds of (creative) human activity vanish from its radar screen.

This is an argument that forms part of a chapter I've written for a volume I'm co-editing  with Sandra Braman (Command Lines) that is currently under review, and there the specific example is Second Life and the challenges that the varieties of user content therein make to the multiple ideas about content held by the different teams within Linden Lab. But GDC led me to see this claim as more applicable here as well. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.

After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers. And there are huge gaps in what we don't know. Where is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from it. I hope the audience did as well.

But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown). And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companies. Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

The best way to put the assertion (and this is all it is at this point; and again, please keep in mind that there are a number of familiar exceptions) is that the practice of game software development generates a way of seeing and defining problems (as essentially precise, logical, and algorithmic), and creating solutions (through linear, text-defined code) that makes other ways of accounting for what happens in VWs seem at worst nonsensical and at best irrelevant or quixotic.

Perhaps designers will design with these facts in mind and use their foresight and control over the market to decrease these problems. I am skeptical.

What other possibilities? Why not exploit *real-world* linkages as part of virtual world design - then why not start with external trading? Can such real-virtual-world estuaries offer the new flank in virtual world game design?