What happens when a video game economy gets hyperinflation? In Old School RuneScape, gold farmers, bots and a 2007-era market with no central bank made the Grand Exchange a real-life economics lab. Shafquat talks to Planet Money about what the data showed.
Shafquat built a dataset of Old School RuneScape item prices and used it to show how the game's economy inflated, who was gaming the system, and why a 2001 MMO is a surprisingly good classroom for monetary policy. Planet Money called. This is the clip.
| Publisher: | NPR Planet Money |
| Genre: | Multiplayer, Economics, MMORPG |
| Players: | 1 (you) + hundreds of thousands of bots |
| Also by this player: | the blog, attribution visualized, a free data audit |