EverQuest - Edward Castronova and the Platinum Piece

We've heard of titles saying "Play Counter

Strike for hard Cash," or "Play games and win cash prizes," while there are even more attractive titles allowing you to win cash, such as Project Entropia, where you can directly convert virtual money earned within the game, into real money. Today, we'll talk about a man who discovered "that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent US-higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira."

I took the liberty of selecting some of the paragraphs I thought were significant:

"Edward Castronova had hit bottom. Three years ago, the thirty-eight-year-old economist was, by his own account, an academic failure [...] To fill his evenings, Castronova did what he'd always done: he played video games.[...] Then he noticed something curious: EverQuest had its own economy, a bustling trade in virtual goods. Players generate goods as they play, often by killing creatures for their treasure and trading it.

[...]As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock what he was looking at. It was a form of currency trading. Each item had a value in virtual "platinum pieces"; when it was sold on eBay, someone was paying cold, hard American cash for it. That meant the platinum piece was worth something in real currency. EverQuest's economy actually had real-world value.

He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in US dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent US-higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. [...] Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game-the equivalent of $3.42 (US) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled.

Then he performed one final analysis: the Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia.

Castronova sat back in his chair in his cramped home office and the weird enormity of his findings dawned on him. Many economists define their careers by studying a country. He had discovered one."

Nice story what can I say? Wait a minute. Does this mean that playing a game long enough, one eventually discovers a country?