more stuff on virtual economies / societies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood
http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Black_Sunday

The first article discusses the accidental release of a deadly plague into World of Warcraft, which rapidly wiped out whole cities, leading many players to avoid populated areas and groups of players. (An accidentally released plague!!!). Eventually, Blizzard fixed the problem by cutting the plague off at the source - the boss that infected players was changed to cast a different spell.

The second article discusses a sudden market failure in the game Kingdom of Loathing. Essentially, an game glitch dumped trillions of units of currency into the game; a simultaneous glitch allowed players to duplicate all their items easily. The basic equivalent in the real world would be everyobdy finding out that they could have as much money and as many things as they wanted. This crashed the market. What is interesting is the strategy used to combat these events: rather than simply resetting things to an earlier, backed-up state, the game creator found ways to suck currency out of the economy - basically by inventing useless shit to buy at gigantic prices (also some useful stuff was sold).

These two examples illustate contrasting approaches to sudden failures. Blizzard essentially used "the hand of God" - they reached in and removed the plague from the game. The makers of KoL, on the other hand, used (for the most part) in-narrative devices. They worked within the rules of the game in order to stabilize the economy.

Consider the possibility that governments could also try for the hand-of-God approach to their economies. The United States could abolish the dollar, if it wanted, and issue ten thousand "new dollars" to every citizen of the United States. Consider the market adjustments and fluctuations that would result in!

Of course, we could hardly stop other nations from trading in USD's. And perhaps individuals could still negotiate to use the old currency. What is interesting is that the same problem could occur in a virtual economy - so long as people had records of their finances, and were willing to set up an economy parallel to the "official" one.