January 2012
3 posts
Designing Virtual Currency by Breaking (Almost) Every Rule in the Economics Textbook: the abstract of my upcoming Game Developers Conference lecture is online.
New job! I am starting as a researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science in professor Harry Barkema’s team. Formally my initial affiliation is Visiting Fellow at the LSE Asia Research Centre.
Speaking at the Desucon Frostbite Japanese pop culture event in Finland about digital manga consumption. My previous talk on the topic is now on YouTube (in Finnish).
December 2011
3 posts
My home page is now available in English, Finnish and Japanese, thanks to Transfluent. Let me know if you would like these updates to be translated, too. Happy holidays!
My lecture “Designing Successful Virtual Currency by Breaking (Almost) Every Rule in the Economics Textbook” was accepted to Game Developers Conference (GDC), 5-9 March 2012
A Digital Media Approach to Islamic Marketing: a paper I co-authored with the team behind Muxlim.com published in the Handbook of Islamic Marketing
November 2011
1 post
Google Scholar has a cool new citation metrics tool. According to my profile, I have a total of 280 citations (includes self-cites), my h-index is 10, and my i10-index is likewise 10.
October 2011
5 posts
Real-Time Crowd Computing Using Social Media: presenting a poster at CrowdConf 2011 in San Francisco on Wednesday (with Yefeng Liu et al.)
Designing Motivation Using Persuasive Ambient Mirrors, a synthesis of my five-year collaboration with Tatsuo Nakajima, to be published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.
Speaking at the DesuTalks Japanese pop culture seminar in Helsinki about the digital distribution of manga contents in Japan and overseas (in Finnish)
Speaking at a panel on online youth work at the opening seminar of the Finnish national online youth work development centre today (in Finnish, will be streamed online)
Just for fun: the New Yorker magazine reveals that I am, in fact, not Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of the crypto-currency Bitcoin.
September 2011
2 posts
Keynote presentation on Virtual economies in social media: the materialistic aspect of digital spaces at the Next Generation Information Technology Workshop, Waseda University, Tokyo
August 2011
0 posts
Prosocial behaviour in avatar-mediated interaction: the influence of character gender on material versus emotional help-giving - new article co-authored with colleagues at University of Tokyo.
June 2011
4 posts
Short essay titled Digital Labor in Online Games published in New Paradigms for Digital Games: The Finnish Perspective, University of Tampere, pp. 87-89.
Technology in Society publishes Identification With Online And Offline Communities: Understanding ICT Disparities In Finland, an article co-authored with colleagues at the University of Turku.
Drawing on Mobile Crowds via Social Media: article co-authored with Yefeng Liu et al. accepted for publication in the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems journal.
The introductory part of my 2009 thesis Virtual Consumption is now online as an html version.
May 2011
3 posts
Collecting conversations: three approaches to obtaining user‐to‐user communications data from virtual environments. Co-authored methodology paper published in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.
I have been awarded the title of Docent in Economic Sociology by the University of Turku, Faculty of Social Sciences - an academic title for life often translated as Adjunct Professor.
Engaging Social Medias: Case Mobile Crowdsourcing. Workshop paper presented at 20th International World Wide Web Conference. Co-authored with Yefeng Liu et al.
April 2011
2 posts
Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy in the media: Washington Post, The Economist, BBC News, France 24, NHK World, Ars Technica. Communications of the ACM reported on my earlier work.
World Bank publishes Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy: my report on game labor, microwork, and real-money trade of social media votes (pdf, blog post, presentation slides)
March 2011
3 posts
Speaking about virtual economies and microwork at the Financial & Private Sector Development Forum, World Bank Headquarters, Washington DC, April 7 at 10:30-12:00 (InfoDev workshop)
The Stoic Male: How Avatar Gender Affects Help-Seeking Behaviour in an Online Game. Research based on unique data from a Japanese MMO. Article to be published in Games & Culture.
Earthquake: I and my family and coworkers in Tokyo are safe, thanks to those who expressed concern. North-East Japan is devastated - you can help by donating via Red Cross
February 2011
1 post
My new homepage is online, featuring papers, presentations and videos organized by thematical area. Have a peek at http://vili.lehdonvirta.com
January 2011
1 post
€30 million worth of industrial grade virtual goods reported stolen. Are carbon credits any different from World of Warcraft gold? (blog article at VERN)
December 2010
1 post
Crowdsourcing Based Mobile Image Translation. First publication from my new collaborative project with Waseda University (paper, slides).
November 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Presenting about game labour and microwork at the ICTD 2010 conference in London on 13 December. These are preliminary results from a project I am conducting for the World Bank’s InfoDev programme about the developmental potential of the “virtual economy”.
A New Frontier in Digital Content Policy: Case Studies in the Regulation of Virtual Goods and Artificial Scarcity - paper describing Finnish, Dutch and Korean virtual goods court cases published in the journal Policy & Internet
October 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Online spaces have material culture: Goodbye to digital post-materialism and hello to virtual consumption published in the journal Media, Culture & Society
1 tag
(in Finnish) Pelimekaniikat osana ansaintalogiikkaa – Miten pelisuunnittelulla luodaan kysyntää. Business and gamification themed article published in the Finnish Yearbook of Game Studies.
September 2010
1 post
1 tag
New Frontier in Digital Content Policy: Case Studies in Virtual Goods Regulation - presenting a paper at the Internet, Politics & Policy conference in Oxford, UK on 17 Sep
August 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Young people identify with an online community almost as strongly as with their own family. Key finding in my new paper: How do young people identify with online and offline peer groups? A comparison between UK, Spain and Japan.
1 tag
New paper: Activity-Based Micropricing: Realizing Sustainable Behavior Changes through Economic Incentives
July 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Western devs enter Japanese social game market, Japanese enter Facebook: blog post at VERN
1 tag
Getting paid to party: what is the difference between work and play? - guest blogged for Microtask
1 tag
Presenting at the XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology in Gothenburg, Sweden on 16 Jul
June 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Wall Street Journal reports on our virtual economy research collaboration with EVE Online (CCP Games)
2 tags
Virtual economy research project AVEA’s Final Report released
2 tags
Some work is born digital: from gold farmers to game masters - guest blog for Microtask
May 2010
4 posts
1 tag
HIIT is organising a Seminar on Research in Virtual Economies in Helsinki on June 8
2 tags
Papers Virtual Consumerism: Case Habbo and Virtual Item Purchase Drivers are back online as original pdfs
1 tag
Peer-reviewed version of my 2008 essay Virtual Worlds Don’t Exist published in the Game Studies journal
2 tags
See you at the The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing in Helsinki on 17-20 May!
April 2010
3 posts
Online spaces have material culture: goodbye to digital post-materialism and hello to virtual consumption - short review article accepted to Media, Culture & Society
2 tags
Speaking about impact of virtual economies at Tweakfest in Zürich on Apr 23
2 tags
VCON Dev-onomics panel with Lehdonvirta, EyjoG, Castronova now on YouTube
March 2010
5 posts
1 tag
I penned a short essay about The Ethics of Social Games and Virtual Goods: a Bigger Picture