everything's been done

Ultima Online is a Tolkeinesque videogame, the playing of which takes place in an enormous online world called Brittania populated by wizards and elves and such. Apparently, building a powerful character takes tremendous time and effort, and so some experienced players had taken to selling their well-developed characters online for real-world money. I soon discovered you could also buy gold pieces on eBay - that is, you could buy an amount of the coinage of this virtual world in exhange for legitimate currency, and the gold would then be transferred to your character inside the virtual world. And this was how I discovered that, in the late summer of 2000, Ultima Online gold pieces were trading against the US dollar at about the same rate as the Vietnamese dong.
This could easily be one of those slice-of-life stories that TV newscasts slap on at the end of the bad craziness of the rest of the news so that the anchor person can turn to the camera and smile and chuckle in a what'll-they think of next? sort of way that tells everyone watching that life is really pretty grand and light-hearted after all. It could easily be that kind of story, but I think its a particularly ugly kind of lie to treat it as such. Because what this fact means - what it means that the Vietnamese dong and Ultima Online gold pieces were worth about the same in the summer of 2000 - is that the triumphant liberal West had by then reached a point where in some real way it saw the nation of Vietnam and the virtual world of Britannia as roughly equal. That one is an actual place with real people and the other a fantasy world created for the amusement of affluent people with tremendous amounts of leisure time - this is still understood, yes, but not as clearly as it once was.

-Chris Turner from the chapter Homer's Odyssey in his book PLANET SIMPSON first published by Random House, 2004

i couldn't have put it better myself. get some perspective