The Escapist come up with an article titled Trust me and take a look at MMO economies and the in-game effects.As no government authority stands behind them,is the imaginary currencies vitual or real?Below is a snippet:

As we all know by now (and the rest of the world is rapidly learning), the imaginary currencies that are earned, spent and traded in massively multiplayer online games and other virtual worlds are anything but virtual, themselves. While no government authority stands behind them to insure their value, a seal of approval isn¡®t needed for a currency to become "real." A World of Warcraft gold piece is worth as much as you can get for it on the market - about ¡ç0.10 at the moment. The U.S. dollar derives its value in exactly the same way.

The people who inhabit virtual worlds have long realized this. Out-of-world sales of gold and other virtual items have been going on since the early days of text-based "multi-user dungeons" and other online spaces, in the late 1970s. And "real-money trade," as it¡®s commonly known, can be an emotional issue, generating harsh conflicts between players who feel it¡®s just part of the landscape and those who feel it ruins the integrity of their games, and between game companies and those who engage in the practice.

But as The Escapist looks back at 2005, it seems virtual worlds have reached a new level of sophistication and complexity where commerce and economics are concerned. In Second Life - a world in which real-money trade has the explicit stamp of approval of Linden Lab, the company behind the world - an avatar named Anshe Chung gained worldwide renown this year for her clever (and profitable) play of Second Life¡®s real-estate market. It has reportedly garnered her hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of SL currency - which is, of course, freely convertible to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cold, hard cash.

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