Toxic Jam

Arden

Edward Castronova is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University. An article about him had recently been published in the New Scientist (October 2006 issue), which is where I discovered him.

Castronova used to be a college professor, in his spare time he liked to play MMORPG’s such as World of Warcraft and Everquest. He began to notice the potential of having these fantasy worlds, as fantasy worlds also have fantasy economies. Castronova began to study the economic activity within the synthetic worlds. He discovered that Everquest’s GDP per capita nearly equalled Russia’s. (GDP is a method of measuring the size of an economy, it is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time).

Castronova’s discovery made him extremely popular, and he has been given a grant of £122,500 by the MacArthur Foundation to build his own game which will be used to test economic theories.

The Synthetic Worlds Initiative site has some information about the new game, though it hasnt gone into great detail at the moment. It is going to be called Arden, and be based around the works of Shakespeare. This is Castronova standing infront of a concept drawing for the game.

If we get that rep notice board thing going, I will put up a photocopy of the article so other people can have a read.