By now, everyone has probably read the gushing news stories: Project Entropia’s developer, MindArk, has introduced a bank card that allows cardholders to treat their “virtual currency” from Project Entropia “just like real money” and withdraw it from a cash machine. The BBC, the New York Times, ABC News, and any number of other mainstream media sources have run stories on this. They boggle at this miracle and explain how,
[t]he new cash card blurs the boundary between the virtual and physical world even further.
This is the kind of story that we love here at Terra Nova, since it involves nifty issues about virtual worlds, the social fiction of money, and all sorts of other interesting questions. But I don’t love this story. I think it’s basically bogus. In fact it’s worse than that. This story has finally convinced me that MindArk is fantastic at generating public relations stories that credulous media sources pick up without questioning, but which, if investigated for even a moment, make you shake your head in wonder.
MindArk had bumped around in the news a little before hitting the big time in 2004. Famously, it was raided and sued by the Business Software Alliance for allegedly running 600 illegal copies of software, a suit that was later dropped. At the time of the raid, MindArk demonstrated that it was good at making lemonade when handed lemons: the Wired story quotes a MindArk statement that suggests the bust was actually motivated by Microsoft’s fear of Project Entropia as a competitor to its MMOG offering, Asheron’s Call. The statement went on to indicate the significance of Project Entropia, even way back in 2002. "When MindArk a few weeks ago proclaimed Project Entropia 3-D universe open for anyone to enter from their computer, the Project Entropia site immediately became the world's largest site on the Internet, even beating Yahoo, MSN, etc." Wow, who knew?
The first really big Entropia story to hit the headlines was the sale of Treasure Island, for US$26,500. I bought the story at face value, I’m sorry to say. But it seemed within the realm of the possible and there were few warning signals. Alarms should have started going off with the October 2005 reports of the US$100,000 sale of the Project Entropia Space Station, to Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs. Jacobs, various news sources reported, was an independent filmmaker and DJ who intended to run the station as a virtual nightclub and resort. What no news services (to the best of my knowledge) ever reported is that Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs worked for MindArk as their “Project Entropia, US Spokesman.” He was a speaker at the Digital Hollywood conference in 2004 on internet gaming, and his (presumably self-written) biography says that his responsibilities for Project Entropia include “business development, marketing and content acquisition”. (Scroll down to the sixth entry). So it turns out that the “sale” of Space Station “Neverdie” was from MindArk to, um, one of their marketing and PR people. Wow, no wonder why the news sources bought that one at face value. No reasonable reporter could have doubts about the validity of that transaction.
The latest news is that you can now get a “Project Entropia Card” and can withdraw your virtual money—Project Entropia Dollars, or PEDs—at your local cash machine in real world currency. All the news sources are going gaga over this. But just give it a moment’s thought and there is nothing there. First off, it’s genuinely no big deal to have a “Project Entropia Card”, since almost any bank is happy to give you a card with your brand on it. At various times I’ve had credit cards with brands like “United Airlines”, “University of Pennsylvania” and “National Geographic” on them, even though I’m confident that none of those institutions is actually a bank. This is called “co-branding” and it’s extremely common. Then there is the amazing fact that you can use your “virtual” currency in the real world. But think about what this actually means: you pay US dollars (or whatever currency you use) to get PEDs at the rate of 10 PEDs per US dollar; these PEDs sit in an account that Mindark controls; and if you get a Project Entropia card you can extract the PEDs from your account as dollars. Which is another way of saying that you put dollars in, and you can get dollars out. Hey, guess what? This new frontier in virtual currency is...wait for it...a co-branded debit card. It’s remarkable that all the journalists at the NYT, BBC and ABC News couldn’t put that one together. It doesn’t even take a phone call.
Now, MindArk may well be a scrupulously honest organization. I’m not suggesting here that it is acting fraudulently. But its PR stunts are designed to make a big impression—“Virtual Space Station sells for $100,000!!”, “Virtual currency crosses over into Real World!!”—and on analysis, they are nothing but bullshit.
The mass media needs to start applying a bit of common sense to stories about virtual asset sales. I think it’s just that the whole idea of virtual property is so new and looks so weird, that media sources will buy any story, no matter how flimsy. It turns out that the flimsiest stories of all are about Project Entropia.
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