Virtual economy

The New York Times has an article on how big the World of Warcraft has become. It's interesting how the virtual world has become somewhat self-policing, and how much the lines between the virtual and real worlds have intersected:
World of Warcraft encompasses two huge continents, eight playable races, hundreds of monsters and thousands of quests. And the game's hundreds of thousands of players have questions, concerns, gripes and outright complaints about just about all of them. The players want answers now, and when they don't like the answers, the community managers are the ones who hear about it, loudly.
Just thought here I should also point out the work of Edward Castronova, who studied the economy of EverQuest. Clearly all the gold you get for killing monsters causes inflation... (Me, I've always been a Nethack player.)

Comments

AcidFlask said…
Have you heard of Project Entropia? Somebody recently spent $25,000 on a virtual island in that realm.
11 February 2005 at 02:30
Daryl said…
Yup, that was in the Economist recently, yeah? $25,000 for mining rights and to sell off plots of subdivided land or something like that. Castronova's mentioned in that article too.
11 February 2005 at 04:31
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