SLACTIONS 2009
Research conference in the Second Life® world - Life, imagination, and work using metaverse platforms

September 24-26, 2009

http://www.slactions.org

CALL FOR PAPERS

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new and improved Virtual Economy Research Network (VERN): a communication hub for scholars, students and developers interested in virtual goods, currencies and economies. The new site features:

Reporting in from Tampere, Finland. I am here at Mindtrek, or should I say, I am ON a Mindtrek. Mindtrek is an annual mediaweek with variety of events and competitions for new innovations and products. Since last year they have also had an academic conference beside all the other wide ranging activities. I also participated in Mindtrek in 2000, which was on the primetime of the dot-com bubble. This year the themes are ranging from games to social media and to ubiquitous computing. Anyway, today I'm here in my original hometown taking part to the academic track on games.

This track consists of three main themes: 1) creativity engagement and algorithms in games 2) games in education, learning and health care, and 3) policies in game industry. All of these are intriguing topics, but what I'm especially interested in is the final presentation/paper about "Revenue Model Innovation in the Chinese Online Market" by Jessie Qun Ren and Philip Hardwick.

UPDATE: The webcast videos & seminar presentation slides are now available. See the end of this post.

The Monday, 2nd June seminar on quantitative research in virtual economies will be available as a webcast. We'll also make the videos available afterwards. The programme is available here. Note that we're starting 9:45 AM Finnish time, which is GMT + 3 during the summer. Visit this site to figure out the correct time.

Despite advances in mediated presence, for many purposes there still is no substitute to being there in person. Joost van Dreunen has put together a long list of virtual world related conferences and events in meatspace.

UPDATE: seminar programme details, including the presentation topics, available below.

On Monday, 2nd June, the AVEA project at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) organizes an open research seminar on so-called virtual economies.

In the seminar we focus on the following question: "Why should economists and social scientists be interested in virtual economies?" Through discussion and presentations by academic researchers and industry representatives, we investigate the potential of conducting quantitative research on virtual economies that is of interest to mainstream, "serious" researchers.

Savvas Papagiannidis of Newcastle University would like to remind us that the deadline for the virtual worlds special issue of Electronic Commerce Research, a Springer journal, has been extended to 31 May 2008. The special issue call can be found here. I blogged about the original call here.

Digital Game Research Association DiGRA is the main global organisation for ludologists and other scholars studying digital games. Last September I attended the DiGRA 2007: Situated Play conference in Tokyo. It was a surprisingly large and well-organised conference, and featured over a hundred paper presentations on a very diverse set of topics, including some related to virtual economies.

The fourth EVE Fanfest, an event giving the EVE Online players an opportunity to meet each other and the game developers, was held in Reykjavik 1. - 3. November. There were two interesting revelations in the event, which also sparked discussion in panels and roundtables, a part of which I’ll try to summarize here. The first one had to with a soon-to-be-published white paper on the EVE player democracy, and why it actually might not be wise to call it democracy after all. The second was about the soon-to-be-published EVE Online Quarterly Economics Newsletter, Vol.1, No.1.

I am late in relaying this, but Electronic Commerce Research and Journal of Electronic Commerce Research are both planning a special issue on virtual worlds. The CFPs (attached below) sent to the VERN mailing list are so similar that at first glance I thought it was the same journal. JECR's deadline is this Thursday already, but you might consider submitting a modified conference paper. ECR's deadline is December 1st. Both issues should come out in August 2008.