Virtual Economy Research Network

Digital Game Research Association DiGRA is the main global organisation for ludologists and other scholars studying digital games. Last September I attended the DiGRA 2007: Situated Play conference in Tokyo. It was a surprisingly large and well-organised conference, and featured over a hundred paper presentations on a very diverse set of topics, including some related to virtual economies. The papers are now available in DiGRA's free digital library. I've added the relevant ones to VERN's online bibliography and written an introduction below.

The fourth EVE Fanfest, an event giving the EVE Online players an opportunity to meet each other and the game developers, was held in Reykjavik 1. - 3. November. There were two interesting revelations in the event, which also sparked discussion in panels and roundtables, a part of which I’ll try to summarize here. The first one had to with a soon-to-be-published white paper on the EVE player democracy, and why it actually might not be wise to call it democracy after all. The second was about the soon-to-be-published EVE Online Quarterly Economics Newsletter, Vol.1, No.1.

In addition to these two interesting matters, there’s also the reason why a representative of Helsinki Institute of Information Technology (HIIT) was present at EVE Fanfest this year, namely, a recently formed agreement of research co-operation between HIIT and CCP, the operator of EVE Online.

For a while now, there has been talk of CCP Games hiring a lead economist to produce economic information about the massive game world of the space MMOG EVE Online. The appointment of this "Alan Greenspan of the virtual economy" was announced this Tuesday.

The man is Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, former Dean of the Faculty of Business and Science at the University of Akureyri, Iceland. Before Akureyri he was a research associate at the University of Rhode Island's Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics where he also completed his PhD. Check out Guðmundsson's first blog post for more about his background and plans. Let's wish him luck and look forward to hearing more from his direction!