More than two million online gamers in the United States alone play "World of Warcraft," a number massive enough that some analysts blame it for monopolizing player time and squeezing the rest of the PC gaming market.

But "World of Warcraft" isn't just making millions of dollars very month - it literally is making money by creating its own currency.

Money just isn't what it used to be. Back in the day, everyone measured money with precious metals like gold or silver.

Later - but still back in the day - we switched to coins and bills that served as IOUs from the government, which stored the precious metals.

Several Bond villains later, the government phased out its stored precious metals while banks introduced alternatives like checks and credit cards.

Now, online payment services like PayPal reduce currency to a digital file handed from person to person. Between this and credit cards, we have shifted most of our money from heavy metal to electronic form.

Through all their fiduciary innovations, services like PayPal and your bank still operate in dollars. After all, creating a new currency is hard.

Despite this, several communities have slipped into making their own forms of currency. One such example is Second Life, a serious attempt at creating the virtual-reality promised during the mid 1990s.

The masses haven't yet descended on this anything-but-humble community. Judging from press attention and my brief forays, the population is disproportionately journalists and the strange fetishists known as furries.

But Second Life has a successful side-industry of people who create things like clothing, furniture, and architecture within the virtual world. All are only usable within that network, yet people spend virtual currency on them.

One way to get the group's virtual currency is to exchange your real money for Second Life's version. Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, operates a market where you can buy or sell "Linden dollars," much as traders do in "real life."

A similar but stealthier market arose with regard to "World of Warcraft" currency. While Blizzard (the designer of "World of Warcraft") tries to quash them, several Internet sites allow players to buy or sell "gold," the money of the game.

A common motivation in buying this "gold" is to make character-advancement easier. As the adage goes, "time is money." This saves time, so it certainly is worth some money.

In earlier games of this type, the sellers were players seeking to make back the money they had already spent on the game. Since then, globalization has become even more widespread, making it financially viable to pay workers to play the game for money.

"Sweatshops" exist in poorer areas of China where people are given fully outfitted characters and expected to earn virtual money. In this way, these virtual economies have entered the real-life debate over globalization.

This also has domestic implications. In October of last year, Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J., confirmed to Reuters that Congress's Joint Economic Committee was even studying the possibility of taxing these virtual transactions.

As Saxton said, "virtual economies represent an area where technology has outpaced the law."

If the pattern of history holds true, the 21st century will be defined by how the law tries to catch up.

Greg Brown is a junior in philosophy. Please send your comments to opinion@spub.ksu.edu