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Interview w/Edward Castronova
scubacuda writes "/.ers interested in the recent editorial on real $ in MMORPGs might also be interested in a GrepLaw interview I just conducted with Edward Castranova (expert witness in the recent Black Hat Hacker Court) about how his work on synthetic economies affects larger law and policy issues on the Internet. Ted has some interesting thoughts, particularly how online game-based economics (Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest, Lineage, etc.) will eventually serve as the bases for "real governments." Should mainstream economics journals take his work on gender and virtual economies seriously, Ted promises to eat his virtual hat."
GFY
(go fuck yourself)
Typign is hard!
(posted ac to avoid karma whore)
Ted, you're doing some very interesting work related to "synthetic economies." Your most recent is a paper examining the fact that there are significant differences in the eBay prices of male and female EverQuest avatars even where there are no differences in their abilities. What prompted your interest in economic problems of the kind your current work is exploring?
Actually, what motivates me now-a-days is spreading the word of jihad against the editors of slashdot. Their fucked-up censorship and repression have been tollerated too long, and the day is near that the jihadis will raze the site and proclaim a new order.
First, broadly speaking, economics has gotten stale. It's out of touch with the conversations going on in humanities, art, and even other social sciences, about the nature of social truth. Post modernism certainly hasn't had much effect on economic methods and subjects, that's for sure. As an extension of that, contemporary econ hasn't seen what's happening to communications. It hasn't sensed the possibility that the Net may have massive implications for daily life. So, being an avid game player, when I saw a massive online game (EverQuest) with an economy in it, I thought "Here's something truly unusual, a topic that doesn't fit in econ but definitely fits with the times, and is a blast to study too" and I went for it. The long run objective of this project is to pose a criticism of the scientistic methodology of economics and similarly-inclined disciplines. Social science is as much aesthetic as it is scientific (in my view anyway), and games pose a problem that highlights the inadequacy of a purely scientific, mathematical, objectivist, positivist approach.
As for the male/female pricing paper, it occurred to me that here was a place that ordinary economic methods could be easily deployed to say a weird, paradigm-shifting thing: we can choose our sex. When I found that female avatars were worth less than equivalent male avatars, I thought that posed an interesting question for society: why is it that men, who are the main buyers of these things, would rather be men than women? Lots of people think that's a stupid question. They say it's natural. But I am wondering why it's natural. There are lots of great things about being female, right? So, as a man, why would I actually pay more just to be male? Why wouldn't the good things about being a woman outweigh whatever bad things there might be, so that I felt equally comfortable as a man inhabiting either male or female avatars in this game world? I do think that's an interesting question. I don't have an answer. But by posing it, I got a lot of heat. I guess that's what academics are supposed to do: ask questions that nobody wants to have asked.
Your eBay/EverQuest paper has become one of the most downloaded papers on SSRN, and it was discussed on NPR's Weekend Edition. Tell us about the stir your paper has created. How would you respond to those who doubt that your work on online "synthetic" worlds can affect policy in the real world?
The stir comes from people who find it weird that anyone would pay real money for what they assume are worthless things. It's a mind-opener when I point out that they themselves constantly exchange things of real value - cars, houses, hours of their time -- for little worthless pieces of paper called 'dollar bills.' We really want to have this category of 'game' and say that it's not important; that's much more comforting than the thought that the computer is going to host a great deal of our mental activity 100 years from now. Whether this will affect policy in the real world depends only on whether people actually start spending lots of time in synthetic spaces. My guess is that the latent demand for other-Earthly lifestyles is huge, massive. As these new worlds increasingly tap into that latent demand, there will certainly be policy consequences on the old Earth. Anyone who disagrees is free to do so, but they are thereby forced to defend t
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Are you by chance a member of the prestigious GNAA?