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Learning About Real-World Economies Through Game Economies
Reuters has a report about research being done on the in-game economies of MMOs like EverQuest II and World of Warcraft to better understand much larger economic situations in the real world. The games are used as case studies where researchers can do controlled experiments that they couldn't necessarily attempt if real money or goods were involved.
"After studying 314 million transactions within the fantasy world of Norrath in EverQuest II, including trading in-game goods like armor, shields, leather, herbs and food, the researchers were able to calculate the GDP of one of the game servers (the back-end computer that hosts thousands of players in one world). As more people opened accounts and flocked to Norrath, spending money on new items, researchers saw inflation spike more than 50 percent in five months. 'We have seen that kind of volatility during times of war and in developing nations in the real world,' said [Dmitri Williams, assistant professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication]. 'Our own economy has turned out to be less stable than we'd all assumed.'"
While I myself enjoy playing the MMO economy micro-game, they are far too simple to really map anything close to the real world. Or at least I should say WoW's is. Some of the less popular MMO's have very realistic economies involving business entities, more niche goods, and even a kind of country proxy.
The examples of what the researchers have discovered also strike me as academically uninteresting (even obvious) and make me wonder if this is an excuse to play some games at work....
I agree with your point; on one hand, there are a lot of data that can be collected from the economies of video games. The challenge, as you mentioned, is making that data relevant outside of the realm of that video game (or of video games, in general). I agree that the games probably can't be valid models of real economies (or cities, etc.).
That said, I'd not be surprised if they could extract useful behavioral information out of the data. Not information about how the economy works, but rather how people act when faced with various economic events and circumstances. Players could probably be mapped to social and regional demographics by qualities such as their characters' net values, activity, and primary sources of income. Patches, updates, and expansions can be mapped to technological breakthroughs and innovations, and resource scarcity and overfarming can be mapped to depressions or natural disasters.
There are plenty of real-world economic events that might be mapped and studied to research how the players in various "classes" react, such as:
To me, the practice seems legit (if done carefully), although I doubt any results are particularly useful by themselves.
In the real world you don't have unlimited resources. In the real world you can't release an expansion and suddenly introduce new products to replace everything someone owns. Studying in game economics can be useful as an exercise or example of how some economic principles work, but collecting data from MMO's and then trying to use that information to explain how the real world works?
I'll limit the scope of this comment to World of Warcraft as that's the one I have personally played. I would not be surprised if the other MMOs mentioned are similar, I just don't know for certain that they are.
I think the appeal is that it's a true laissez-faire free-market economy. Among those, it's unusual because the game rules effectively prevent any one player or group of players from forming a monopoly and locking out competitors. So I may have the market for healing potions cornered, but there is nothing I can do to prevent you from gaining crafting skills and harvesting herbs and making your own potions and competing with me. Your potions will be just as good as mine, and any herbs you harvest won't be available to me until they respawn, at which point they become available to both of us again.
I can see why this would be interesting to an economist. It incorporates a lot of our notions of what a free market is. In the real world economic freedom is generally considered a desirable thing, at least until players are so free that they can form trusts and otherwise monopolize markets. So in the real world, anti-trust laws and other government regulations provide the necessary restrictions that the game rules provide in the virtual world. If nothing else, it can provide a way to explore the degree to which such regulations are necessary and what happens when they are minimal. Perhaps this is to an economist what the computer simulations are to such scientists as physicists and astronomers. They can use it to model something based on how they think it works in order to refine their ideas of what works and what doesn't.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
WoW also has a fairly large black market in the presence of illegal gold sellers.
If anything, the economics of MMOs are far less interesting than the socio-political aspects of the game. WoW is more or less set up to maximize character freedom. The police (GMs) are relatively ineffective, and apart from a few obvious things you aren't allowed to do, like call other players faggots in public chat, most anti-social behaviour is in practice insufficiently policed or not policed at all. I'm talking about things all the way from ninja looting and node stealing up to the use of illegal hacks (like the underground mining hack, for example). The small percentage of outright asshats on any server seem to be sufficient to prevent a general climate of trust from forming (even though most people are nice, and helpful).
The guild system is the only way where people can build decent trust networks, and these of course require human leadership. Even then, a good guild (meaning a guild with reasonable leadership and adequate policing) is hard to find and it can't get too large before it's too big to serve that function. But Azeroth as a whole suffers from severe social dysfunction.
I guess it just shows to go that any social environment would work just fine if only a way could be found to get rid of the 10% who are hell bent on exploitation, cheating, griefing and bending the rules to suit themselves (and these are the people who howl loudest at any attempt to fix things). WoW's economy suffers from many honest players having a disincentive to enter the market, because people who hack and cheat have an illegal competitive advantage. It's really no different from the real free market or the real world in that respect (a friend of mine who is a cop pointed out that the people who barely stay within the letter of the law are often as much of a social nuisance as genuine criminals - knowing some people I've seen in business, I am not surprised).
I think WoW stands as a living counterexample to all those who desire a lightly policed social system based entirely on consent.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
Why not look at the Eve online economy? The Eve system is a lot more flexible, largely player driven and a LOT more players involved. This should more accurately model real economies.
Then of course, eve have already had a lot of attention for this reason, so perhaps they wanted to do a more novel study.