If you play a game online these days, there is a more than even chance that you can obtain “things” in the game which can be found, earned, bought with in-game currency or traded for. Because any of these methods involve an investment of time, you, like many others, have probably wondered if perhaps you could pay someone else to just give you the “thing” in question. For many games the “thing” is in game currency. World of Warcraft players have many opportunities to purchase gold for their characters in the game, allowing them to participate actively in the auction houses online and easily afford some of the game’s more extravagant purchases like special mounts or training.

Second Life, an online virtual world where players can create content, build up virtual real estate and freely buy and sell virtual good between one another, actually has had a fairly robust economy as recently as 2011 Q2. League of Legends uses what is known as a freemium model. The core service is free while certain content, in the form of upgrades or reskins, is available through purchase. The list goes on; game developers have quickly latched onto the idea that they can charge customers for the flip of an electronic bit.

While there are many who think this is perfectly acceptable and even encourage the development of this model, there is a growing number of people who reject the idea of paying for virtual goods. They seem to accept that some games will require a subscription fee for ongoing access to the game content itself, but believe that it is unreasonable or illogical to purchase in game content with real money. Typically it comes down to possession of real property. If I buy a book, I have physical possession of that book. I can read it, shelf it, burn it, throw it at a burglar or build a shrine to it. Whatever I choose to do with it, it doesn’t matter whether the company that sold me the book, or the book’s author for that matter, are still around. Nothing prevents me from continuing to possess the book.

Things change when you buy a virtual item. Since World of Warcraft came onto the scene, it has seemed to be an unstoppable juggernaut in the MMORPG space, chalking up record breaking subscription numbers year after year. It has finally seen a decline in those numbers which may or may not be indicative of the eventual fall of the iconic franchise’s tenure at the top of the food chain. Regardless though, it seems commonly held wisdom that it too will eventually succumb to something that comes after, even if it is another Blizzard MMO. And when the servers for WoW are finally shut down, that epic Sword of Truthiness will no longer be available. And therein lies the argument of the naysayers opposing virtual good purchases. You aren’t buying anything tangible. The company might close its doors with little to no notice and that shiny electronic loot you had is now gone along with any characters you might have built up.

The problem with this thinking is being locked into the idea that virtual goods are like their real world counterparts. They are quite different and should be treated as such. This doesn’t mean that virtual goods have no value, just that we can’t expect to be able to treat them like we would something we can go down and buy at the furniture store. If we start with the mindset that in fact the two are different, with virtual goods having the greater risk of possibly disappearing in spite of our best efforts, then we begin to frame the discussion more reasonably.

Even so, the thinking goes, why pay permanent real money for something that is here today and gone tomorrow. To which I would respond by asking, “Did you enjoy your last movie?” Where is that movie now? Did you frame it and put it up in your living room? Did it drive you to the grocery store yesterday? Are you wearing it? Of course not. You paid for an experience. You paid to see the result of someone else’s work. How is this different from purchasing some item inside an online game? An artist created the model. A developer wrote the code. You are buying the experience. It is entertainment. For now at least. Perhaps some day we will conduct business in a virtual world like Second Life. Hold meetings, perform negotiations, interview prospective employees. When that happens, we may want to be able to build a virtual corporate office with virtual furniture. And we will likely pay for the privilege. In such a case, we still want that experience. We are decorating our world, virtual or otherwise, with the works of others. That is what you are paying for, and that is really no different than buying a book. The book, the physical pages, are simply a medium. It presents perhaps greater value because it is a flexible medium that won’t just disappear, though of course it is not without its disadvantages like requiring physical space and having mass which becomes a problem when you are moving. But what you are really buying in that case is the story or the information contained within the book. You could have gotten it as an e-book, or perhaps on CD. Same story. Same content. Different medium.

But what about account theft? It is true that in some cases, perhaps many depending on the virtual world in question, account theft is the source of virtual goods sold. Someone’s account is hacked, their currency transferred to another temporary account who then transfers the gold to one or more other handling accounts and is then itself deleted. Quickly, a buyer is found, pays for the in game currency, the real world money changes hands, the bandits then send along the stolen currency and move to the next “customer”. It is possible for such transactions to then be rolled back, but the real world currency exchange is already completed, often with little or no recourse to the person who paid. This is, however, symptomatic of other problems. There will always be those who try to game the system, real world or otherwise, taking advantage of their ability to lure unsuspecting victims into giving up their money. In many cases these people didn’t even realize that what they were doing was wrong or that they were dealing with criminals. The problem is not that virtual good transactions are responsible for these thefts. It is that these thefts are used as part of virtual good transactions. As these virtual worlds move toward more secure operating models or even handle the transactions themselves rather than leaving it up to some sort of black or gray market, the chances of theft will be drastically reduced. When the operators of these virtual worlds take an active hand in running this market, they can also avoid inflationary effects which ofttimes occur as a result of currency purchasing.

All in all, there isn’t really anything inherently wrong with purchasing or selling virtual goods with real world money. The philosophical opposition to the practice is rooted in mistaking physical and virtual attributes for one another and how things were done early on in the burgeoning marketplaces. While there are adults who have never lived a single day where the Internet wasn’t around and available to operate within, we are as a society still grappling with the changes that our online activities are creating in our lives.