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Comment by larsiusprime | Hacker News Reader

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I think video games are massively under-studied, particularly in the realm of behavioral Economics.

One of my favorite seminal pieces is Zachary Booth Simpson's paper 1999 paper on the Economics of Ultima Online:

https://mobiledevmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/The-In-...

In my own field, I keep finding more and more instances of MMO's and online virtual worlds that reproduce the real-world housing crisis.

https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-value-tax-in-...

It is funny you mention that and I definitely agree about it not being studied enough ( especially given how much players are being watched today you would think there is enough data ). My first real encounter with inflation was in an MMO. It was fascinating how quickly player-base did what people in RL did ( moved to assets other than currency ).

Even outside of MMOs you had things like Stones of Jordan - often the "currency" would be something compact that had some value inherently, but became much more valuable as the money.

And you want something that doesn't hit game limits, and doesn't get messed with by the developers much (both of which do NOT apply to "WoW gold" for example).

Now that you mentioned that, I remember World of Warcraft having a pandemic event that spurred some discussion in epidemiology circles.

Zero Punctuation did a hilarious and informative video on this topic in one of his "Lets all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee" series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB3jOD2wjUc

Yup. There was also an economics paper by someone who abused the in game market (auction house).

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