Starship salvation: Icelandic currency in space.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Citings - EVE Online

THESE ARE STRANGE times for Iceland, where the economy, in the words of Scribbles and Lies" blogger Dan Curtis Johnson, "has collapsed so thoroughly that at this point, its only economically viable export may very well be an Internet spaceship game." Johnson argues that the in-game currency of a multiplayer online role-playing phenomenon called EVE Online, owned and operated by the Icelandic company CCP Games, "is for all intents and purposes a more real and valid and valuable currency than the actual country's actual money."

Iceland, a resource-poor island where high-risk banking and currency speculation previously flourished, is recovering more quickly than expected from the devastation of the 2008 financial crash. But its future looked far more bleak on October I o last year, when the country was forced to withdraw entirely from the world currency markets, its krona utterly devalued. At the time, Iceland's debt was approximately nine times what the entire economy was capable of producing in a year.

By contrast, the economy of EVE Online, which bills itself as the world's largest game universe, is thriving. Hundreds of thousands of players, each piloting his own virtual spaceship...