Sellers offer shortcut to games’ hard-earned perks

Friday, Aug. 3, 2007 | 7:27 a.m.

By Abigail Goldman

Joe T. is a budding black market entrepreneur. For $800 under the table, the 22-year-old can outfit you with a virtual army. This is a criminal bargain, people. And Joe will finance.

He sold a highly equipped priest, shaman, druid and rogue to a 16-year-old who's secreting the splurge from his parents by paying $150 cash installments every two weeks.

The Vegas teen is one of 9 million people worldwide who play "World of Warcraft," an online computer game where virtual characters wander virtual lands in search of virtual treasures.

Joe sells "Warcraft" characters - the priest, shaman, et al. - for real money. He's just another small-scale merchant in what academics estimate is a $2 billion market in real money trade of virtual property. A market that runs on the most conspicuous kind of consumption: the sale of items that don't exist. The purchase of flickering pixels.

Some say cyberspace salesmen like Joe are ruining games by selling their pieces for profit. Taking the fun out of play and promoting virtual inflation. Selling characters, or swords, or whatever it is one needs to troll virtual worlds - cheapening the value of goods, and the games, by doing so.

But Joe doesn't feel bad at all. He just doesn't want his last name printed in the paper because it could get him thrown out of the game and cut off his virtual lifeline to cold hard cash.

"What I did is cheating, absolutely," he says. "But I'm not cheating at life. I'm cheating in a video game."

But don't think this economy of imaginary items is frivolous. People have killed for virtual goods. They've sold blood for access to online role-playing games. Chinese companies now hire groups of gamers to play, winning saleable items in apparent sweatshop conditions. Internet sites sell in-game currencies used by virtual characters for actual dollars. Steve Salyer, the CEO of one such site, IGE, said his company's trade volume in 2004 was approximately $880 million.

The fluctuating exchange rate for this virtual Monopoly money is tracked like Nasdaq.

On Monday, IGE was selling "Warcraft" currency - gold pieces - at 200 for $26.58. On Tuesday the same amount of gold was going for $21.74. On Wednesday, $23.52.

Joe makes a few hundred dollars every month selling "Warcraft" characters. He uses the money to take his girlfriend out to dinner.

Others have made thousands. One Miami man reportedly used it to pay his mortgage.

Although profit varies from seller to seller, the client's motive seldom does. People who pay for virtual goods do so for one reason: They want more advanced, better equipped characters. Normally, this means playing the game for weeks or months to build your characters while gathering currency and gear.

Or paying someone to do it for you.

"Everybody wants to be better than the next guy," Joe says, "in virtual reality and in real life."

Joe spent two months of 10-hour days playing "Warcraft," advancing the characters he eventually sold to his 16-year-old client through the highest levels, acquiring different weapons, abilities and skills along the way.

Joe never intended to profit from his labor.

Skip back to December 2005. Joe fell asleep while driving 95 mph down California's I-5 and woke up in the hospital with no memory of the accident, a swollen skull and orders for two months ' bed rest.

He started playing "Warcraft" to kill time. He kept at it after his recovery. He built up a small army of high-ranking characters. He joined a team of gamers who meet up in the fantasy land where "Warcraft" takes place: Azeroth. There, the group tackled the game's tougher tasks together. United online, alone in their homes.

A year and a half later, Joe says it's really not his thing.

"I don't have the gaming mentality," he says. "I don't want to make virtual friends."

So in May , when word got back to Joe that an acquaintance was interested in buying his cast of characters, he decided to sell. He studied Web sites where characters are bought and sold, found a few similar to his own and used them to price his product.

Joe determined his entire "Warcraft" account was worth $1,500. But he sold it for $800.

"I'm doing this on the side," he says. "I'm not doing this to stay alive."

The sale planted a seed - he could go into business hustling "Warcraft" goods.

The history of selling nonexistent virtual assets has its roots in a game called Ultima Online.

Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher for the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology who specializes in the study of virtual consumerism, calls Ultima the first successful massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG.

Ultima debuted in 1997 and grew to a reported 250,000 subscribers who, like "Warcraft" gamers, pay a fee to play.

Ultima's virtual world was designed to have a realistic economy, where gamers traded acquisitions during play, Lehdonvirta says. My sword for your spear, your armor for my coins, and so on.

But within two years Ultima players started selling their game goods online for actual cash. At first through the Internet auction house eBay - which has since banned the sale of "virtual artifacts" - and then through a breed of Web sites launched to broker the virtual assets for some of the more than 80 online games.

One of the most notable sites is IGE, where currencies and characters from 16 games are bought and sold like bullion and pork bellies.

Legally speaking, the Hong Kong company occupies a gray area.

The question is whether IGE and similar sites are violating game terms of use by selling virtual goods for a profit. Or are they merely collecting a fee for brokering business between players?

The question has yet to be tested in court, Lehdonvirta said via e-mail from Tokyo.

The complexities of virtual ownership complicate things. After all, how does an imaginary item accrue actual value?

Online, where virtual worlds are limited only by what a person builds into them, Lehdonvirta writes, "everyone could have almost everything. At the very least, everyone could have the best suit of armor and a nice castle next to a lake."

Developers build scarcity into the games, Lehdonvirta notes. For players, having everything can quickly lead to it all meaning nothing.

This logic, carried to its end, is the argument against real money trade for virtual assets.

IGE declined requests for comment on the subject. So did Blizzard Entertainment, "Warcraft" 's developer. Joe, however, spilled.

"With selling, you take the in-game value out," he says. "Everything does become worthless."

It takes a computer on autopilot to advance a "Warcraft" character to level 60 - almost the highest. Everyone considers this cheating.

After the computer, Joe takes over. He puts in about 10 hours to advance the character to the highest level - 70 - and then sells it.

For this service, Joe charges strangers $190. Friends, $100. This is his new business, launched in June. He made $700 in the first month.

Now he's thinking of forming an LLC to protect his personal assets in case Blizzard finds out and comes after him for so wantonly breaking the laws of its artificial land.

But it's only a side job. Something he does between working at an electronics outfitter and hanging out with friends. Something to pay off hospital bills and credit card debts.

Like the 16-year-old client who's paying Joe off - the last cash installment to be forked over today .

The teen is one player among millions, Joe says. It would take his side business an eternity to bankrupt the entire world of "Warcraft."

"As long as we stay little," he says, "we're not a thorn in their foot."

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