CRV's Susan Wu has started an interesting discussion at her blog, based on a chat she recently had with Stanford Language and Information Program Director Byron Reeves. She says he's working with Seriosity (what a serious name!) to develop a platform to allow companies to create virtual economies by assigning currency values to different types of interaction and communication.

As Wu points out, the work Reeves is doing raises some interesting questions on how virtual currencies drive behavior and group dynamics. The questions she asks are sharp and pretty spot on:

- What does it do to a [company’s] culture if all interaction can be boiled down to some quantitative representation?

- Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?

- And, has anyone done any studies measuring what type of correlation exists between the rate of change of a [group/country’s] economic growth and the rate of change of its language? I guess I’m curious if various Chinese dialects are changing more quickly than languages in more static socioeconomic conditions. I feel this must be true to some extent, but I wonder to what degree.

I wonder, too! Particularly as virtual goods and currency fast become a mainstay of both online gaming and social communities, I believe Mr. Reeves is right on that successful worlds and games will need to do some brainstorming to pinpoint exactly what communities invest with abstract value, so they can explore how best to valuate it materially. We've seen how successful "special edition"-type goods can be in games, how Facebook gets people to spend real money for online badges of affection that friends can send each other, and we've talked to Doppelganger about a world driven primarily by "Respekt". I agree with Susan that we may soon see more variant, more specific definitions of "virtual economy" in a community-focused climate.