A systems-design course in building and balancing virtual economies: currency sinks and faucets, market microstructure, and the numerical and mechanism-design tools behind EVE Online, World of Warcraft, and RuneScape's player-run markets.
What you will do
You'll spend the semester reading real, published data from player-run virtual economies --- EVE Online's Monthly Economic Reports, World of Warcraft's Auction House, Old School RuneScape's Grand Exchange --- and learning the tools their designers use to keep those economies from collapsing: faucet-and-sink accounting, cost-effectiveness ratios, market microstructure, and mechanism design. You'll build spreadsheets that model real ships, real prices, and real scandals, not toy numbers invented for the exercise. You walk out with a portfolio of that analysis and a capstone report proposing a scoped, numerically justified fix to a real problem in a real economy.
Who it is for
Built for students who like systems more than they like any one game --- you don't need to have played EVE Online, WoW, or RuneScape, but you do need to be comfortable with a spreadsheet and unbothered by a ratio. It suits computing and engineering students looking for a systems-design elective with real numerical modelling in it, not a games-studies seminar. If "market" and "mechanism" sound more interesting to you than "lore," you're in the right place.