My good friend Lars Doucet published an article today on Game Developer (previously Gamasutra) in which he goes into great detail about how economic theories have consistently and predictably played out in multiplayer games (EVE Online, Final Fantasy XIV, Ultima Online, etc.). It's long, well-researched, and quite insightful about parallels between physical and digital worlds.
Fantastic article! These simplified economies do follow similar constraints as real economies. A popular argument is that we are not all homo economicus... but video game players are real humans, not NPCs, and yet they reproduce most of the same classical economic issues that were predicted from first principles by philosophers such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Henry George.
