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The research value of virtual worlds
My poor aging eyes could not read the pdf (you, however, can print it out or perhaps you are young and vigorous), but I believe this article is interesting with a very high "p."
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 3, 2008 at 06:22 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
Not sure if you were being sarcastic but you can bump your pdf reader to 130% for easier reading :)
Posted by: Allison Reynolds at Jun 3, 2008 6:38:23 PM
on macbooks you can put 2 fingers on the trackpad while holding down the apple key and zoom in on anything
Posted by: Al Brown at Jun 3, 2008 8:12:46 PM
I think he means all of the skipping around you have to do because the columns are about five words long. At least that's why I didn't bother.
Posted by: MH at Jun 3, 2008 8:23:03 PM
Although its three-column page design was not ideal, this article was extremely interesting. As many people spend countless time online, the virtual world is so rich with research potential -- and not just economics. I'd be very interested in somehow designing and carrying out a virtual-based sociological study (as I'm currently an undergrad, I have some time). :)
Posted by: Dana Williams at Jun 3, 2008 10:19:52 PM
Studying Second Life to understand what virtual worlds are like is a bit like studying CompuServe in the late 1980s to understand what today's Internet is like.
As the article itself points out, virtual banks no longer exist in Second Life. Most if not all of them offered savings accounts with Ponzi-like interest rates; this rate was invariably quoted as a daily rate (eg, 0.1% daily).
Of course, one of the basic functions of banks in real life -- deposit taking -- is entirely superflous in Second Life. There is no "money under the mattress" problem, no loose change or cash to be mugged or lost. Linden dollars do not exist as in-world objects, there are no virtual pieces of gold or dollar bills; your Linden dollar balance is just a database entry, displayed in the corner of your screen. That is, the company that runs Second Life is the default banker (but pays no interest).
Because no interest is paid, very few players maintain a large Linden dollar balance. Anyone who earns substantial money in-world simply exchanges it periodically for US dollars on the Linden exchange. The buyers however are other players, since the company itself never redeems Linden dollars for US dollars.
There are also no treasury bills or other risk-free investments in Second Life.
In general, economists looking for something to study won't find all that much to sink their teeth into. With Second Life's fifth anniversary approaching soon, many aspects of modern real-world economies still don't really exist within the game at this point, nor is it clear that they ever will.
Posted by: at Jun 4, 2008 12:21:06 AM
I never used to like reading PDFs zoomed in because I had to pick up the mouse all the time to move where I could see the right column. I could scroll up and down with the arrow keys, but the left and right arrows did some kind of stupid page-down thing.
Then I discovered that if you hold the Shift key you can use the arrow keys to move right and left. Now I can read PDFs again.
Posted by: Noumenon at Jun 4, 2008 7:15:43 AM
If you couldn't read that, you need reading glasses. You're 46. It's time.
Posted by: ostap at Jun 4, 2008 8:24:08 AM
It seems likely the Fed won't find virtual worlds useful exactly because of things like virtual banks. Many differences in the economic systems between real-world and virtual-worlds will be arbitraged away if it's profitable to do so. Now, let's get cracking on that Linden-USD carry trade...
Posted by: Leftic at Jun 4, 2008 2:39:45 PM
