Please let me know if you hear of anything! My resume can be found in the sidebar to the right.

by Ed Castronova, the economist who pioneered the study of the economics of virtual worlds
* Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games
* Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality

by Julian Dibbel, a journalist who explores gold farming and real-money trade in games:
* Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot

I’d say that Castronova’s first book, Synthetic Worlds, introduces some interesting ideas, such as determining the labor productivity and GDP of Norrath, the world of EverQuest. He dedicates a lot of the book to explaining what virtual worlds are, and both of his books feel like they’re aimed at people with little to no experience existing in a virtual world. Still, they’re worth reading.

Julian Dibbel’s book could also be considered a general audience book, but there’s enough content in there to engage any reader, even veterans of virtual worlds. The book is superbly written, which is no surprise because Dibbel is a journalist. In Play Money, Dibbel chronicles his time acting as a broker for virtual goods after detailing how he himself became addicted to the game. The title claims he tried to make “millions trading virtual loot”, but his goal was just to earn enough of a salary selling virtual goods in order to earn as much as he could writing. It turns out he did, but at the cost of a big part of his “real” life. The book is interesting because he interviews many people involved in the “real money trade” aspect of virtual economies, and really explores just how big that market is.

Again, I’d love it if people could post comments letting me know what they think of these books as well as the names of other books that would be of interest.

For more info on the beta, see here: http://starcraft2.com/beta-faq.xml

Best of luck to everyone!

What’ll be interesting to see is if anything changes in the game in the coming months. Like others have commented on my previous posts, there are other bots besides Glider, including many private ones. Additionally, many of the characters who are doing the “botting” are physically controlled by Asian farmers, who some argue constitute much of the “botter” community.

Will we see a rise in prices of WoW commodities on the auction house as a result of this ban? Were Gliders really producing a lot of the commonly-traded goods, and the economy is seeing a contraction of supply as a result of their termination? Not likely. World of Warcraft has upwards of 12 million players worldwide, and I doubt that there are enough people affected by this decision to make a noticeable impact on the game economy.

If anyone has any accurate data on the prices of major WoW trade goods across multiple servers, please let me know. I’m considering writing a script that will pull data from WoWEcon.com and show a graph of price changes along with major WoW-community events (bots getting shut down, WoW patches, etc.). Would anyone be interested in seeing something like this?

You can see my post here. Let me know what you think!

While no official statistics could be found, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of botters use Glider. After all, it’s the most widely used bot that has sold a few hundred thousand copies (according to information that came up in court). On the other hand, many of the gold farming operations in Asia do everything by hand with extremely cheap labor (see this preview of an interesting documentary). So, if Glider has been deemed to be infringing upon Blizzard’s copyright whenever it’s in use, does this give Blizzard a right to shut down the sale of Glider? If so, would this drive supply of gold down and shoot prices up? Or will the hard-working Chinese prevail and keep prices down for us lazy players?

This is an interesting development. To what extent will characters/avatars/data be transferable between worlds? Will your 70 Tauren Warrior be able to hop in a car and drive around a virtual town? Will he be able to walk to the end of Azeroth and into Second Life? Probably not. More likely, you’ll be able to communicate with players of other virtual games…. even people playing your game, but on a different server. In the future, anyone playing any sort of online game will be able to communicate with everyone else. This is a cool proposition.

An important thing to keep in mind is that content from other games may ruin the feeling that I’m immersed in a world. When I’m slaying beasts in Azeroth I don’t really want to see some guy from Second Life flying around. It’ll be interesting to see how companies make use of this cross-platform technology without hampering upon the immersion and culture of each individual game.