I was doing a little web surfing today and ran across an article in The Guardian about virtual economies. The article talked about Second Life, China, and Eve Online. Yes, the article made the mandatory mention of an Eve scandal, in this case the Eve Bank scandal from July. But the article did mention CCP's chief economist Eyjólfur Guðmundsson. While a lot of talk centered around Second Life's $600 million economy, there is a reason Eve gets so much coverage. While the economy in EverQuest 2 is receiving some academic study, Eve is a very sophisticated economy that is seriously studied by the game developer. You can read the Q2 2009 Economic newsletter that came out in August for some examples or just watch the video from Dr. Guðmundsson's presentation below.
But I'm not just using The Guardian article as an excuse to post another Eve video. I was also reminded of an episode of Shut Up We're Talking from 2008 that also discussed owning items in games and what that could mean to players. Some of those fears of politicians looking to our games as another method of taxing us continue on as an article on Ars Technica discussed how proposals to institute taxes were posted on the official U.S. Internal Revenue Service back in January.
So virtual economies have been attracting attention for a while now. The question is how much is the real world going to intrude into our games? I guess we'll have to wait and see.
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