Virtual economy monitoring and adjustment in 3D virtual world

Abstract

With the virtual ecosystems development of 3D virtual worlds and MMORPGs, such as Second Life, World of Warcraft, virtual economy monitoring and adjustment becomes an important issue to the economic benefits of virtual world operators and all the residents. A framework and series of methods of virtual economy monitoring and adjustment are proposed for a try to solve the issue. An extensible calculation module of economic indicators is designed to support the definition, calculation and visualization of normal and abnormal economic indicators with specific calculation methods that are different from real ones. Meanwhile, an extensible macro-economy adjustment module is also proposed to facilitate virtual world operators to control virtual macro-economy, such as, inflation control by controlling money supply in virtual currency exchange. To verify the feasibility of proposed methods, a prototype is built based on a web application platform and a 3D demonstration platform.