Virtual Worlds by Professor Castronova

A lecture about Professor Castronova's 2001 Paper "On Virtual Worlds." The paper presents economic data from a video game world, showing that the world of a video game is not that much less real than the outside world. This talk summarizes the results of the paper and tells stories about where it came from and how it has been received. The paper also made some predictions: some that were really wrong but others that still look pretty good .