It has been said that MMOW’s will become the most important economic models of the 21st century. Second Life actually controls inflation to keep its exchange rate in line with the US dollar. Here’s an awesome article from Scientific American.
Why Do Virtual Worlds Even Need Economists?
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Good find. I read a book (well, most of it) called Synthetic Worlds that dealt with the virtual reality of MMORGP games. It featured the author researching how much money game items were worth in real life, taking into account factors like time, availability, and costs for the players to acquire the items. i also recall reading NYTimes article at one point about how people were paying players in China to “dig gold” for them. They would pay these Chinese players to dig for like 12 hours a day because it is tedious. It was an interesting column about how virtual economies and real economies converge.