On April 27, the solar system Jita was destroyed by a fleet of ships that fired on anything attempting to travel through the region. All traffic in the solar system, a major trading area for minerals and other materials, had been brought to a halt. This was not the start of a science-fiction film but the actions of gamers within Eve Online, a game in which players can take part in mining, manufacturing, trading and even piracy.

CCP, the Icelandic company behind the game, allowed the destruction to happen. “They are really driving the economic engine of Eve Online bec-ause all these ships had to be built from harvested resources,” explains Eyjólfur Gudmundsson, the gaming company’s lead economist. “War is consumption in Eve Online .”

Mr Gudmundsson, a former dean of the business and science faculty at the University of Akureyri in Iceland, was one of the first economists hired by a gaming company to bring real-world expertise to video games, as companies realised that the trading systems within their games were functioning as miniature economies.