In the first quarter of this year, while Chinese demand for copper, aluminum and nickel helped the London Metals Exchange’s index of prices rise to a 4% gain, the minerals price index for EVE went in the opposite direction, dropping by 1.8% over the same period.

CCP Gaming A screenshot from EVE.

The deflationary trend in EVE was led by sharp declines in high-end metals Zydrine and Megacyte, mostly explained by a positive supply shock. A hitherto inaccessible asteroid belt was opened up in null security space, which created an important new source for the two metals and counteracted the upward effect of stronger demand from spaceship builders.

These observations and more are laid out in the latest quarterly report on economic activity in EVE by Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, chief economist for Reykjavik, Iceland-based CCP Gaming, the company that designed, created and now manages EVE.

Unlike the real, physical world upon which things like the LME metal price index are based, EVE is an imaginary place set 20,000 years into the future in a galaxy known as New Eden. There, imaginary citizens of five different imaginary empires fight imaginary wars in a bid for imaginary domination over each other. And yet it is a world controlled and influenced by the interactions of real people: the 350,000 real world subscribers to EVE Online — its “capsuleers,” as the spaceship-piloting gamers are known in their virtual existence.

These people’s actions, economists say, offer a treasure trove of information to study and analyze, primarily because each one of their decisions leaves a trail, creating a vast database that economists can only dream of in the real world. In effect, it creates a giant laboratory within which to study human behavior, dramatically scaling up the kind of classroom-based experimental economics that were pioneered by 2002 Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith.

Mr. Gudmundsson earned his PhD studying the economics of fisheries, producing a dissertation that required the laborious compilation of meteorological data from printed historical records. But after developing an interest in experimental economics following a visit to Iceland by Mr. Smith, he came to see rich academic potential in online games and so jumped at a chance to join CCP when the job came up two years ago.

“I had been struggling, spending too many hours, just trying to figure out how to get data,” he said. “And I had seen that in experimental economics they were running experiments with 20 or 30 people and getting results that were really in line with theory. So, I thought, with tens of thousands in the same boat, this could be awesome.”

Mr. Gudmundsson isn’t the only one awe-struck by the possibilities. In addition to EVE, various virtual world games such as Linden Lab’s popular Second Life have attracted attention from researchers. CCP shares its database with the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology’s (HIIT) Social Media research group, for example, and collaborates with Magnus Thor Torfason from Columbia University’s Business School. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Southern California, led by communications professor Dmitri Williams, have done extensive work into human behavior based on various other online games.

“What people are trying to understand is whether behavior in online worlds can be replicated for the real world,” said Mr. Gudmundsson.

Like all good academic economists, the HIIT team spent much of its early work with CCP establishing the theoretical framework for their research. This was important to prove to other economists that the things they were measuring in EVE — virtual metals inflation, for example — could translate into the same concepts in the real world.

CCP Gaming The creation of a character in EVE.

But with that work now completed, the fun stuff is beginning. Describing the EVE database as a “goldmine,” Marko Turpeinen, head of HIIT’s Social Media research group says his team has so far “just scratched the surface” of its potential.

One of his team’s first big findings is somewhat sensitive. Confirming decades of gender research by economists, sociologists and anthropologists, Mr. Turpeinen’s group found that the same biases that have historically favored men in the real world exist in a virtual economy. Their research demonstrates that both women subscribers and female avatar characters operated by male subscribers in EVE are biased toward a slightly lower chance of success in competition with their male counterparts.

Critics of this kind of analysis would argue that data taken from an online game bears little connection to real world results because the imaginary nature of life in those virtual worlds makes people behave differently from how they would in the real world.

But CCP Chief Executive Officer Hilmar Petursson, who could be thought of as EVE’s head of government, turns such arguments on their head.

“People say the real world in a casual way, where it sounds like something fundamental,” he said. “But people tend to forget that the world we live in is just a game designed by our governments. Our economic systems are just a game.”