In the early 2010s, before your stint in the Greek government, you worked as economist-in-residence for Valve, a prominent gaming company. In what ways were your skills as an economics expert in game theory useful for dissecting the economics of virtual worlds? And, in turn, what kinds of insights, if any, on the inner workings of the real economy did you gain through that experience?
Ten years ago, the metaverse was already up and running within gaming communities. Valve’s games had already spawned economies so large that Valve was both excited and spooked. Some digital assets that had previously been distributed for free (via the game’s drops) began to trade for tens of thousands of dollars on eBay, well before anyone had thought of NFTs.
What if the prices of these spontaneously lucrative items and activities were to crash? That was what kept the people at Valve awake at night. You can see this from the email with which I was approached: ‘I have been following your blog for a while… Here at my company we were discussing an issue of linking economies in two virtual environments (creating a shared currency), and wrestling with some of the thornier problems of balance of payments, when it occurred to me “this is Germany and Greece”, a thought that wouldn’t have occurred to me without having followed your blog’.
My reasons for getting involved were many. One was the prospect of studying an economy as an omniscient researcher: Since I would have access to the full data set in real time, I did not need statistics! Another was the lure of playing ‘god’; i.e. being able to do with these digital economies things that no economist can do in the ‘real’ world, e.g. alter
— source yanisvaroufakis.eu | Yanis Varoufakis | 23/04/2022