Case in point: World of Warcraft--with just over 12 million subscribers since October 2012 (seriously)-- is a booming example of an online economy. Individual players buy, sell, and trade items amongst themselves, and can buy from and sell items to non-player characters, or NPCs. They may craft items, and some custom items cannot be replicated. Vendors pawn their goods to other players, and mods have been created by the user community in order to facilitate the ongoing search for products of interest (e.g. Auctioneer). This is not a micro-economy; it is an amalgamation of cultures all over the world exchanging goods. And yet it is fictional.
Individuals who specialize in making money in massively-multiplayer online (MMO) games for the purposes of real-life sales are called "farmers" by many MMO communities. The dub farmers is a reflection of their ceaseless, efficient, and monotonous repetition of the same actions in order to garner in-game money, usually by killing monsters. Often the same monster. Over and over and over and over and over again. All day.
Farmers strategically pick targets of interest, kill them, and take in-game money drops. In WoW, farmers gather gold and sell it in online venues. Players with hard cash, usually from Western nations can purchase in-game money or items in order to make their online questing more comfortable. In recent years, the WoW developer Blizzard has strong-armed online marketplaces into protecting their WoW economies by making it against terms of service, and a bannable offense.
Often farmers are from Eastern nations. Chinese gold farmers are especially prevalent, sometimes (certainly not always) working in sweatshop-like conditions, playing MMOs for most hours of the day alongside other twenty-something Chinese players to meet gold quotas, under supervision of a "factory" boss. This is, of course, to sell for a real-world bottom line; Chinese gold farmers may typically earn up to $250 in a month, but more realistically earn about $75-100 in a month. While real-world gold auctioning violates WoW's terms of service, it isn't illegal. Players generally look down on farmers and those who patronize them, with disdain for what they perceive as cheating. Unfortunately, then, farmers are assumed by players to be Chinese and are often harrassed, enduring the pejorative or racist comments attached to assaults. But the business model is so successful that it has spawned as many as 100,000 gold farmers in China. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/technology/09gaming.html?_r=1&ex=1291784400&en=48a72408592dffe6&ei=5088)
Why is this important? An online economy is being transformed into a real-world economy. Fictional currency can be bought and sold by players all over the world, and shifting hands through online venues and organized using venues like eBay or forums. Western nations provide the capital for this business; while the conditions are often not ideal for workers, it is still a service of value. Customers will apparently pay. We must, then, consider the value of some large online economies relative to real-world economies. Second Life is an example that perpetuates this concern, with businesses and individuals paying for virtual real estate, avatar modifications, services, and every virtual object you can imagine (see Second Life Marketplace). A real-world market for virtual goods is already viable. The next big question is whether this innovative adaption will perpetuate itself and grow, or fall away.
This post was very interesting, for I never knew that anything of this scale was happening with online video games. The fact that WOW has become so popular that the in-game economy affects the real economy is incredible. It is interesting to see that the buyers are from Western nations; it has become the trend that Eastern countries produce, and the West purchases. To see that the game world and the real world have merged economies is very interesting.
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