Though widely criticized, the issues are somewhat complex. Gold farming does provide employment, to people that would (likely) not be going to school. This is also interesting – sort of corporate social responsibility, a la goldfarming: Sea Turtles 911, a non-profit in Hainan rescues sea turtles, funded primarily by: a gold farm that caters to foreign customers.

Now you can ebay all the WoW gold you want, guilt free.

The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire. Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth. The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescense from overhead, half way through its daily revolution. Small rodents scampered about, occupying themselves in the daily accomplishments of their dismal lives.

Tingling. I’m going to go play Baldur’s Gate II. Actually come to think of it I’m pretty sure there’s an amateur fantasy film that I was in when ~10 years old. Certainly hope no one ever digs up a copy.

DotA is a fan-made modification for the Warcraft III engine, and is pretty much the only thing that’s come out (maybe aside from Portal / AE) in the last decade that’s worth playing. Very astounding that it has such international appeal – the Swede referred me to this trashy Europop song, (the depiction of bored girls is spot on – I’ve ruined at least two relationships through overplaying). A quick consult of Google Trends reveals that English – despite being language of origin, is not even in the top ten list languages used to search (dominated instead by Tagalog, Indonesian, Thai and Chinese). Whether or not this provides the opportunity to bring people closer together is debatable – for example, it’s unclear how to translate ‘omg noob stfu kthx’ into Chinese. Probably best that no one does.

MMORPGs (World of Warcraft and Eve Online in particular) have become hot topics in social sciences – primarily because you could conceivably run interesting social experiments without nasty hazards associated with actually harming people (like seeing if player-to-player insurance mechanisms develop when you threaten to blow up everyone’s space ships with an anthro-economic supernova). While interesting, these experiments still take place within a setting dictated by the creators, with extensive limits placed on the types of interactions that can conceivably occur. For example, numerous economists plotz upon learning that WoW features a marketplace where players can trade (oooh… aaah) – that’s because the programmers put it there, Sherlock. There’s nothing “spontaneous” about it.

On the other hand, fan developed games like DotA can tell researchers a lot more about the development of self-governance, at least as it relates to the democratizing potential of technology. For example, the creation of enforced ban lists for cheating, behavior rankings, informal rules for conduct during games have all been critical to the lasting appeal of DotA – for a long time there have been competing ban lists and rankings that hosts can use to discriminate against various types of players. Fascinating! 

The whole project works and stays interesting because of a cadre of dedicated player-developers; and the constant feedback provided by an obsessive community of fanboys. There has to be potential for commercialization (charging for professional player / team matching services?) It’s amazing that Blizzard hasn’t formalized DotA – to some extent perhaps they are content to let it run as an extremely popular experiment that their own developers can build off of in the future.

This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit by computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

Marc Reinganum also has a good piece that disproves the possibility of time travel, given the existence of positive interest rates. If time travel were in fact possible, he posits, all interest rates would fall to near zero as profit opportunities were snatched up by rapacious time-traveling hedge fund managers.

Finally, though hardly as interesting as the coming war of man against machine – Robin Hanson examines the probable economic impacts of machine intelligence. He concludes that we’re screwed, but also makes the assumption that no new job types will be created:

By distinguishing the complementarity between different job roles from the possibility of substituting machines for humans in particular roles, we can reconcile our historical observation of rising human wages and machines which complement human labor with frequent predictions of eventual machine substitution and consequent falling human wages. Our models show that wages can rise a great deal for a long time before eventually falling dramatically. 

我们错了。
wǒ men cuò le

And a slide show. Slightly related, but mostly because I’m going stir crazy. Credits also to the brilliant verbiage of Mr. E. Kravets.