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“He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in US dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent US—higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game—the equivalent of $3.42 (US) per hour. “That’s higher than the minimum wage in most countries,” he marvelled.
Then he performed one final analysis: the Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia.
It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn’t even exist.
Castronova sat back in his chair in his cramped home office, and the weird enormity of his findings dawned on him. Many economists define their careers by studying a country. He had discovered one.”
View the complete article here.
Original article located at http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2004.06-economics-game-theories/1/.
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No, Harry does not make a surprise visit to North Cyprus in the latest book. And neither do any of the other characters either. And, nope, there are no spoilers of any sort for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I have yet to read (but am looking forward to immensely).
I was in North [...]
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I watched him.
Retrieving books from the endless row of shelves, poring over them with the mind of a scholar, and settling them down on the red mahogany tables when his arm muscles ached from holding a book too close. His almond brown eyes travelled the width of the paper; they were sunk beneath two jet [...]
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To those of you who had faith in my application to Cambridge to study Mathematics, I thank you. However, on the 16th of January I received a very thin and ominous letter stamped ‘Cambridge’ on the top. I subconsciously knew the decision they had reached.
I ripped open the letter, unfolded one of two pages and [...]
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Firstly, Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all!
Secondly, and more importantly, to all ye who had little faith in our beach + barbecue + camping plan: we did it! (albeit at the very last minute – we clearly weren’t designed with organisation in mind)
Setting everything up was a bit of a pain in [...]
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Ask anyone about Choueifat, and they’ll probably keel over and clog an artery when it comes to talking about exams. In the majority of our secondary years, we spend every week doing a multiple choice test on nearly every subject we take. In addition to that, we have to take three full-fledged written + multiple [...]
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The long haul from Dubai to England took ages. We left at 4:00 PM UK time and arrived at our house in Bedford at about 11:00 AM the next day. Our flight on Cyprus Airways was an hour late, and we stopped over in Bahrain on the way. I hardly slept a wink on the [...]
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Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
You’ll be relieved to know that this is not the recipe for the ooze they stir [...]
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The story begins three Tuesday’s ago when, purely on a whim, I decided to bother to actually come to school to attend two lessons: Statistics and Maths.
Upon arriving, I found out that Statistics had been cancelled. The official excuse our teacher gave was that there were representatives from AUB (American University of Beirut) arriving at [...]
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art·ist n.
1. One who is able by virtue of imagination to create works of aesthetic value.
She emerges from the room with her hands full: a wooden board, a pair of papers, two brushes, a black charcoal pencil, and an easel slung over her shoulder.
I sit on a school chair while I wait. The boy’s bathroom [...]
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The first thing you will notice upon arrival in China is that no one speaks English. Not the people walking down the street, not the cashier in McDonalds, and not even the majority of the staff at the 5-star previously Communist Party-run Beijing Hotel.
Despite this, the Chinese are generally a friendly bunch. With a few [...]
