Games

MMORPGs and the item payment revenue model at DiGRA 2007

DiGRA Japan logo 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.

Because Players Pay: The Business Model Influence on MMOG Design

Author(s)

Oh, Gyuhwan and Ryu Taiyoung

Year

2007

Publication information

Proceedings of DiGRA 2007: Situated Play. Tokyo: The University of Tokyo, September, 2007. Pp. 650-657.

URL

http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07312.20080.pdf

Game Design on Item-selling Based Payment Model in Korean Online Games

Author(s)

Ström, Patrik and Ernkvist, Mirko

Year

2007

Publication information

Proceedings of DiGRA 2007: Situated Play. Tokyo: The University of Tokyo, September, 2007. Pp. 639-649.

URL

http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07312.12427.pdf

The unbound network of product and service interaction of the MMOG industry: with a case study of China

Author(s)

Lin, Holin and Sun, Chuen-Tsai

Year

2007

Publication information

Proceedings of DiGRA 2007: Situated Play. Tokyo: The University of Tokyo, September, 2007. Pp. 335-343.

URL

http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07312.38207.pdf

Cash Trade Within the Magic Circle: Free-to-Play Game Challenges and Massively Multiplayer Online Game Player Responses

Author(s)

Chesney, Thomas, Chuah, Swee-Hoon and Hoffman, Robert

Year

2007

Publication information

Nottingham University Business School, Industrial Economics Division, Occasional papers 2007-21

URL

http://ideas.repec.org/p/nub/occpap/21.html

EVE Online Fanfest, QEN, and research co-operation with CCP

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.

EVE Online Appoints In-World Economist

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!

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