The employee’s job is to win virtual possessions or acquire skill levels for an avatar
The accounts, each of which may have one or several avatars, are then given to an employee, some of whom play for up to 12 hours a day. The employee’s job is to win virtual possessions or acquire skill levels for an avatar. Once an avatar is for example a WOW level 60 Shaman, the factory sells the account on some internet commerce site like eBay. In its entry for virtual or synthetic economy, Wikipedia reports that one gamer purchased a virtual space station for $100,000. Similarly on December 17, 2004, BBC News published an article “Gamer buys $26,500 virtual land”, which tells about how an Australian gamer bought, using real money, a virtual island which exists only in the game named as Project Entropia. Edward Castranova, currently Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University and author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games published by the University of Chicago Press, is an economist who for years worked by day in near obscurity teaching economics and studying welfare at California State University in Fullerton. By night he used to play video games including Everquest. He discovered that when Everquest players retire from the game, they oft en sell off their virtual money, platinum pieces in this case, in exchange for real money on eBay. In 2002, after gathering data on auctions of virtual wealth for real money, he determined that the value of an online Everquest player’s time is the equivalent of $3.42 per hour in real money and that the annual per capita gross national product of the virtual land Norrath is $2266 per capita – again in real dollars. Imagine a land which exists only in the realms of computer RAM and hard disks has created a real world economy larger than that in all but 77 real world countries! For more information on IIPM Editorial Article, please click here...,
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Source: IIPM, B&E
posted by IIPM at 2:39 PM
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