Advertisers want their ad to be seen by the most people with the most likelihood to spend money on their products. The brute force approach is to make sure as many as possible see the ad, hoping the actual buyers will be among them. So, barring demographics, the value of any ad space is proportional to the number of people who see it.
So, picture a 2-dimensional ad space, such as the million dollar home page, except that it is not constrained in size, so that scrolling is needed to see all of the ads. Make it a video game (think old Zelda in the top-down view), so that the scrolling speed is very slow. Reason would lead us to believe that the ads closest to the point of origin would be seen the most often and thus be worth the most to advertisers. The value would theoretically decrease in an inverse relationship to the distance from the point of origin, as the number of players thinned out. Of course, this could be eliminated by spreading players out equally.
What really strikes me is the implications of moving the ad-space into the 3rd dimension. For one, the ads start blocking each other. If the player began with a view outside of the known ad-verse, then the most valuable ad-space would be on the outside! Say the ads are solid objects that cannot be passed through; they might be designed to try to trap the player so that he stays longer.
These ads do not necessarily have to be for real products. In an MMORPG, other players may be advertising their virtual items or services, and propaganda may be an important tool used to maintain alliances.
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