The 425mm railgun - a powerful gun for the large ships that are a stalwart of any serious battle fleet - dropped to a fifth of its previous price. He is tasked with figuring out whether the game has enough “sinks” that can soak up excess money if it looks like an inflationary bubble is emerging.ĬCP pricked such a bubble when it overhauled the system for producing player-created items. We did not announce that there was more explicitly, but in a matter of days the price had adjusted,” Guodmundsson said. “After we opened up an area where there was more zydrine (an in-game mineral), we saw that price dropped. At least here I know the data is right,” Guodmundsson said.Īs new players join, CCP adds new planets and asteroids that can be exploited, one of several “faucets” that serve to inject funds into the universe and keep the economy ticking. “As a real economist I had to spend months trying to find data to test an economic theory but if I was wrong, I wasn’t sure if the theory was wrong or the data was wrong. In this regard, Guodmundsson is the envy of every policymaker who has wrestled with incomplete data - all deals and prices are instantly captured by CCP’s computers. Just like for a Wall Street stock investor, a Singaporean commodities trader or a London foreign exchange dealer, information is key. Players deal in interstellar kredits, or ISKs, a play on the trading symbol for Iceland’s currency, the krona. It’s a darkly literal twist on the creative destruction beloved by classical economists - players create things, like heavily armed starships and alliances, to destroy rivals.Įve’s economy is rooted in activities such as mining raw materials. That builds consumer behavior and patterns that you see in the real world,” Guodmundsson said. “This makes the consumers behave in a more natural way because they are competing against each other on multiple levels, not only on a tactical level in combat but for logistics and resources. Players want standardized data about Eve’s economy to help them track prices and make investment decisions as they battle to control interstellar space on behalf of mega-corporations whose size and power would make any real multinational blush. “There’s a lot of discussion in the game about inflation and that is my job, to find out if inflation is going on,” said Guodmundsson, who has a doctorate in environment and resource economics from the University of Rhode Island. ![]() Guodmundsson is the newly appointed chief economist for CCP Games, which hired him in June to quantify the wheelings and dealings of Eve Online’s denizens, which number about 200,000 players.ĬCP hopes that will grow 50 percent by the end of 2008 to be about the same size as Iceland’s population. The difference is that the economy Guodmundsson oversees exists only in the virtual world of Eve Online, a science fiction computer game run out of Iceland. Eyjolfur Guodmundsson was appointed chief economist for CCP Games, which hired him in June to quantify the wheelings and dealings of Eve Online's denizens, which number about 200,000 players.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |