[ecrea] streaming of lecture by Edward Castronova

Invitation to live streaming of Guest Lecture by Edward Castronova
(Associate Professor, Department of Telecommunications, Indiana
University)

You can watch the lecture via the live streaming on the blog of the
Virtual Worlds Research Group
http://worlds.ruc.dk 

 
Associate Professor Edward Castronova (author of Synthetic Worlds and
Exodus to the Virtual World) is giving an Open Guest Lecture entitled On
Magic and Money: The Growing Economic Importance of Virtual Goods at
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, Room PH408, CBS Porcelænshaven,
Frederiksberg, Denmark on 4 June 2010, 14.00-16.00. If you can attend,
please register for the lecture and an email to
(dixi /at/ ruc.dk) (or phone +45 4674 3813) 

Abstract. The lecture will explore how trade in virtual goods has
exploded since 2005. The distinction between the real and virtual
economies has been becoming more and more blurred in the course of the
last decade, and the boundary is increasingly hard to find. Are gold
pieces in online games real money? If you buy virtual flowers for
someone’s Facebook page, is it a real gift? The lecture will explore
these questions at two levels. First, the social: Why has the sale of
virtual goods gone up so rapidly? What are the markets saying? Secondly,
the psychological: Why do people treat virtual items like real items? The
lecture concludes with predictions about virtual business, virtual work,
and the real profits to be earned from both over the next decade.

 

Programme

14.00 – 14.10 Welcome by Professor Flemming Poulfelt, Copenhagen Business
School

14.10 – 15.50 ON MAGIC AND MONEY by Associate Professor Edward
Castronova, Indiana   

                      
University

15.50 – 16.00 Closing remarks by Professor Flemming Poulfelt, Copenhagen
Business School

                      
Following the lecture there will be an opportunity to continue the
conversation and   

                       
enjoy a glass of wine.

 

Edward Castronova, PhD in Economics and Associate Professor of
Telecommunications, Indiana University is an expert on the economies of
large-scale online games. He has numerous publications on the topic,
including Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games
(University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Exodus to the Virtual World
(Palgrave, 2007). Synthetic worlds are online environments where millions
of users share a persistent, fabricated geographic space at the same
time. These places, billed and sold as games and/or social platforms,
actually seem to be offering something more than mere entertainment. They
act as a fantastical alternative to ordinary life, and as such they pose
a significant challenge to business-as-usual in ordinary society:
markets, public policy, politics, law, romance. In the area of economics,
one pressing issue involves the extent to which people are paying real
money to buy items for their game characters, thus blurring the
distinction between the game economy and the real one. For further
information, see

http://mypage.iu.edu/~castro/ and
http://terranova.blogs.com/.