/ 9 June 2010

Cops and virtual robbers

Finnish police probe theft of virtual furniture” is one of those ridiculous headlines designed to lighten up a news agenda filled with cheery stuff like oil spills and flotilla attacks. “Those zany Finns”, we’re supposed to chuckle, “they need some real problems”.

But is it really that ridiculous? Yes, the 400 people who were digitally robbed had accounts on the comically named Habbo Hotel, and yes most of them were teenagers who had bought the virtual furniture to impress their online buddies. But they spent real money on that furniture, and no doubt the theft felt very real to them.

They aren’t the only ones spending money on virtual goods. The overnight success of casual games like Farmville has shown that ordinary adults around the planet are willing to pay for a product they will never touch, taste, smell or hear and that they will only ever see on their computer screens.

And we aren’t talking about a small amount of money here. Zynga, which owns Farmville (and several other popular casual games) should make over a half a billion dollars this year. The worldwide market for virtual goods was worth over $8-billion in 2009 and one eager CEO forecasts that it will be worth $100-billion by the end of the decade.

Why do people buy this stuff? For all the usual motives people buy things they don’t strictly need: for fun, to show off, to keep up with the Joneses and a few dozen other equally banal reasons. Virtual goods are just another form of luxury goods. They’re no more or less ridiculous than, say, ringtones — a market worth about $5-billion.

Still, you might argue that getting the police involved is take things too far. Yes, it calls into question the whole way we assign value to things (or non-things), but perhaps that’s a good thing. We live in an information age — an age where ideas are often worth far more than physical objects.

I agree, the theft of a virtual couch or cat doesn’t trump a real murder or even the theft of a real car. Those ideas aren’t inherently very valuable, which is why it took the theft of over 400 of them to get the Finnish police involved in the case. But what about more valuable ideas, like intellectual property?

Most countries have fairly crusty copyright and intellectual property laws which can’t even keep up with the internet in its simplest form. How on earth will they deal with, say, a French luxury clothing designer suing a Chinese virtual clothing designer for infringing on her trademark? Or vice-versa for that matter?

No doubt the Luddites out there will see this as yet more proof of society’s steady decline into technology induced madness. Luckily they do not call the shots. The world’s new crop of billionaires has sprung almost entirely from information technology. This reflects deep societal changes that we have not yet had time to digest.

So while there may be no way to measure the enjoyment of buying a virtual cow for your farm or a virtual rose for your valentine, that doesn’t make it any less real.