What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team
reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a
real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they
feed.
Week 1: Economies as Designed Systems
Why a virtual economy is not a metaphor for a real one --- it's a system someone wrote code for, with all the same failure modes a bad API has.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Week 2: Faucets and Sinks
The two pipes every game economy runs on — where currency comes from, and where it has to go, or inflation eats everything else you designed.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Week 3: Market Design and Price Discovery
Order books, guide prices, and why Old School RuneScape's Grand Exchange and a stock exchange are closer cousins than either fandom would like.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Week 4: Case Study — The EVE Online Economy
A decade of Monthly Economic Reports, read as what they are — one of the largest publicly available datasets on a virtual economy anywhere.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Week 5: Numerical Balancing — The Ship-Fitting Problem
Why "make it better" is not a balance patch, and how DPS-per-ISK and effective-hitpoints-per-ISK turn a vibe into a number you can compare.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Week 6: Skill- and Time-Gating as Economic Design
Why "you have to wait" and "you have to grind" are pricing mechanisms, not just pacing decisions — and what happens when a real-money option lets players buy their way past them.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Week 7: Logistics and Frontier Economics
Why the most valuable resources in a game are often the ones furthest from safety, and why moving goods there is itself part of the economy.
Week 7 · 12 April 2027
Week 8: Market Manipulation and Real Scandals
The Guiding Hand Social Club heist, and what a decades-old player scandal still teaches about the difference between a bug and a working system.
Week 8 · 19 April 2027
Week 9: Cross-Game Comparative Economics
Putting EVE Online, World of Warcraft and RuneScape's markets side by side — same underlying problem, three genuinely different mechanical answers.
Week 9 · 26 April 2027
Week 10: Agent-Based Economic Modeling
Guest lecture — thousands of simple trading agents, none of them smart, still manage to reproduce the bubbles and crashes a real market produces.
Week 10 · 3 May 2027
Week 11: Mechanism Design and Game Theory Crossover
Auction theory shows up in every market this course has studied — this is the week we name it properly and ask what it would mean to design one on purpose.
Week 11 · 10 May 2027
Week 12: Capstone Studio — The Intervention Clinic
The last lecture is a clinic, not new material — bring your in-progress Economic Intervention Report and get it stress-tested before it's due.
Week 12 · 17 May 2027