從日常生活商品建立經濟指標-以虛擬世界為例

Developing an Economic Indicator from Daily Commodities for the Virtual World

許家霖(Chia-Lin Hsu)

指導教授 ： 孫春在

國立交通大學/資訊學院/資訊科學與工程研究所/碩士(2015年)

https://doi.org/10.6842/NCTU.2015.00939

摘要

近年來「有感」的概念不斷被提及，如政府希望落實的「有感施政」以及「有感經濟」等等。我們常常可以看到政府公布了一些經濟指標數據，如平均薪資提高、就業環境變好等等，但也時常可以見到民眾表示這些數據與他們的實際感受不相符的情況。民眾無法認同指標的情形可能起因於指標本身的建立是站在國家管理的角度，或是社會存在階級差異等等。因此，指標的建立若是能以一般民眾的觀點出發，由日常生活中就會接觸到的事物來建立一套大家都能輕易了解的經濟指標，則對一般大眾而言，指標顯示的結果可能比較會有「有感」的感覺。故本研究以虛擬世界為平台，探討能否在虛擬世界中找出某些商品，它們在市場上的數量會隨著虛擬經濟體的經濟狀況變化而變動，玩家也就能在虛擬世界中透過觀察這些商品在市場上的數量變化，了解所處經濟體當前的經濟狀況，我們將擁有這樣特質的商品稱為「指標商品」，並且討論這樣的指標除了能顯示經濟狀況外，還能讓我們看到玩家哪些特殊的消費行為與偏好。
　　本研究以《魔獸世界》為研究平台，發現到了在《魔獸世界》的各經濟體中都能夠找到其數量變動能夠反應經濟狀況的指標商品，但各經濟體的指標商品並不存在交集。而《魔獸世界》的指標商品在類型上以裝甲類型為大宗，玩家購買這些裝甲類型指標商品的目的是以「分解」與「塑形」為主。另外，本研究也發現到了不同遊戲型態的伺服器，其指標商品的組成也會有所不同。

關鍵字

虛擬世界 ； 虛擬經濟 ； 經濟指標

並列摘要

The word ‘sensible’ has been mentioned a lot these days. For example, the government is trying to enforce policies that are “sensible” to people. Despite of their effort, we can still frequently see news saying that people are disagreed with the economic indicators government published. Such phenomenon occurs probably due to the fact that economic indicators are developed from the perspective of the government, which mainly focus on macroeconomics and country management. If we develop a new economic indicator with daily commodities, we might reduce the incidence of people’s disagreement with the economic indicators. In this thesis, we take virtual world as a platform to aid out study. We aim to find merchandise whose market supply are highly correlated with the virtual economy. With these kind of merchandise, players in the virtual world can easily understand the virtual economy situation by just reading the market supply of these merchandise. We call merchandise with such property the “economic indicator merchandise”. We will discuss what features do these merchandise have in common, and what player behavior can be seen from these merchandise.
The popular MMORPG “World of Warcraft” is chosen as our virtual world. The findings show that we can find economy indicator merchandise in each virtual economy, and despite that properties in different realms are so alike, neither two of these realms have the same economy indicator merchandise. The economic indicator merchandise from the “Armor” category has the largest number of quantity among all categories, and players buy these economic indicator merchandise mainly for “disenchanting” and “transmogrification”. We also find that different types of realms might have influence on the composition of economic indicator merchandise.

並列關鍵字

Virtual World ； Virtual Economies ； Economic Indicator

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