Horizon

There's nothing inherently less rational about buying virtual islands than about buying gold. A few technical applications aside, gold has almost no inherent usefulness other than how much people are prepared to value it for its own sake.

It seems we have come full circle... I commented on an article commenting on this very phenomenon back in July...

I see I was missing the practical applications for all of us. A virtual island with virtual beachfront property will eventually have virtual residents and virtual vacationers who will want virtual blockbuster novels to read while they lie in the virtual sun. I've never been able to write a real novel, but a virtual one might be up my (virtual) alley.

I actually wrote a short article about these games recently but I don't think the editor over at this computer game review site likes it much. Wrong venue I suppose.

I spent a month playing some of the games as research, and I'm surprised most of them have any players, much less enough players to create a functioning economy. There is one exception to that, a brand new MMORPG which actually manages to give one that eerie "virtual world" experience, but most of them are interesting only because of the amount of time and hard work people have been willing to invest in killing progressively larger animated monsters and selling the items got thereby.

You might expect this new, much more immersive game to create its own economy like the others, but I'm not so sure. It is tuned so that players have much more free time and don't have to work as hard to gain rewards (in other words, you're not constantly working at killing another animal or simply surviving). This makes a lot of sense from a normal game design standpoint because the result is much more fun and less work. But I suspect this might actually preclude the growth of a strong economy there. We'll see.

It's exciting that we can now speculate about whether economic systems will spontaneously emerge from artificial worlds, as if from a gigantic petrie dish. Economics and sociology may never be the same.