real vs. virtual

I've always been fascinated by the similarities between economics and communications - these two seemingly different subjects share many of the same theories, just stated in their own terms. For example, in class we discussed that tastes and aesthetics differ from person to person and even from group to group with the understanding that there is a conscious existence of a high class taste that we always defer to.

Within economics, there is this idea that objects have a perceived value based on how useful and scarce it is. To me that is very much like aesthetics and taste. We perceive a normative value or taste and everyone is in want of the aforementioned value/taste because it is useful in some way - perhaps a symbol of status or some other representation in the case of clothing. In addition, clothing is one of those necessities in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. By being a "high class" object the aesthetics of fashion are also not easily attainable by most people.

What's even more interesting, I think, is that society as a whole accepts certain values as factual and "real" in some cases, and rejects it in others. I've already said a bit about taste, but my biggest interest is in the systems of real world and virtual economies. Real world economies are something we are all familiar with, we use money to pay for necessities and extras every day. A virtual economy exists solely within a virtual or digital world - the best example is in Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs, or just MMOs). MMOs like World of Warcraft function with entirely made up objects and currencies.

Here, the potential for crossover is astounding: real world money - dollars and cents can be traded for digital sprites representing some kind of functional object, perhaps a sword or a shield or even gold. If you've ever heard of Chinese gold farmers, what I'm saying probably isn't new to you. But for others it might seem like some completely bizarre practice: trading real world cold hard cash for some virtual gold, but whats bizarre to me is that we are within a hegemonic structure almost without concern or question. What makes a piece of green paper, or even a series of 0s and 1s on a server somewhere "real money," incomparable to a server storing what items your RPG character currently owns?