September 16th, 2007
As regular readers know, we’ve been keeping track of various business/economic-related issues via our Avatarnomics series of posts. Given our interest in this young area of research, we were very happy to see – and welcome – another source on such matters at Professor Robert Bloomfield’s Metanomics site & blog.  As he notes:
“Metanomics†refers to the study of the business and policy aspects of the “metaverse†of virtual worlds. Metanomics can focus on issues arising within virtual worlds, such as how developers manage the economy of a game world (like World of Warcraft), or how residents of virtual worlds manage and regulate business. Metanomics also includes the study of how real-world businesses can use virtual worlds as part of their strategy, and how real-world law and regulation might apply to virtual-world activities. Finally, metanomics includes the use of virtual worlds as laboratories in which to study real-world business or policy issues.
Metanomics can take an “immersionist,” “augmentationist,” or “experimentalist” perspective. Immersionist metanomics attempts to understand business and policy issues from entirely within the virtual world in question, with little reference to the outside world. Augmentationist metanomics views the metaverse as simple an addition (augmentation) to the real world, and examines how its appearance affects business practice and regulatory policy. Experimentalist metanomics uses the metaverse as a laboratory in which to conduct controlled experiments that can tell us something new about the real world (such as eliminating capital gains taxes actually does increase investment and productivity) .”
We look forward to reading and studying this site’s analyses and insight as we continue to build our own understanding of Avatarnomics.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
