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Seriously, Shane might be on to something. I have seen board games and computer games in which one spends money or credits on military equipment and then also receives influence/status points. These games are obviously based on real diplomatic and wartime situations.

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and my memory was jogged. Happily, because of google, my memory is also distributed:

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To fill his evenings, Castronova did what he'd always done: he played video games. In April, 2001, he paid a $10 monthly fee to a multiplayer on-line game called EverQuest. More than 450,000 players worldwide log into EverQuest's "virtual world." They each pick a medieval character to play, such as a warrior or a blacksmith or a "healer," then band together in errant quests to slay magical beasts; their avatars appear as tiny, inch-tall characters striding across a Tolkienesque land. Soon, Castronova was playing EverQuest several hours a night.
Then he noticed something curious: EverQuest had its own economy, a bustling trade in virtual goods. Players generate goods as they play, often by killing creatures for their treasure and trading it. The longer they play, the more powerful they get ? but everyone starts the game at Level 1, barely strong enough to kill rats or bunnies and harvest their fur. Castronova would sell his fur to other characters who'd pay him with "platinum pieces," the artificial currency inside the game. It was a tough slog, so he was always stunned by the opulence of the richest players. EverQuest had been launched in 1999, and some veteran players now owned entire castles filled with treasures from their quests.

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[ 20 July 2004: Message edited by: clockwork ]

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Originally posted by charlieM:
it also just simply reflects the capitalistic world we live in.

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Ah yes. Humanity endured centuries of slavery and economic feudalism, Dark Ages and finally to the birth pangs of democracy. Look how far and fast we've come since the revolutions.

Then they sold this money on e-bay for REAL money.

"He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. — higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira"

"Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game — the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries"

"The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia."

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Castronova submitted his original EverQuest paper to a few economics journals. They rejected it instantly. One reviewer wrote a snippy note saying he preferred "to stick with things that are real rather than virtual."

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Originally posted by charlieM:
it also just simply reflects the capitalistic world we live in.

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It may more precisely reflect the capitalistic game companies running them.

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Originally posted by Rufus Polson:

It may more precisely reflect the capitalistic game companies running them.

But also, there are a lot of things we like as games that we don't like so much in reality. I can see people wanting this capitalistic, work-your-way-to-stardom approach in a game. For reasons similar to why they often want the kind of wide scale violence found in Everquest or, for that matter, Starcraft: It's fun in a game, where the risk isn't real. It's sort of like Tolkien's comment in The Hobbit when he skips briefly over the stay at Rivendell, that things which are very enjoyable to experience often make very boring stories, while things which you would never want to have happen to you may make very good ones.

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Im starting to get the feeling im way off topic?

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I actually considered doing something similar when I was tossing about for a thesis topic, but shied away and went down a different road entirely.

A lot can be learned about how people behave when you get them in tightly controlled environments, like an online videogame, with tens of thousands of others. Particularly when you can control all the non-human variables.

It has at least as much value as mainstream economics, where they simply 'assume away' all the variables that might mess with their precious theories.

I'm actually amazed that academics aren't working with video game developers to try out some nifty studies. There are so many options for tweaking the variables.

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Originally posted by Rufus Polson:
Guys? This thread is not originally about games theory in the usual sense. It's a pun on it, if anything--it's about theories relating to the way things have been happening in massive multiplayer online roleplaying games and the virtual economies they develop, and the odd interactions between those virtual economies and the real world. Check out the article linked at the beginning of the thread.

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[ 23 July 2004: Message edited by: VoiceofTreason ]

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Seriously, Shane might be on to something. I have seen board games and computer games in which one spends money or credits on military equipment and then also receives influence/status points. These games are obviously based on real diplomatic and wartime situations.

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Just in case, I was being sarcastic. This post was in answer to Shane's claim that if Canada spent more on war toys we'd have greater influence on Iranians.