By Eric Gwinn,Chicago Tribune

What do a new ATM card and Mickey Mouse have in common? They’re symbols of how role-playing games are extending into the real world.

Imagine winning at Monopoly, then going to an ATM and withdrawing your winnings.

That’s like what 410,000 residents (including 200,000 landowners) of EntropiaUniverse.com can now do.

On the online planet of Calypso, Entropia players buy and sell land, minerals that they’ve mined, clothes and all the other things pioneers on a colonized planet would need.

For $1 they can buy 10 Project Entropia Dollars from game creator Mindark that they can save up and spend on homes or spaceship rides (a spaceship costs $4,000 in real-world money). And at any time, they can use an ATM card, made available this month, to withdraw their money (formerly, the money lay in accounts for weeks until a check to the player was written).

Independent filmmaker Jon Jacobs is cashing in. He recently plunked down $100,000 for a virtual planet that orbits around Calypso. He says he’s already making money on his investment in his first month of land ownership, taxing visitors and selling a plot of land, unreal estate that can be seen only with a computer.

In another example of the virtual made real, orchestras in several cities will perform music for video games. Two tours are on tap. The first, “Play! A Video Game Symphony,” kicks off May 27 in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont. The Chicagoland Pops Orchestra will perform music ranging from ominous to soaring to sentimental from “Kingdom Hearts,” “Final Fantasy,” “World of Warcraft,” “Sonic the Hedgehog” and even “Battlefield 1942.” The tour also will hit Stockholm; Detroit; Philadelphia; Vienna, Va.; and Toronto. More info is at www.play-symphony.com.

A separate tour, “Video Games Live!” (videogameslive.com), kicked off in March in San Jose, Calif., and is scheduled to hit Chicago Aug. 5. Other stops are Houston, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Toronto and Los Angeles.

“Video Games Live!” scrapped last summer’s planned tour because it couldn’t sell enough advance tickets. You couldn’t have predicted that in February 2005, when 4,400 people packed the Rosemont Theatre to cheer on the Chicagoland Pops’ performance of video game music from the “Final Fantasy” series. That concert was inspired by a raucous Hollywood Bowl concert in May 2004 during the E3 video game conference, the first time an orchestra in the United States had devoted a concert to video game music.

Two years later, two separate tours are taking music from the make-believe world of games into real-life concert halls. Meanwhile, the second installment of “Kingdom Hearts” – just one of the games featured in both tours – has sold more than 1 million copies in North America in just over a month on store shelves. “Kingdom Hearts II” introduces Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck to even more “Final Fantasy” characters in an entertaining and satisfying blend of Disney and Square Enix (makers of the “Final Fantasy” franchise).

It’s a game that’s more fun to watch than play, so I suggest starting the game on its easiest setting (making it easy to defeat enemies when necessary) and watch the game’s story unfold in hours of beautiful mini-movies, or cut scenes. The music underscores the tension and expresses the sentimentality of this game, and it will bring a smile of reminiscence to your face if you attend a future video game concert.