Gamification is a powerful tool in education. Applying it in the new and exciting domain of virtual reality has the potential to improve the reputation of the “dismal science” and also become a powerful teaching and learning environment.
This new research initiative combines the real life experience of virtual reality with the social science and application of economics. The proposed platform will be an interactive online virtual reality game, where players are randomly given scenarios of economic shocks and fluctuations based on real life historical data. Players will be asked to act on these utilizing monetary and/or fiscal policies. They will have access to datasets and a library of economic models that they will need to chose from.
As players score points, they will collect badges, which will unlock new datasets, advanced models and access to economic advisors, who have accumulated specialized knowledge in their fields (such as behavioral economics, market design or industrial organization). Success will require economic knowledge, intuition, as well as craftsmanship and experience.
In the interactive mode, players will be allowed to interact with each other and build “teams” to tackle policy recommendations together. The virtual reality domain will showcase the outcome of the economic policy implementations, in the form of street riots, social uproar or electoral victory or a boom period.
The multidimensionality of the virtual reality environment will also allow the players to virtually walk into the data and weed out the outliers and/or visually detect and fix some common econometric forecasting problems such as heteroscedasticy and multicollinearily.
This platform will be designed to train the next generation of economists, using gamification, as well as big data techniques, economic theory, a library of models and real life scenarios enriched with real life data. It will be entertaining, as well as educational. Think about monopoly on steroids in virtual reality.