The Study of Virtual Worlds

I happened upon an interesting and decidedly scholarly weblog today. The site is called Terra Nova. In general, it's about being a "collaborative weblog experiment...about an emerging social phenomenon called 'virtual worlds' -- computer-generated, persistent, immersive, and representational social platforms". The description of the site sounds academic and exhaustive because the site actually is.

What brought me to it in the first place was their article about the Economics of FFXI. In the article, two Wharton undergrad honors students are mentioned and a link is provided to their report on FFXI economics. Interestingly enough they expose some problems with the economy. The author of the Terra Nova article (Dan Hunter) speculates that developers of virtual worlds will soon have to pay more attention to their economic systems to stop economic savants from "taking them for all their worth".

The report is pretty hardcore so don't expect it to be light reading. The Terra Nova blog is accessible and if you play MMORPGs at all, much of what they blog will hit home.