{"id":1024,"date":"2008-01-02T14:45:51","date_gmt":"2008-01-02T21:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1024"},"modified":"2008-01-02T14:45:51","modified_gmt":"2008-01-02T21:45:51","slug":"will_work_for_v","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1024","title":{"rendered":"Will work for virtual gold"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now, here’s a great twist on the web sharecropping<\/a> model: Get people to contribute valuable information to your business, and then pay them with fake money. That’s what Amazon’s been doing with its Q&A site, Askville. When you successfully answer people’s questions on the site, Amazon rewards you with “Quest Gold,” a virtual currency that, as GigaOm reports<\/a>, you’ll be able to use later this year in Amazon’s new online role-playing game, Questville:<\/p>\n

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With Askville, users who provide helpful answers are given virtual gold as they rise in status (called \u201clevels\u201d) \u2014 two metrics familiar to anyone who\u2019s ever played massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. Questville will take this to its logical conclusion, offering adventures and Quest Coins to helpful Askville users. With a game like WoW, you become more powerful by killing monsters and completing fantastic tasks; with Questville, you\u2019ll get virtual rewards for providing helpful real-world information … Indeed, if Questville is successful, it could prompt other Internet companies to add MMO-style features to their own systems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s like buying Manhattan with beads. Call it the Trinket Economy.<\/p>\n

But this leaves me in a bit of a quandary. In July of 2006, I entered into a quasi-wager<\/a> with Yochai “Wealth of Networks” Benkler about the ultimate economic structure of the most popular social media sites. I predicted that the dominant sites would pay for their content – that they would, in Benkler’s terms, be “price-incentivized systems.” Benkler predicted that the sites would be pure “peer-production processes” existing outside “the price system.”<\/p>\n

So what happens if people get paid with virtual gold: Is that price-incentivized or not? I would argue that it is. If you’re working for gold, whether real or fake, you’re putting a price on your labor. I mean, if you take beads in trade for something of value, then the beads are money, right? But of course I’m biased, being a participant in the wager. Maybe Benkler would argue that fake gold is more like a token of esteem or a gift of the heart than like a wage.<\/p>\n

One thing’s for sure, anyway: If you can pay your workers with virtual money, you’ve got a helluva labor strategy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now, here’s a great twist on the web sharecropping model: Get people to contribute valuable information to your business, and then pay them with fake money. That’s what Amazon’s been doing with its Q&A site, Askville. When you successfully answer people’s questions on the site, Amazon rewards you with “Quest Gold,” a virtual currency that, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}