Castronova's Notes on Hacker Court

scubacuda writes "Cal State Fullerton's Edward Castronova (who recently wrote an excellent analysis of gender inequality between male and female Everquest avatars) has just updated his notes on 'Hacker Court', a mock trial held at Vegas' Black Hat Conference on whether virtual items destroyed during the hack of an online video game constituted real loss. 'No verdict was reached, but the jury and audience agreed that the damages were real,' says Castronova."

Comments

Re:OK....so?

[Frymaster]

How about we mock the geeks that are still crying over this?

feel free. but the exercise actually has touched on an important issue: the "value" of "virtual" items.

let's look at two theories of value, shall we?

1. labour theory of value: both adam smith and karl marx agree on how to assess value (whoda thunk?) value is represented by labour. (marx's theory is here, adam smith here) the bottom line is that the value of an object is the labour that goes into making it. raw materials are "just there" and only have value because of the labour expended to extract and refine them. add up the work hours to make something and you have its value.

   now, with virtual items this is tricky. baboo the barbarian "worked" for several hundred hours to win the +12 shears of torpiary. so, to baboo, thos shears have a "value" of 100 hours. however, some programmer wrote up those shears in 2 minutes and created a dozen of them with a keystroke. so, to the authors of the game, the shears are worth 2.01 minutes of labour.

   the bottom line is: the labour value of virtual items depend on who you are. this is totally unlike "hard" items (ie, real shears). labour value theory fails us.

2. the scarcity theory of value: this is the supply and demand stuff everyone seems enamoured with these days. you know it. now, we'll ignore things like elasticity and fungibility to keep it simple.

   to baboo, there are only 12 shears in "existance". since they are highly sought after (demand) and there are very few (supply) the value of the shears is high. however, the authors of the game can create, destroy, modify and, most importantly, duplicate these shears with near-zero effort. the supply can be upped instantly. the shears can be modified to become useless, thus reducing the demand. the authors can make as many shears for themselves as they wish...

   so, once again, the value depends on who you are. totally unlike real shears. the scarcity theory breaks down with virtual things.

so. do virtual items have value? no matter how you calculate value, the answer depends on who you are. this is a major readjustment of the whole concept of value and will need to be addressed by governments and the law as the distribution and use of virtual items (not just in the gaming world, but everywhere) becomes more prevalent.

we don't need a digital millenium copyright act, we need a digital millenium value theory. of course, coming up with that will require some knowledge of economic theory and some hard thinking - so don't expect one from your politicians anytime soon.

Which Mods didn't read or check this?

[Anonymous Coward]

... Stanford Law [tubgirl.com] (Weasel). [goatse.cx]

In other words, virtual worlds are just like our world, so, there's nothing particularly interesting about them. Unless they feature nubile anime dickgirls- then they'd be of interest to one Rob "cmdr taco" Malda.

etc

Re:OK....so?

[Arker]

What you're talking about isn't new, it's called the subjective theory of value, and the austrian school of economists worked it out a long time ago.