I have something of a confession to make - when I was in early high school, I was an absolute geek. Used to spend all my spare time at high school in "the computer room", forgoing meals in order to screw around with the other geeks on the PUNCH CARD machine to program it. Punch cards I tell you!

We also played pretty lame games and programmed stuff. I never did get into bulletin boards however, as that was just too geeky even for me. That the guys that set up our local bulletin board ended up selling out in a big way some years later to a major Australian ISP is a source of regret I will admit, but I just didn't have the vision of where the whole bulletin board thing was going to go when I was 15.

Nor did I get into Dungeons and Dragons, nor what I would regard as a more recent equivalent online game World of Warcraft (hereafter known as WOW). For those of you that haven't heard of this computer game before, it is what is known in the trade as an MMOG - a massively multiplayer online game. That is to say that it is a computer game played via the internet, with many, many, MANY players. Just how many? You might be surprised to know that the online "community" for WOW (ie the number of players that play the game) numbers at some 11 million people .... more than the entire population of Belgium!

It was this rather large potential market of buyers in mind that undoubtedly drove the good people at DC Unlimited to release a series of "coins" related to the game. Except they're not really coins, because a coin is a thing that is "a flat, typically round piece of metal with an official stamp, used as money" and money is "a current medium of exchange" or indeed a store of value for some people such as ourselves.

Although these "coins" are indeed flat, round and made of metal, they cannot be used as money (WOW is an online world after all, making the physical transfer of assets impossible).

Technically, they're medallions that are presumably being marketed as collectibles to the 11 million folks that play the game. At an issue price of around US$70 per set (they come out later this year), I'm not hopeful of any appreciation or longevity, particularly since mintage figures haven't been quoted.

They are apparently "Ready to be displayed on a desktop or wall", however those true to the game may choose to bury their set in a safe place, or hide them in a log in the forest....