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"During the past year, nearly 16,000 people have downloaded a 40-page economic analysis of EverQuest, Sony's popular online fantasy world of Norrath. "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier," by California State Fullerton economics professor Edward Castronova, is the No. 1 article in the history of the Economics Research Network, an Internet library of tens of thousands of professional journals and research papers in economics."

"From an economist's standpoint what's happening in these games is real," said Edward Castronova, an associate professor of economics at California State University at Fullerton. "You've got a distinct territory with specialization of labor, gains from trade, a floating exchange rate -- real economies are happening."

"Kellen's auction is just one example of how increasingly popular online role-playing games have created a shadow economy in which the lines between the real world and the virtual world are getting blurred. More than 20 million people play these games worldwide, according to Edward Castronova, an economics professor at Indiana University who has written a book on the subject, and he thinks such gamers spend more than $200 million a year on virtual goods. One site, GameUSD.com, even tracks the latest value of computer-game currency against the U.S. dollar, an exchange-rate calculator for the virtual world."

A conversation with Cory Doctorow plunges into the matter at hand so quickly that it's almost impossible not to imagine yourself falling through an internet-era rabbit hole of pop culture and technology. Doctorow is all about synthesizing ideas and spitting them out in as accessible a fashion as possible, and the ground he manages to cover in a single stride can be mind-boggling; he's a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger, father, gamer ... A former WoW player and husband of gaming standout Alice Taylor (also previously profiled here in 15 Minutes of Fame), he's widely known as the co-editor of Boing Boing and author of the bestselling young adult novel Little Brother.

"According to John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC, massive multiplayer online games demonstrate ways in which groups can manage information and maximize learning. At a recent lecture as part of Stanford University's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, Brown said that World of Warcraft guilds can serve as models for entrepreneurs in understanding how to succeed in a knowledge-based economy. "

"It's not going to be news to anyone who follows this page, but World of Warcraft has of course already spawned an active external market. What's different is that Blizzard, the developer, has announced [text below] that it will attempt to shut the thing down."

"Together with some students from the University of Sheffield, we've done some research into World of Warcraft Gold USA, and what that tells us about the realm-by-realm economies of the European and American servers. What came out of the study was astonishing- and seems to indicate a phenomenal bias on behalf of Blizzard towards their American clients."