Ramin Shokrizade

Overview

Ramin Shokrizade is a virtual-economy and game economist who, while helping CCP Games design EVE Online's player-driven economy in 2003, arrived at a fix for a virtual land bubble that reproduces the logic of a land value tax. At launch, players raced to buy the game's "factories" — fixed, scarce production sites tied to particular star systems, functionally identical to land — and by the time Shokrizade could log in, every prime factory had already been grabbed by speculators charging $300–400 apiece for access, with no guarantee of secure title.[1] His proposed fix was to raise the recurring holding fee on factories high enough that only players actively producing goods would want to keep them, creating a "hot potato" effect that pushed speculators out; the change took several months to implement but, once live, broke the speculators' grip on the economy, lowering consumer prices and reducing the wealth concentration the bubble had produced.[1]

Shokrizade has said he had no formal grounding in Georgist theory when he devised the mechanism, arriving at it through game-design trial and error; he later drew an explicit parallel to California's Proposition 13 (1978), reasoning that when property taxes are lower than a property's rate of appreciation, holding land becomes a profitable speculation in the real world just as it had been for EVE's factory-hoarders.[1] His case is cited by Lars Doucet in Land Is a Big Deal (Ch. 10) as a real-world instance of the land-value-tax mechanism being rediscovered independently of the Georgist tradition, and a secondary write-up on virtual-world game design describes him as having had "no formal knowledge of Georgist theory" when he fixed EVE's land recession.[2]

See Also

• Land Value Tax — the real-world policy Shokrizade's EVE Online holding-fee fix reproduces
• Land Is a Big Deal — Lars Doucet's book, which cites Shokrizade's EVE Online case in Chapter 10
• Proposition 13 — the real-world low-property-tax case Shokrizade compared his in-game fix against
• Elizabeth Magie — another case of game design surfacing land-monopoly dynamics, via The Landlord's Game

Sources

1. Ramin Shokrizade, "How I Used EVE Online to Predict the Great Recession," Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), April 5, 2013. gamedeveloper.com — used for the EVE Online factory-speculation episode, the holding-fee fix, and Shokrizade's own Proposition 13 comparison, in his own words (primary source).
2. Naavik, "Land Value Tax in Online Games and Virtual Worlds: A How-To Guide," 2022. naavik.co — used for the secondary characterization that Shokrizade had "no formal knowledge of Georgist theory" when he fixed EVE Online's land bubble.
3. Lars Doucet, Land Is a Big Deal (2024), Ch. 10 — the wiki's discovery source, cited on the book page, for Shokrizade's case as an independent re-derivation of land-value-tax logic. An exact page/quotation from a direct read of Ch. 10 is not yet supplied.