As most everybody knows by now, you can sell (virtual) stuff in the (virtual) world of Second Life. It should therefore come as no surprise that sellers are using advertising to hawk their wares.

One Second Life denizen (Nylon Pinkney, who blogs here) created three ad spots to stimulate demand for the Nylon 35mm, the Nyloid Super Color 1000, and the Nylonic VHS Camcorder.

There's real money to be made selling virtual goods for virtual dollars. How long before the first virtual ad agency is founded for the purpose of creating sexy spots for virtual goods? Better yet, how long before established advertising agencies hire real sluts starlets to appear in said spots? Right now, all of the advertising we've seen is first-party and generally incomparable to advertising seen on prime-time television. That will eventually change, but when?

[Via The Daily Graze]

The MMORPG Project Entropia is known for its economic experiments, with pieces of virtual land being bought for high real-world prices. This latest news breaks the barrier between real and virtual money even further, however; a new cash card will let owners withdraw from their ingame balances using real ATMs.

Some MMOs entirely shun the idea of converting money earned online to real money, but Project Entropia is taking this to the other extreme. The game's economy is built around real-money transfer, so a move like this simply adds a logical ending to the cashflow pipeline, with developer MindArk sitting in the middle profiting from the whole process.

[Thanks, pandlcg]

Buying virtual goods with real money is becoming a trend these days, but this new Guild Wars announcement turns the game's small number of character slots (four) into a money-spinner: starting this summer, you'll be able to buy more slots for $9.99 each. The upcoming expansion, Factions, will also provide more slots, so the number of characters on a single Guild Wars account should be approaching that of other MMOs soon.

Other virtual services that cost real money include realm-to-realm character transfers (EverQuest) as well as approved real money transfer (Second Life) -- micropayments for a little bit of database juggling are on the rise, though Guild Wars at least has an excuse for charging for extra functionality, as it has no monthly fee.

Sony placed a full-page advertisement in the April 2006 issue of PC Gamer congratulating that magazine on their recent decision to stop taking advertisements from companies that amass huge piles of gold and other virtual items in games like World of Warcraft and Everquest in order to sell these virtual goods for real money. (The practice is often referred to as "real money trade," or RMT.)

First, we've got to give props to PC Gamer, because they've taken an editorial stance against advertising that they feel harms certain game environments. More game magazines should be willing to turn down advertising revenues when they feel it compromises editorial quality.

That said, Sony's note sounds a little whiney. They write, "For every fix we make in our games, for every new tool we develop for our customer service teams, there are literally thousands of unscrupulous people around the globe looking for ways to poke holes in our games and find exploits in our worlds."

Replace "games" and "worlds" with "software" and you've got a statement that could have been written by any company developing Internet-enabled applications. Welcome to the Intarwebs, dudes! Address complaints to Al Gore, plz thx.

(Click image for a version large enough to read in full.)

This six-minute video is a teaser for an upcoming documentary that examines the practice of hiring low-cost Chinese labor to farm virtual goods for sale in richer nations. It's the new new sweatshop.

More affluent nations have always outsourced their drudgery, and games that are full of such menial labor are susceptible to the same outsourcing movement that's swept through other industries. It makes sense that well-to-do gamers will outsource repetitive, mindless work. A professional who makes the equivalent of $50 per hour (about $100,000 per year) would be foolish not to spend $10 per hour to skip the boring parts of World of Warcraft. He's got better things to do with his time.

The trouble is, outsourcing tends to result in the online replication of the real-world divide between rich and poor. Is it fair that rich people are allowed to skip the low-level gruntwork while poor gamers must suffer through it? Whatever happened to the egalitarian ideal that makes places like World of Warcraft so appealing? Whatever the case, don't blame the customers, and don't blame the Chinese. Blame Blizzard. And Canada.

[Thanks, Probot and WoWInsider]

There have been some hefty discussions going on recently at WoW Insider concerning buying gold and accounts, and the subject of gold farming's fast becoming a favourite amongst MMO commentators. However, the phenomenon of real money trading (RMT) is not a new one, and Terra Nova have been digging into its history.

An interesting comment is that powerlevelling another character wasn't originally a service done for cash: "Men did it for women in the hope or expectation of some kind of emotional or physical relationship." Nice work if you can get it. According to Richard Bartle and Jessica Mulligan, selling items for money dates back to about 1987, and character sales have been happening since at least 1989. However, both were on a much smaller scale than the items available to purchase through eBay today; the universally-known auction site has certainly helped RMT take off and attain a much higher profile than it had in its early days.