Virtual Economy Research Network

Professor Richard Heeks from University of Manchester recently made available a working paper titled Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games. Heeks summarizes pretty much everything that is currently known on gold farming. The approach is systematic and includes meticulously going through e.g. the estimates on on RMT market volume and aggregate spending on gold farming products, trends of RMT market prices and their effect on gold farming, the stakeholders in the gold farming industry, and the virtual world operators' incentives in reacting to gold farmers.

The paper can be found via the VERN bibliography. Instead of listing more of its contents here, I'd like to point out the viewpoint of development studies, which is novel in these circles at least to myself, and which is interestingly visible in many parts of the paper.

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.