re: #71 Targetpractice

Monetary systems for online games are a pain for the system administrators to deal with — inflation is one major hassle. They print money, just like governments do (You’ve killed the dragon! Here’s 50,000 gold!) but that devalues existing holdings by other players. There’s also the problem of game currency being bought and sold in the real world for real (fiat) money as part of the pay-to-play strategy.

A friend of mine wrote a book that kicked off with a “heist” at an online game company. The poor police officer who turned up to the Secret Underground Bunker (used for proofing against cyber-attacks) where the company kept their servers didn’t understand that this “Monopoly money” was worth anything at all but then when it was explained to her that the real-world exchange value of the stolen intangible assets was in the millions that changed things.