On the Walrus Magazine website there is an amazing, albeit long post, on Game Theories, and how the online economies of World of Warcraft and other online games are having real life affects.

There is one section on the first page that really hits home, as there are direct statistical comparisons between EverQuest and the real world and it really sums up the effects that online communities are having.

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.

If you are interested in this type of information and comparison, this is the best article I have read on this subject in a long time, and really it also explains why there are so many gold farmers in MMORPG’s.

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