Interesting if a little short piece from Wired on the value of scarcity in online world economies. Wired 14.04: Geekonomics
Now, of course no-one's been able to trust a word any American has written on economic matters since Milton bloody Friedman was a teenager, and as usual it comes with a certain amount of neo-liberal baggage. But it makes a good point about scarcity having to be made explicit in the game world, and there are some interesting egs.
In the early days of Ultima Online, storage space was unlimited. Eventually, a guy decided to hoard 10,000 shirts, utterly borking the market for cloth.
Only thing that worries me a tad: the US already seems to have modeled its foreign policy on Desert Strike, it's not going to start running its economy on Everquest lines is it?
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