Financial Force Majeure: The Virtual World Taylored to Our Real World

If any of you have ever played the virtual reality game, Sim City or any similar, you will probably appreciate the point to be made more immediately than those unfamiliar. For the unfamiliar, this is a game in which you are the master of the land, tasked with taking what amounts to any empty field and building, expanding, and developing yourself a thriving metropolis.

This entails tapping into the natural resources that are available within your splotch of land, thereby harnessing those resources to grow your community. As master of your domain, you have to the politician, the banker, the shopkeeper too, making wise decisions with your electronic currency inasmuch as budgeting and investment are concerned. You have to provide the infrastructure, exploiting what resources you have to attract more Sims (the inhabitants of your city) to further grow your town.

You zone the land for residential, commercial, and industrial zones and providing for greenbelt, park, and recreational zones. You build schools, banks, retail and shopping centers, single-family and multi-family residential, industrial, and hospitals. As in the real world, this is done through various types of investment deals in the both the private and public sectors, involving commercial and investment banks, private investors and businesses. Your metropolis’ success depends on good investment strategies.

Mother Nature is an ever present threat, just as in the real world, throwing a natural disaster your way now and again. Of course, disaster strikes when least expected, testing the validity of your decisions, most of all your infrastructure. It is than you discover if value engineering the levy walls was such a good idea. Should news of cutting corners for costs leaks out, it costs your city, as restitution to flood victims is yours to bear.

Of course, the entirety is based on a designed program consisting of a language, codes, and locks. As with any program there savvy programmers, some might say hackers, having the learned knowledge to manipulate codes, language, and changing locks or even to remove locks. Purposes in hacking games might be to expand the games capabilities or to be able to be able to skip ahead to more advanced levels without having to play through the levels not desired.

Virtual reality games are rooted in fantasy, even if based on real situations, there is no tangible result. Emotional personal satisfaction or perhaps of monetary award if in some sort of competition is the best reward one can hope for. You can’t physically walk the streets of your city, go to one of its schools, or benefit from the investment dividends in terms of attaining real dollars.

For the developers, the tangible aspects are realized by sales which return in real dollars to the owners of the rights to the game. The developers might not necessarily be the owners either, depending on whether the developers retain rights or assigned them away to another.

The point to take away from this little piece is more of a question. What if, with highly sophisticated programming, it was possible to design investment strategies, for instance and than somehow apply them to the real world? What if it has already been done…..What if our whole entire economy has been modeled in the virtual world, brought forth into the real world?

Sound ridiculous? ………think again…….

INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEM FOR SEAMLESS VIRTUAL TO REAL WORLD OPERATIONS      

US Patent Pub. No.: US 2002/0188760 Al

SECURING CONTRACTS IN A VIRTUAL WORLD    

US Patent Pub. No.: US 2007/0117615

WEB DEPENDENT CONSUMER FINANCING AND VIRTUAL RESELLING METHOD      

US Patent Pub. No.: US 2001/0056399 A1

TRANSACTIONS IN VIRTUAL PROPERTY      

US Patent Pub. No.: US 2005/0021472 Al

VIRTUAL FINANCE/INSURANCE COMPANY       

US Patent Pub. No.: US 2003/0187768 A1