In Thursday's gamesblog column, I wrote about the data that companies and academics are collecting on us as we frag, chat and slay. The extent to the collection is pretty awesome, and believe me, so is the analysis; I've spent the better part of the last two years trying to make sense of an immense Second Life dataset. But enough about my PhD, here's someone who's actually got some results.
Economist Edward Castronova, he who famously calculated the GDP of EverQuest back in 2002, and his team of merry men and women have completed their MacArthur Foundation-funded Arden Project in which they built a virtual world, split it into two and played around with the economic principles in each to assess the economic validity of virtual environments. From his announcement:
Summary: In a fantasy game setting, we made two equivalent worlds and set the price of potions to be higher in one than in the other. We found that people bought fewer potions when they were more expensive.
Discussion: The result suggests that people in fantasy games act in an economically normal way. Perhaps these game worlds can be used to study real economic behavior.
Read more here in 'A Test of the Law of Demand in a Virtual World: Exploring the Petri Dish Approach to Social Science'.
I have a gut sense that collecting data from virtual world and other online game environments about the players will soon become much more difficult in the same way as putting people through truly fascinating but psychologically dangerous experiments came to an end when ethics boards became the norm. There are questions of digital privacy, digital identity and data ownership which are still being hacked out by the commercial and the public sectors. For the time being, the virtual world petri dish is still accessible for social scientists like myself, and Castronova et al's research provides yet another reason why they are worthy of study.
