http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-12/ff_ige
"The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire"
by Julian Dibbell
November 24, 2008
Wired
The article basically discusses one instance of the real-money trading industry. Basically this involves accumulating stuff in MMORPG's, and then selling it to other players for actual money ("actual money," considering that virtually all modern currencies are fiat money).
To get back to the thought that economics is about the "allocation of scarce goods and services": that thought is really complicated by how virtual economies work. For one thing, a couple of programmers at Blizzard could, at first glance, alleviate scarcity completely with a couple of lines of code. Suddenly, everyone has everything! Problem solved! But we all know that nobody would play WoW if that were the case. Moreover, all these "goods" could just disappear, with another couple of lines of code. No more WoW! So what happened to all those "goods"?
This is why I say that economics is really about incentives. Blizzard has figured out how to get people to do things, how to incentivize them (an incredibly detailed alternate reality). And so they do it.
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