> Now, can the Staff of Westfall be transferred to another simulation? Yes and no. The signifier, the physical (virtual?) staff can be transferred to another game in some sense. The 3D model can be transferred, the physical appearance of the item can be transferred. But that was always on your computer all along; it's not particularly meaningful. The effects of the item may or may not be transferable; if a game is not the exact simulation that WoW is, what does +5 intellect and +11 spirit mean? The game operator may elect to translate that to some other concept in their game, or they may not. I think this notion of "transfer" is what you're eluding to.

> But there's something else that can be transferred: the thing that ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies: the concept that the person holding that item has slayed Edwin VanCleef (in WoW). Transferring the Staff of Westfall may not mean transferring the physical model or its attributes, but it may mean something more along the lines of transferring the meaning of what the player has accomplished. Admittedly, I'm not sure why this would be useful or what the applications of such a system would be; what I'm getting at instead is the idea that transferring an asset may mean many things, and that transferring an asset from one simulation to another is not necessarily the opposite.

What the "ownership of the Staff of Westfall signifies" is a relatively easy problem to solve. In a way, it's a list of achievements. So the only thing you need to do is to link that list of achievements (or facts if you want to be more general) to a centralized or federated identity. That's easy to do. The 3D object is already harder: not all engines render 3D objects the same way. Maybe there's a "3D object standard" like SVG and you could use that. That's maybe not easy, but not the hardest.

You're hinting at the hard part when saying "it's a weapon so it uses your weapon slot to equip it, and the stat bonus of +5 intellect that gives you additional mana and +11 spirit that gives you mana regeneration". If we remove that part, the "usefulness" of the item, the only thing that's left is appearance and signaling. There's no substance. What's a pen without the ability to write? What's a computer without the ability to run programs? What's a car without the ability of moving? This is why I say that taking an object from one simulation to another is not compatible (at the same effort level) with having different simulations.