HoneyBakedHam: Those of us old enough to remember an economy based on exchanging money for goods and/or services know that exchanging money for xBox desktop themes and avatar trinkets is equal to inviting a mugger to mug you.
Arkose: If you think clothing and themes are robbery, nothing can prepare you for what is attached below. Nothing.
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OUCH! I wasn't prepared for that! :-)
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You know... in fairness, after reading some of these comments... I realize that I own the BioShock Limited Edition Collector's Edition for PC, which contains an art book, a soundtrack CD, a making of DVD, and a statue of a Big Daddy...
...and which I bought solely because I thought the Big Daddy figurine looked cool.
In many ways, all these things are technically useless... at least in that they are not required to play BioShock, but they are tangible. The BioShock game is a distant memory to me now... but Big Daddy is sitting on the shelf where I can see him every day. (next to a Fallout 3 Bobblehead and a few Todd McFarland Spawn figurines)
I guess there really is a certain equivalency between tangible useless things and digital or virtual useless things... but what bothers me personally is just that someday in the far future I'll have an Xbox 720, and all those avatar trinkets will be gone and I'll need new clothes for my 3D Holo-atar... or whatever.
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But I just bought BioShock 2 (because the price dropped) and I'm gonna go play that :-)