Thursday, July 5, 2012

Video Games in the Classroom: Eve Online

One thing that will always be tied to how energy is used in the world is economics. Money, and where it goes, is often the single most important variable determining whether an idea sinks or floats. But economics as a concept is sometimes very difficult to understand as an outside observer. Unless a student has experience with an allowance or personal money, there is very little he or she can experience in their own life that would help with the complexities of economics. That is where video games come in.

Eve Online is a computer game where a player is given a ship and allowed to do as they please. They can spend time mining ore, chasing pirates, exploring the galaxy, or destroying each other's ships. While this may not sound much different from any other space game, what makes it interesting is the player controlled free market economy within the virtual universe. Everything, from the most basic mineral ore to the most elaborate space freighter, can be bought and sold. (If you were to watch some people play the game, you would assume they were simply using the stock market, given all the graphs on the screen.)  And when I say free market, I mean that players are not only able to lie, steal, and cheat their way to the top, they are encouraged to do so, since there is no regulatory body to punish them.

The truly free market of Eve Online allows players to experience many key economic concepts first hand. Buy low, sell high. Demand in often localized and where you sell is very important. Large corporations (which are player formed) can corner markets and dictate how the price of a commodity moves. If a deal is too good to be true, it probably is (there are stories of Madoff scale Ponzi schemes and mind-boggling tales of corporate espionage).  If students were to read about all these concepts, they would have more trouble retaining the information as opposed to if they were personally invested in how well their space mining operation was doing.

These concepts are important in our education of energy topics, mainly because many of the technologies today are not penetrating the market due to high costs. The reason many US solar companies are going bankrupt has a lot to do with China undercutting prices and flooding the market with their own cells. Students who understand the economics of green energy as well as the technologies behind them will be much better prepared for the future when they become the ones who are making the decisions.

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