I've seen a lot of interesting articles on this site, and I felt compelled to finally give voice to my own opinions, regardless of how people accept them.
In my opinion, the problem here is that too much value is being assigned to virtual-world items which are undeserving of such value. Real-world items suffer a very real scarcity because resources of time, energy, materials, and man-power must be utilized in the construction of such items, and those resources are finite in extent and availability. In contrast, virtual-world items only require time to obtain or construct, and even this time requirement is merely an artifact of the game's design; it can be circumvented at any time either by clever methods on the part of the gamer or by design/implementation changes from the game developer.
Virtual-world items do not suffer scarcity in the manner of real-world items because they are not subject to the symmetry laws of physics constraining physical substance, symmetry principles such as conservation of energy, mass, momentum, etc. These symmetries limit the availability of resources. This is because virtual-world items are merely information, and information has no intrinsic physical form or physical substance, though it may be manifest via a physical medium(like CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, digital and analog signals, etc.). While the medium of the information may suffer scarcity under these symmetry principles, the information itself does not(this, I believe, is the heart of the problem about DRM and business models based on information exchange or IP).
Further more, real-world items have a lifetime that is determinable from the design, construction, materials composition, and use of the item. In this way, real-world items have a durability. This furthers the scarcity of the item and, hence, its value. Virtual-world items, on the other hand, have indeterminate lifetimes as they can be destroyed(deleted) at any time by the gamer, the game developer, or catastrophic system failure. Even so, recovery of the virtual-world item is then just a backup away. Compared to a real-world item that, once destroyed, is usually unrecoverable. While durability is a game-mechanic that can be assigned to virtual-world items, such durability is again an artifact of the game's design and not intrinsic to the item itself.
This brings another point. Replication of virtual-world items only requires additional usage of the medium that manifests the information of the item. However, the consumption of the medium is not linear with the replication of the item; whereas, replication of real-world items has a direct linear or nearly linear relationship with the amount of time, energy, materials, and man-power that must be used. At best, virtual-world items may have a linear relationship with the time required to produce the items, but, again, this is due to the design of the game and is not intrinsic to the construction of the item.
At the end, virtual-world items have little to no value because they do not suffer any scarcity that real-world items suffer. The reason for this is that virtual-world items are comprised entirely of information, and information is simply a pattern of concepts that has meaning in the mind of an observer; information does not, in and of itself, have any form or substance that causes it to obey the limitations of the symmetry principles of physics constraining material substance(and I am familiar with Information Theory, by the way).
On a personal note, I prefer to keep the fantasy of the game in the game and the real world in the real world. The last thing we need, in my opinion, is to have the fun of the game spoiled by trying to make it be exactly like the real world.
