Here're my running notes from The Future of Cyberspace Economies at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Econ is the study of choice under scarcity. The dismal science says, when essential stuff is scarce, you've got to trade something for something else.
MMORPGs sometimes try letting everyone have everyone for free are ghost towns. MMORPGs create artificial scarcity.
The surprise to econismists is that scarcity is fun — people hunger for that which is dismal, scarce.
Because wealth accrues due to temporal investment, the rich and powerful in MMORPGs are people who can devote a lot of time to games, which means that they tend to be poor in real life.
