Savvas Papagiannidis of Newcastle University would like to remind us that the deadline for the virtual worlds special issue of Electronic Commerce Research, a Springer journal, has been extended to 31 May 2008. The special issue call can be found here. I blogged about the original call here.

Greg Lastowka at Terra Nova has put together a wonderful bibliography on virtual world related articles in law journals. Several of them deal with virtual property and virtual economies.

In the latest EVE Online Quarterly Economic Newsletter, published yesterday, there is a section that is based on my work done at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT). The section in question is the one called Gross User Product, and is the first outcome of the research cooperation between HIIT and CCP that was announced earlier this year.

Gross User Product, or GUP, is a concept upon which I arrived when transferring the concepts of the UN System of National Accounts (SNA) to a virtual economy. SNA is a standard guideline according to which national accounting is performed for real-world national economies. In the very short, SNA tells the statisticians how to measure the national accounting aggregates, such as GDP.

GDP, GUP – what’s the story here? That’s what I try to explain in this blog article.

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.

I am happy to announce that we are starting a new virtual economy research project at HIIT. The project has an excellent lineup of collaborators from the industry: Nokia Research Center, Finnish digital media company SWelcom, casual game community Playdo, and MMORPG company CCP Games. Below is the press release.

There are two main types of social science experiments that can, in principle, be conducted in virtual worlds. First, with access to necessary logs of an existing virtual world, one could conduct natural experiments, observing e.g. the effects of the introduction of a new feature. Second, with the necessary influence in some virtual world, one could set up and conduct controlled experiments, that is, tweak some property or rule of the world and observe how it affects the behavior of the participants.

The Arden project, headed by Edward Castronova, has the ambitious goal of building a virtual world for the purpose of conducting the latter kind of experiments. A version of Arden is now available for testing and downloading.

According to news reports, Dutch police have arrested an unnamed 17-year-old on suspicion of having stolen 4 000 € worth of virtual furniture from other users in Habbo Hotel. The teenager is said to have hacked into others' accounts and transferred the items into his own account.

This kind of incidents are not uncommon in various virtual worlds and other services where valuable virtual property exists. But what caught my attention was the somewhat large alleged value of the loot as well as the fact that the suspect is said to be charged with "burglary" in addition to the hacking crime. Burglary, at least in English common law, means breaking into a building with the intent to steal.

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.

I am late in relaying this, but Electronic Commerce Research and Journal of Electronic Commerce Research are both planning a special issue on virtual worlds. The CFPs (attached below) sent to the VERN mailing list are so similar that at first glance I thought it was the same journal. JECR's deadline is this Thursday already, but you might consider submitting a modified conference paper. ECR's deadline is December 1st. Both issues should come out in August 2008.

Nicolas Nova over at Terra Nova blogs about an interview of Sulka Haro, a lead designer for Habbo Hotel. Habbo Hotel is a virtual world in the same league of popularity with World of Warcraft. Using the Linden definition, Habbo Hotel has some 80 million "Residents", far outclassing Second Life. Where, therefore, is the research, asks Nicolas Nova.

My HIIT colleague Mikael Johnson has collected an extensive Habbo data consisting of interviews, surveys and fansite records during the past few years. He's currently writing his dissertation about user-developer dialogue and hasn't published much about the data yet. Here are a few links though.