Estimating the Aggregate Production of Azeroth

Whitney Fish

Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Coe, Richard

Keywords

GDP, Virtual Worlds, Gaming, World of Warcraft, Azeroth, Production

Area of Concentration

Economics

Abstract

Given the growing prominence of virtual worlds in everyday life, it is reasonable to assume that social scientists will want to study the complex interactions that occur there. At the time of this thesis's completion there were more people in the United States playing popular massively-multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft than there were US farmers. The goal of this thesis was to attempt to estimate the production going on inside Azeroth, the virtual world that World of Warcraft is set in. To do this, I examined questions such as what counts as production inside a virtual world? What does GDP measure? What are the goals of people in the virtual world and what increases their satisfaction with the virtual experience? Using a method developed by economist Edward Castronova, I made my own estimations about the GNP of Azeroth and examined the ways that method could be flawed or potentially improved.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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