I was referring to more of a cultural feel and my own reactions, I never made the link of computation to computation, we need an economist to weigh in on this.

Also, if you find this sort of thing intriguing you might enjoy Charles Stross's Halting State - http://www.amazon.com/Halting-State-ebook/dp/B000W9180A/

Halting State by Charles's Stross (http://www.amazon.com/Halting-State-Charles-Stross/dp/044101...) explores what happens when some crooks steal all the virtual goods in this kind of company. WoW meets NUMB3RS in an interesting way.