In the early 2000s, colleagues told me about the real-life friendships they’d developed in online games. They told me about the openness and honesty that greeted them when they logged into Everquest and Asheron’s Call, the emotional power of achieving long-term goals with people thousands of miles away, and the bizarre group ‘dinner’ parties they described, separate but together, behind their home computer screens. I dismissed their stories; these were places populated by orcs and warlocks, I reasoned. Impossible fantasies of people who needed to meet more real people. But around that time I also read an article by economist Edward Castronova who had used the economic barter and trade systems in Everquest to assess the GDP of its fictional world. Taking the average amount of time players spent ‘levelling up’, or advancing through new areas of the story by engaging in repetitive tasks, and the amount which items and extremely virtually valuable character accounts were sold for on eBay’s Category 1654 (Computer Games), Castronova placed its Gross Domestic Product between Bulgaria’s and Russia’s. His paper, On Virtual Economies, and his subsequent analysis of the relative and socially-determined monetary ‘value’ of male and female avatars in massively multiplayer online games (women sell for $47 less, based only on gender assignment), inspired a flood of scientists into online spaces like EverQuest searching for similar clues to offline social processes, including me.
Essay
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[Academic] The value of virtuality for social science research
Monday January 25, 2010 @ 09:42 AM (UTC)
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