Edward "Ted" Castronova is a professor of media at Indiana University Bloomington. He is known in particular for his work on the economies of synthetic worlds. (wikipedia)
There's no economic puzzle here. Where there's money to be made, there will be people out to make it. Where some gamers are playing for fun, others are pursuing a new kind of day-trading game and those two factions are trying to co-exist.
One thing that's surprising is how serious this is. It's now my career.
It turns out that the way humans are made, the software-based approach seems to have much more success.
As synthetic worlds grow in importance, we'll see scholars, legal analysts, and game industry experts under increasing pressure to generate sensible guidelines for different aspects of the practice.
We can and should view synthetic worlds as essentially unregulated playgrounds for economic organization.
