This space-themed MMO, where players pilot space ships for combat, commerce and industry also happens to be one of the few MMOs that grew subscribers during the first two years of WoW. The game recently over 200,000 active subscribers and just Monday reached a new concurrency record of 35,000 players online at once. EVE's ISK , which happens to have the same name as the Icelandic Krona currency code (ISK), may soon surpass the Krona in the number people it serves--since the entire population of Iceland numbers around 300,000.

EVE is more of a sandbox-style game than an online RPG. Much of the compelling experience comes from the politics between players, the corporations they join and large alliances of those corporations. The largest of these, GoonSwarm, consists currently of 38 member corporations and 4618 players, according to EVE-Online.com. Finance is critical to success as corporations must fit their fleets to be competitive. In EVE, when your 1.8 billion ISK dreadnaught is destroyed, it's gone for good, and the equipment it was fitted with (usually worth much more than the ship itself) also. Having an extra few ships on hand to hop into after this happens takes some serious coin.

About 1.5 trillion ISK change hands every day in the EVE universe. It makes sense that that an economist could have a lot of fun studying the EVE economy. To that end, CCP hired Guðmundsson, formerly Dean of the Faculty of Business and Science at the University of Akureyri, Iceland. But what does having an economist around mean to the players? VE3D sat down with Dr. Eyjo at Austin Game Developers Conference last week to find out.