LIS  Michael Habib

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.