Digitial Economics

Over at David Friedman's Ideas blog, he makes mention of the idea of using MMORGs as testbeds of economic theory. It's a good if common idea, and David takes it one step further than most by actually proposing a methodology:

I am an economist, so my brief examples are economic ones, but there should be opportunities in other fields as well. One respect in which the worlds represented by different servers are not quite identical is in their populations. Servers whose internal clocks are on Pacific Standard Time are populated mainly by people from the west cost of the U.S.—with an occasional Spaniard or Korean. A server on Korean time—I am told the game is very popular in Korea—will have a rather different population. That should make it possible to do extensive studies of differences and similarities in social norms across a wide range of societies—without spending a penny on airline tickets or hotels.

So far as the cost of the game is concerned, a little over a thousand dollars a year—a small fraction of any serious research budget—will buy you a hundred characters each on every server. Most of the cost of such a project would be the time of the researchers—and grad students are not very expensive. If you select them properly you may get a good deal of their time for free, since from their standpoint you are paying the cost of their recreation.

Again, it's a good idea although there are a lot of variables in play. A lot. Not the least of which is the economic models for various games are quite different For example, in the game I play, City of Heroes, there is almost no economic incentives past a certain level, resulting in high level players literally giving the money away to people they randomly meet on the street. The first time it happened to me I saw shocked, but since then I've looked at it as a flaw in the economic design of the game. The experiment design would have to be very careful, but I certainly think it's doable.

Still, this as close as I've seen in to something that might be a repeatable experiment in economics, and I hope some one tries it.

OTOH, regulation is not as far away as one might think. This I picked up from Sci Fi Weekly:

Warcraft Hammers Bad Players
lizzard, developer of the hit massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, has suspended 18,000 accounts for violations of the game's terms of use, the GameSpot Web site reported. That amounts to roughly 200 accounts per day, the site reported. Most of the suspensions were of computer-run characters made to farm gold and items for resale in the real world. Blizzard is asking legitimate Warcraft players to report suspicious activity. VU Games recently announced that the game had reached the 5-million player level.

Which is telling them something about the design of their economy model.