Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier

By Edward Castronova. Social Science Research Network, 2001

555 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called Norrath, populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath's currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many. The population is growing rapidly, swollen each each day by hundreds of emigres from various places around the globe, but especially the United States. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new world is its location. Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San Diego. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are making money -- with annual revenues expected to top USD 1.5 billion by 2004 -- and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may soon become the primary venue for all online activity.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fccbea71d533e18ded2b5d620e0a7e9ea0ab088d

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In Management Science and Operations Research

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Co-creating Second Life (2008, background): “In addition, Castronova (2001) reviewed the completed auctions for the items and in-game currency in Everquest and calculated that players earn an average wage of $3.42 per hour of game played, and collectively, its per-capita GNP was $2,266 (then comparable to the seventy-seventh richest country…”
Making learning fun: Quest Atlantis, a game without guns (2005, background): “support hundreds of thousands of users each day, consuming hundreds of millions of man hours per game, sporting economies that surpass the gross national product of many actual countries (Castronova, 2001; Kolbert, 2001).”
The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical Environments (2006, methodology): “For example, Castronova (2002) has used the eBay sales transactions of virtual items to show that the economy of EverQuest is quantifiable and has a higher gross domestic product than some developing countries, and to show the inequity between the value of the virtual male and female body (Castron”
From Content to Context: Videogames as Designed Experience (2006, unknown): “Already, a number of legal scholars, economists, and sociologists are using them as laboratories to gain fundamental insights about their ﬁelds (Castronova, 2001; Ondrejka, 2004).”
Co-Creation: Toward a Taxonomy and an Integrated Research Perspective (2010, background): “Castronova computed that an early, and relatively small, fantasy world produced the per capita equivalent of the (physical) world’s 77th richest economy [15].”
Educating the Net Generation (2005, methodology): “One platinum piece, the unit of currency in Norrath, trades on real world exchange markets higher than both the Yen and the Lira (Castronova, 2001).14 Black noted that players of all ages are involved in many different MMOGs and in ancillary activities such as fanfiction Web sites, where people…”
Second Language Use, Socialization, and Learning in Internet Interest Communities and Online Gaming (2009, background): “8 Edward Castronova (2001, 2002), an economist turned telecommunications researcher, was the first to perform detailed economic analyses of virtual gaming environments as they interrelate with global capital through the sales of in-game objects on public auction sites such as eBay (www.ebay.com).”
From Gaming to Training: A Review of Studies on Fidelity, Immersion, Presence, and Buy-in and Their Effects on Transfer in PC-Based Simulations and Games (2005, background): “A study of an online gaming community known as Norrath, where social roles are defined through communication with other avatars and social relationships greatly help or hinder progress within the virtual world, found that 20% of users report a feeling of " living in " Norrath (Castronova, 2001).”
Massively Multiplayer Online Video Gaming as Participation in a Discourse (2006, background): “One platinum piece, the unit of currency in Norrath, trades on real-world exchange markets at a higher rate than both the yen and the lira (Castronova, 2001).”
The case for dynamic difficulty adjustment in games (2005, background): “This network of producer-consumer relationships can be viewed as an economy—or more broadly, as a dynamic system [3][9].”