A second, third world?

A few months back I wrote an article responding to people who were comparing the economy of SecondLife to that of developing countries like Burundi, Liberia, DRC and Zimbabwe. My argument was that there is simply no scarcity in a virtual world, making any comparison null and void. However, because SecondLife (and games like it) are completely controlled environments, if one wanted, they could introduce artificial scarcity, rules, governments etc. Has anyone experimented with a virtual ‘model’ of a developing country? Or perhaps even a whole continent like Africa?

That’s TED Fellow and Appfrica CEO Jonathan Gosier in a new post about the potential to use a virtual world like SecondLife to study development.