EVE Online Releases Data

EVE continues its tradition of innovation, becoming the first major online game to release economic data to the general public. They're providing a test run of a year's worth of price info from major trade regions. More info here.

Comments

[Leonel Morgado]

1.

First, that is, as in "because Second Life is not a game".

[ecastronova]

2.

Second Life does not have a structured economy the way EVE does. The
only data from Second Life as a whole is population, land sales, and
{prim-constructs w/scripts}. As for the latter, sure there are a lot
of goods, but in the data it's just one huge category "IP." I don't
know of anyone who has gone through all that virtual construction
and categorized it as "clothes," "vehicles," "sexual services," and
the like. You would need to have that. SL's data dump is not by
itself very useful. EVE's data dump, because EVE is a game with
identified items with their own identified markets, is immediately
useful.

Edward Castronova

Games, Technology, and Society

Professor of Telecommunications

Professor of Cognitive Science

Indiana University

http://games.indiana.edu

http://mypage.iu.edu/~castro/home.html

[Leonel Morgado]

3.

I hadn't thought of that! Makes perfect sense in the line of what you had proposed in the "petri dishes" paper. It does makes one wonder how to develop efficient data-gathering strategies for freeform virtual worlds.