The In-Game Economics of Ultima Online
TL;DR — The 1999 GDC talk that first analysed a virtual world as a real economy with real inflation.
⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. Explicitly free / author-released / CC.
Zachary Booth Simpson, Origin Research Fellow, presented at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference, 7 April 1999.
The first serious economic analysis of a massively multiplayer world: money supply, faucets and sinks, inflation, the labour market in resource gathering, and what happens when a designer accidentally runs a central bank.
Foundational. Everything since — Castronova’s work, EVE’s economists, in-game inflation as a live design problem — descends from this talk. A primary document at the moment virtual economies were first recognised as economies.
Where this came from
23 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.