The Games Economists Play

It is a source of confusion that economists for decades have worked on ‘game theory’ while studying economic behaviour. However, while not focused on games in the recreational sense this perspective does provide a highly meticulous complementary framework for the understanding of computer game structure and player behaviour. This article attempts to extract useful analytic concepts and insights from economic game theory and to give suggestions for how these might be put to concrete use in the study of computer games. A non-technical introduction is given followed by a casestudy and finally ideas for future research are presented.