Scientific American, In-Game Economies & Eyjólfur Guðmundsson

EVE Online's in-game economist Eyjólfur Guðmundsson is the focus of an article in Scientific American magazine. Indicating that positions such as this are becoming a "serious" job opportunity, SA explained:

Eyjólfur Guðmundsson is the only economist on Earth who spends his days studying the fluctuating cost of warp-disruption batteries and T2 light drones. That's because he's the world's first virtual-world economist.

This past August, Guðmundsson took up residence in EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online game, to report on its economy, research its society and coordinate with academic institutions on their entrance into virtual worlds.

Think Alan Greenspan-only in Battlestar Galactica. In EVE Online players buy, sell, trade, earn, steal and otherwise work to accumulate interstellar kredits (ISKs)-a currency that, officially at least, is only valuable inside EVE. To earn ISKs, players can mine ore from asteroids, process it into salable goods, clear the world of computer-controlled pirates or turn pirate themselves and attack other players.

Check out the rest at the link above.

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What are your thoughts on this, Kalia?

Have you ever actually read his newsletter? If he didn't talk about the warp disruptors, you'd never know he was talking about a game.

One of the biggest issues surrounding professional development in the games industry is that very few people take it seriously or respect it as a professional industry. This even, much to my personal dismay, includes a very large portion of the people actually involved in the industry.

I read this article, which is very academically interesting and one of the reasons I did appreciate it is the serious, professional, and respectful way in which the issues of game theory (mathematical economic theory in this case) were reviewed.

It might be voyaging a little too far from the concept of fun and entertainment, but it is something that industry needs right now. And it is scientific America anyway, no rating of the lab researcher hunks in there.

Games are essentially "simulations", and we can introduce any number of problems into them and simulate how it transpires within the world, and learn valuable lessons for real world applications. Take EVE's economy for example, that's a goldmine of research material right there.