“If you think it all sounds very postmodern, you’re right. Derivatives are referential securities, commentaries on underlying assets. They raise all sorts of questions as to what a symbol signifies and what values are embedded in the price of a security, which is, after all, a mere byte of digital information. It’s the sort of thing a French structuralist could noodle endlessly over a few demitasses at a cafe in St. Germain. And as he puffs on a cigarette and waves ironically through the clouds of curling smoke, he might also notice another irony. The NYSE—for two centuries at the vanguard of American capitalism—is now finding itself having to buy a European exchange in order to get into the hottest new business in the securities industry.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2142158/?nav=tap3

Grant McCracken argues that technology has evolved to help the untechnical have access to the technical:In the early days, we were obliged to hire the guy at Bungie (the authoring house that created Halo). He might not have an aesthetic bone in his bo…

We have a couple of hundred years experience of the impact of a powerful virtual world on the real world, namely the virtual world of the financial markets. People in finance even talk about the “real economy”, meaning the economy of goods and services which are not financial goods and services. Money, after all, is only a social fiction we all agree to accept as a token of something, and is not the something itself.

There remains the sense that all these games stick to a goal-oriented logic – i.e., player wants to fly between a and b and safely land plane, or so on – and the new “noise” character is in whether or not your partners in the causal chain are able to be trusted, or refutable, or so on. I think there are many sociological models in game playing and so on that will support the notion that, eventually, more people will want to experience what they can not in the real world, and so it happens that more “worst case” scenarios develop. In the example – it isnt fighting with the sister for controller, but that they willfully crash the plane on purpose, screw up the chances for the flyer to land, and so on. So it would eventually follow that, if there isnt going to be pure anarchy to the point the “game” is no longer recognizable or able to be played, a “governer” is always required, even if hidden away, like government. So there would be regulatory policies, the “policing” will get stronger and so on. Just like in economy – sometimes you need “wild” growth… as long as you can get away with it and it suits the other players and overall game design. But too many incidents, crashes,and the like, and…regulatory policies spring up, or people leave for another game.

We once discussed how the inside of a virtual world can often be unfathonable to those on the outside (ref. Stranger in a Strange Land). Most virtual worlds we know are centered upon clusters of friends in a sea of