As synthetic worlds grow in importance, we'll see scholars, legal analysts, and game industry experts under increasing pressure to generate sensible guidelines for different aspects of the practice.

We can and should view synthetic worlds as essentially unregulated playgrounds for economic organization.

There's no economic puzzle here. Where there's money to be made, there will be people out to make it. Where some gamers are playing for fun, others are pursuing a new kind of day-trading game and those two factions are trying to co-exist.

It turns out that the way humans are made, the software-based approach seems to have much more success.

One thing that's surprising is how serious this is. It's now my career.

We asked the experts, if these items were in the bag and they came in contact with one another, was it possible, likely, that the contamination would go from the contaminated items to the uncontaminated? Yes.