Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

by Cody "Micajah" Bye

For those of us who went to college or are presently attending college, we remember the days where we had to sit through hours of lectures that included terms like gross domestic product, laissez-faire and econometrics. If economics weren't our primary concern, we may have put those terms into our short term memory and filed them away for use later, knowing that they'd likely never come up again in our relevant real life world. In our day-to-day lives we may check out the daily price changes in our mutual funds or calculate our taxes for the year, but rarely do we put our mind into the sweeping sort of grand scale economical thinking that we did in college.

Dr. EyjóG, EVE Online's first in-game world economist.

As massively multiplayer gamers, we spend even less time considering the changes in our virtual economy. We may be interested in economic adjustments if our game experiences rapid inflation or deflation, but rarely do we ever find ourselves putting our minds to the test to try to determine how our game's economy operates on a broader scope. We may know that this piece of armor cost several more gold pieces a year ago, but we don't really consider it pertinent information to how we play the game. We simply adjust our tactics and move on.

However, the team at CCP knew that they couldn't operate on the same assumption that many gamers do. Due to their unique, player-driven style of economy, CCP understood the need to fully grasp how their economy was operating in the broader sense. They needed to know how certain adjustments to the gameplay were affecting the users and how the users were subsequently affecting their own economic system. Not only that, CCP also wanted to give users the necessary information that they needed to make strategic choices when they were attempting to make money in the EVE universe. In order to fully realize the information that they had on their hands, CCP hired an economist on June 27, 2007. According to the press release that went out at the same time, Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson (Dr. EyjóG) has over 15 years of experience in the field of economics and was hired to "publish quarterly reports on the state of the EVE Online economy as well as ongoing analysis of other economic indicators, such as inflation, economic growth and price trends. His research is designed to provide players with information necessary to make strategic decisions, but is also expected to have an impact on future development of the game. Dr. Guðmundsson will also be responsible for coordinating research initiatives with academic institutions."

Being his first public appearance as a representative of CCP, the editors at Ten Ton Hammer were extremely anxious to talk with Dr. EyjóG about his work on EVE's economics and how he plans to take them into the future of virtual world economies. However, we had also had time to briefly glance at his first post on the EVE developer logs, which can be initially daunting to say the least. Thankfully, Dr. EyjóG proved to be an incredibly down-to-earth individual, who talked in simple terms for the layman that was asking him his questions.

Some people consider economic statistics to be entertainment.I don't think it's these Minmatar.

To start, we thought it best if we began with Dr. EyjóG's responsibilities at CCP and what his goals are as the lead economist for EVE Online. According to the doctor, he has three major areas that he covers. "First I watch the economy and give players basic information about the economy, like the status of the markets, historical overviews and analyzing particular events," he said. "Second, I coordinate research with universities, which is where we're seeing a great amount of interest on all kinds of social science research. Everything from governance to economics is being covered. Finally,  I use all the knowledge I gather from the game to go back and enhance the product for the future."

Now that he has been unleashed upon the public, I was interested to know how Dr. EyjóG originally came to know of CCP and their online world. It turns out that Iceland is a fairly small place. "I was attending a conference on experimental economics," he said. "I feel in love with the idea of a single server world and the concept of a game where you can actually lose what you've hoarded. It appealed to me that you actually have to develop business skills in order to succeed."

"If you were a large corporation, why couldn't you use EVE as a training tool to make sure that your recently hired employee could actually run a solid business, especially if the business is in a virtual world and not in a real life situation," Dr. EyjóG continued.