Month: December 2005

New book on the economies of virtual worlds

Via Arts & Letters Daily, I found this book review in the Economist. It is for a new book by Edward Castronova, titled Synthetic Worlds : The Business and Culture of Online Games. From the review, it appears that this book looks at how people become psychologically immersed in virtual worlds. I am interested that it looks at the economic aspect becuase I am always interested by the amounts of real money poured into virtual economies. This is a topic I have been interested since I learned that world in Everquest, Norath has a per-capita income of $2,266, which makes it equivelent to the 77th largest national economy. I was also interested by the way that this has effected peoples real lives like in this story about a murder over the theft of a virtual sword.

Finished

I have spent many hours trying to set my blog up to have the functionality and format that I wanted, and am finally done. There are a few functions I would still like to add, but have figured out that there is no manageable way to do so at this point in time. Tagging of individual posts is too difficult with Blogger. It has also proved very hard to trackback other people. I think that I have otherwise been able to manage everything else that I wanted to.