Something about the green/orange color scheme makes the cover of “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” very appealing to me. More importantly, I like economics because it attempts to describe the behavior of rational people and helps to make jumbles of data meaningful.

Freakonomics doesn’t have anything to do with games per se, but does delve into a few tangentially related themes:

* Big discussion on the drop in crime and how it is due to the increase in legalized abortion. Damn, there goes our theory that video games have pacified the nation ;)

* Brief coverage of the “rat race” and why folks are so willing to work so hard (or take so much flack) at the start of their careers, only to give up down the road. Interestingly, this was mainly in the context of street gang culture. The main premise is that you have hopes of making it big, making it to the top, etc, and are willing to put in the effort only to later realize there’s just no way you’ll be one of the few to make the top slot. Could the heavy burnout/dropout in the game dev workforce be less of a physical thing and more of a realization that, after 5+ years of grinding, you’re never actually going to get the chance to make the game you want to or get paid to be the hancho designer?

* Some discussion on how public/political reaction to issues relates to the following equation “risk = hazard + outrage”, noting that when hazard is low and outrage is high, people overreact (via regulation, etc). Hmm, where do we see this happening in games?

Anyway, the book is full of interesting and freaky tidbits.

Would be fun to see similar economic principles and study applied to the game industry on stuff like piracy, player demographics, the violence debate, lack of innovation, etc, etc, etc… Ted’s MMO work is an early indication of the potential.