Edward Castronova
Edward Castronova is an American Professor of Telecommunications and Cognitive Science at Indiana University.
Education and Career
Castronova attended Georgetown University where he graduated with a BS in International Affairs in 1985. Following his undergraduate degree, he studied postwar reconstruction and social policy in Germany. Castronova then earned a PhD in Economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1991.
Castronova began his carrer as an Assistant, and later Associate, Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of Rochester. He was then an Associate Professor of Economics at at California State University before accepting his current position as both Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the department of Telecommunications and Cognitive Science at Indiana University.
At Indiana University, Castronova teaches courses on the design of games, the gaming industry, and the management of virtual societies [1]. Castronova was somewhat of a failed economist. After playing EverQuest, an online role-playing game with over 400,000 users, he saw value in how and why people played online games. Users take advantage of an alternate reality to provide themselves with a sense of worth that might not be possible for them in real life. The muti-million dollar industry creates an "economy" because it meets peoples needs and the product can, and must, adapt to be successful when millions of users leave.
Books
- Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Games Will Change Reality
- Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Gaming
- The Welfare Cost of Income Uncertainty
