Have you heard the one about "The World Stock Exchange" that was robbed of $3.2M Linden dollars, while hackers ripped off a comparable sum in real world banks?

Or how 'bout the collapse of Ginko a virtual bank that created a virtual run on their virtual ATM's?  Unfortunately it created a loss of more than $750,000 in real U.S. dollars.

Both of these examples are from Second Life and they represent real dollars being lost by real people in a virtual world...or is it virtual?

In the past few days I have been thinking about the intersection of gaming and ecommerce.  Unitl now, at least in my head, gaming had very little to do with reality.  The truth is that gaming and the virtual worlds that are embracing it will be tightly married to real world transactions and will require the real world skills of bankers, lawyers, credit card companies and everything else that goes along with the movement of goods and services.

Let's pretend for a moment that my Avatar in Second Life needs a new car so I can race in a new game from Electronic Arts.  I want to buy that car and outfit it with a new set of wheels and a custom paint job.  Well, this means I need to go shop for my virtual car, buy that car and take delivery on that car - all of which takes money - real money that has been converted in virtual money.  In this case Linden dollars.  By the way, Linder dollars can be bought at the exchange rate of about 270 Linden's for every one real U.S. dollar.  So hear we are, I've just bought a car, new wheels and a custom point job.  The seller wants to check my credit - virtual credit to be secured by real dollars of course... and so on until my virtual car is delivered to me so I can race in the game with my new car - and so it goes...

Every aspect of real commerce, suddenly is recreated in a virtual world backed up by real dollars.  It's only a matter of time before the lines between virtual and real cross and become intertwined.  I dare say it already is for 12 million residents of Second Life.