Nate Combs has again posted on Terra Nova about what makes rare minerals rare. Nate makes the very good point; that rare minerals are not as scarce as the name might suggest. It is well worth a read as his his personal “scratchpad”.
I have been thinking about the economics of Online Games (specificly MMORPGs) for some time. Most of my interest comes from writing my undergraduate dissertation which was more of an overview of the future of MMOGs than any specific focus. Lately, and most importantly with EVE Online, economics has shot into the public eye.
First CCP Employed an Economist, Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, which as it turns out is probably the first time an Economist has been employed to study and create reports based upon an ingame economy. Dr Guðmundsson has already posted a blog item about the Mineral Market in EVE Online although he describes it himself as more of a “statistical overview” than an in-depth study.
I am certainly not alone in my interest in Virtual World Economics as there is at least one “research network” who actively post about research found on the internet and in acedemia. A good number of posts over the past few years over at Terra Nova have considered the implications of applying real world economic principals to Virtual Worlds, Edward Castronova wrote a book about them, of which I have a copy which I still haven’t read.
The thing that facinates me most is probably they way you can maniuplate a virtual world’s market and not get sent to prison for it. You can collude with other players to fix prices buy up entire stocks of a particular item only to put it back on the market again at an artificially inflated rate! I am sure that people reading this who play EVE would say that that is unfair or even worthy of outwrite wrath. However who is to say that it is a bad thing? it all leads on to the Good vs. Evil argument and the question “is it wrong to do something in a virtual world just because it is wrong in the real world?”
So what does the future hold for virtual economys, well I can see lots of research comming from big university’s… I mean why wouldn’t they, if an economy such as EVE Online’s can act so much like that of the real world why not use it as a economic study. I also expect real world corporations to start accepting virtual economy “experence” as a creadable experence for job applicants. This has already started happening with MDs and CEOs of small technology companies getting the job because of past leadership experence within World of Warcraft.
All the mad hat stuff going on arround here and I have been forgetting to blog, that said before this weekend there was virtualy nothing to blog about!
OK… will start from last Thursday, headed off to RiverCamp at about 10:30. For those that don’t know I am a Christian, I go to a church and count myself as part of an church organisation called Elim (Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance technicaly) and RiverCamp is our yearly prayer, worship and teaching event. Jon and Carol Arnott were doing most of the teaching this year, which was great for the most part, even though I missed the teaching that you would get at Spring Harvest or similar. All in all it was a really great weekend I feel that RiverCamp is still very young and very much in its infancy but it is growning up fast, huge future ahead of us I am sure.
It seems to be all change season in Radio land, Hitch has left EVE-Radio, it wasn’t a huge surprise as Hitch is one of the more mature (as in responsable) DJs and it seems that there are certain members of E-R management and community who do not agree with his point of view, to the point of totaly annialating his farewell posts and banning his account. All is not lost however as Hitch is going to be creating some more THH Pod Casts, which is much better, because I can listen to them when I have time rather than having to stop listening half way through because I have to do some work or get some much needed sleep. In local radio land Juice FM’s Brooksy is leaving the morning slot and moving up ‘t north, according to the Argus he is being suceeded by Terry Garagan… do do doo doo do do doo do, do do doo do doo da da, do do do doo do doo doo doo, Last Bus To Whitehawk.
I have decided to take a break from EVE and MMOGs in general, I say I have decided… I can’t afford it at the moment so I havn’t got a huge choice in the matter.
I did get a chance to play Guild Wars for a weekend last weekend, which was a huge amount of fun.. not strictly a MMOG but it feels pretty good, kind of a cross between Lineage II and Phantasy Star Online.
I have decided that I will use my time to re-design OcPS which has needed re-working for quite some time. And if I get really bored I have a month of Lineage II waiting for me in the box pack that I bought a couple of months back.
I have totaly neglected this blog over the weekend, Catherine came to stay with me for the weekend which was great we had a really great time at both of the wedding shows we went to, we also spent quite a lot of time talking about stuff. I have been feeling quite ill, I have been having all sorts of problems with acid reflux over the last week, the doctor has put me on various things to help calm it down, but we will see.
I finaly got round to finishing my dissertation, it went quite well in the end got a good 300 words over the minimum, any more than that and I would be waffeling about stuff, which dosn’t really make for a good dissertation. In hind-sight I would do much more research and probably work a fair bit harder at it earlier on… the rush to the deadline was far too much strain for me, I only got 12 hours sleep in 5 days which dosnt make for a happy Richard. If you are interested in “The Future of Massivly Multiplayer Online Games” then take a look at my dissertation
… finaly now I have been playing EVE:Online for over a week (I have reviewed it at dooyou.co.uk). I have decided to reset my character to start from scratch and build it up as a miner/refiner.
PHP Integers are really getting on my nerves at the moment, it seems that anything more than 32-bits is just plain not supported in PHP… to be honest that is awful… that is the most apauling degree of accuracy I have come across since BASIC. Oh well never mind rant over.
I am having lots of fun playing EVE and writing my dissertation, it is quite interesting researching the history of MMOGs, something that facinates me while being technical and worthy of a dissertation. Need to crack on with the dissertation bit though 5 days to go… should be fine, pleanty of time.
My stomach seems to be a lot better recently, I havnt had the same acid indegestion problems that I have been having the last week or so, I am still going to talk to the doctor see if there is anything that they can do by way of investigating what the problem might be. I am petrified it might be something serious or not even something serous… just something that would cause me to have to go onto a special diet… its hard enough work not eating meat products and still making interesting food without having to avoid other ingredients too… we will see.
OK… so all of my old planetside chums have defected to this new MMORPG called EVE Online: The Second Genesis… so here I am writeing a dissertation about the future of MMOGs, thinking I wander what this game is all about… and I wish I could have a go just to see what it is like… so I did, got a 3 day trial of Dreeder (cheers matey) and started playing today… the tutorial was less than clear and I gave up after fiddeling trying to get it to work for a couple of hours, then I just spent some time mining stuff for seemingly no point oh well never mind… from what I see of the game so far it looks vast… there are a huge number of systems in the EVE universe and they all seem quite big in themselves. From a design perspective I imagine it is largely an illusion as there is little between each asteroid/station/planet and so on… the theory behind the game is very simple. However a huge amount of work has gone into the economy, which is a really good thing as it ads layers and layers of complexity to the game, anyway if you are interested in EVE take a look at this affilliate link you can then look round the website and if you sign up CCP (the makers of EVE) will give OC-PS.co.uk $7, which isnt bad at all.