I just read that Diablo 3 on-line is going to have an auction house for in-game items that uses real money, like eBay.
Welcome to the new economy.
Man, talk about “intangible benefits.”
Where you can sit enough people at computers with nothing else to do, it’s amazing what you can gin up. There are reported to be CAPTCHA squads of people who just enter the text equivalent of the grainy, distorted pictures of words intended to ensure that a human, not a script, is addressing a web site that renders a personalized service. Even if the games were hacker proof, North Korea could still field players to “earn” things that other players might want to buy with physical money. An accomplice outside North Korea would pick up the identity of the North Korean game player and do the physical money transaction.