Welcome to the desert of The Real.

Whether it's the World of Warcraft, Second Life, Entropia Universe or any other virtual world MMORPG, we're continually fascinated by the implications of these virtual worlds upon our lives. And apparently, we aren't the only ones.

Take a look at this article by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at Oxford. It is worth reading, but if you don't have time, we'll give you the juiciest part of his 'simulation argument', i.e., the conclusion. Professor Bostrom states that if his simulation argument is correct, at least one of the following conclusions is true:

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;
(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Did you catch that? There is a 33.33% chance that you, me, Napoleon Bonaparte, Billy Jo Robideaux and everyone else who has ever existed is nothing more than a simulation in some computer somewhere that is being run by some advanced species. I mean, I liked 'The Matrix' as a film, and I thank Renee Descartes for all he's done, but I've never really wanted to live it.

So why are we bringing this up?

We've always been fascinated about the world of online games. For example, when you are buying a WoW epic sword of kicka**, what exactly are you buying? A code on a computer somewhere? Some pixels? The right to rent those pixels or that code?

Though it's probably the last of these, it still seems strange that monetary transactions for virtual goods takes place. But a thing only has value if people believe it does, right? If people stopped believing tomorrow that money has value, it would just be paper.

So getting back to the simulation argument, if everything is a simulation, then it makes perfect sense that simulated goods ala the WoW sword has value. After all, WoW itself would be a simulation inside a simulations, and the player avatars would just be simulations played by other simulations...

Oh man, we're getting a headache again.