Chinese girls are buying ‘homes’ at iPartment, a social networking/gaming site that lets users interact with their ‘love apartment’ via pets, diaries, gardens, and games all while looking for someone to share it with.

No matter how complex and diverse our online communities are, and how sophisticated and evolved the new ways in which we interact with one another seem, buying and selling still remains at the fore of the online world. Though the basic act of commerce has not changed, many entrepreneurial minds have envisioned new ways to facilitate our transactions, and bring business beyond cash and coin. Here are ten currencies we’ve been tracking:
The Renmibi
In China, the QQ Coin—a currency attached to the massively popular QQ chatting and social networking service—has broken out of the virtual world, and is increasingly used to [...]

We’re looking forward to having Celestine Arnold, creative strategy consultant, join us at our upcoming PSFK Conference NYC 2009. Celestine will be speaking on the changing face of race in gaming, virtual worlds and social networks.
First, who are you and what do you do?
My name is Celestine Arnold and I’m a creative strategy consultant to brands and agencies. I generally work in the gaming, social media and digital spheres, but have worked across all types of industries. I find it is nice to mix it up a bit.
In one paragraph, can you explain what themes and ideas you hope to [...]

When we speak of virtual economies, the first thing that may come to mind is the immersive 3D worlds like Second Life, etc. But the entire internet can be considered an near-infinite virtual world, where anything that happens is part of the complex “life” of that space. The web of activities that we participate in leave an indelible trace and builds up a significant virtual persona (for better or worse.) The Yale Law Journal has published an interesting article that discusses how to legally deal with this space where reputation becomes a kind of currency, the substance of value rather [...]

National taxpayer advocate Nina Olsen delivered her 2008 Annual Report to Congress last week, and the lack of laws regarding the transactions of virtual goods was brought up as a prime area of concern. The US government is now stepping up research into ways to tax and regulate the virtual economy of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft which are estimated to contain yearly transactions totaling over $1 billion. The US is not alone in trying to get a piece of this digital income, Sweden is currently working on similar tax laws, and Korea has been [...]

If you walk into any Internet bar in China, you are sure to see a large number of the screens filled with scenes from the extremely popular MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW).  The game has attracted over 1 million peak concurrent users in China and makes up more than 90 percent of the earnings for The9, the game’s China licensee.
Given the games popularity, an entrepreneur has opened a WoW-themed restaurant in Beijing to cater to its considerable number of fans.  The entrance is a re-creation of the opening animation from the game, walls are covered with WoW images and replica [...]

Artist, film maker and game designer Michael Highland discusses the significant impact video games have in programming the brain in his film As Real as Your Life:
The beauty and reality of video games today lies not in the lifelike graphics, the vibrating joysticks or the virtual surround sound, it lies in that these games are beginning to make me emotional.  What is sadder is that my inability to understand and decipher the real world I live in makes these simple, virtual emotions even sweeter.  The people that make these games are smart, They know what makes me tick.  What makes [...]