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''Miniconomy'' (also called ''MC'' by players) is an online, browser based, economic and trade simulation game developed in the Netherlands. The game has over 141,000 registered players from 100 different countries that can play the game in English, Spanish, Danish, Portuguese, German, French and Dutch. As of March 2015, 134 rounds have been completed. ''Miniconomy'' is free to play, but a premium membership is available. This membership allows for the creation of Miniconomy Ventures (MV) with which harbors, banks, and garages can be built, enables the player to start a political party, and gives the player personal smilies and colors on the forums (ingame incorporated as clubs) as well as twice the length of posts in clubs and unlimited number of lots that may be owned. ==History== The idea for ''Miniconomy'' came in October 2001 when then computer science student Wouter Leenards started thinking about making a realistic trading simulation game. Together with his brother, Mark Leenards, he further developed the plan, and eventually created ''Miniconomy''. Supported by Mark and some friends, he developed the idea further. Mark, being a business administration student, focused on the economic aspects of the game, whereas Wouter did the programming. The result is a unique online game for everybody who is interested in trading, economics and games. The advantage of ''Miniconomy'' is that it can be played on your web browser, so with any internet connection; at home, in the office, at school or at a friend's house. The first public round of ''Miniconomy'' started on January 1, 2002. The original idea, a game where economy is simulated, sprung from a combination of imagination and the strengths of other well known game concepts. In most games, however, trading and all its characteristics is not the key. In ''Miniconomy'' the trading is the key, and therefore has realistic situations. Monopolies, price fixing, shortage, threats, robbery and abuse of power occur. The first rounds were beta testing where bugs were found and loopholes were used to create imbalance in the game. However, during this time, the game grew exponentially, reaching 2000 active players and 5000 activated accounts within the first four months. The fact that the game grew so quickly and that server costs were rising to facilitate the bandwidth for this increase in players, something needed to be thought of to make sure that the game wasn’t making big losses. To do this, a Premium Member system was developed. The benefits of this were at this time: a daily salary, entry to the Casino, the ability to post smileys and use color codes on the forums, the ability to start political parties, and the ability to start companies that could build harbors and banks. At this time the brothers were frequently approached to ponder a way to apply the game in the school system, and so the brothers applied for different grants that existed for funding the creation of education systems. It was not until they got the Digitale Pioneers grant, a temporary action program that is meant for innovative grass-root Internet initiatives. This fund gives financial and organizational support to small-scale grass root content communities that realize innovative projects in the public domain on the Internet,〔(''Program Digitale Pioneers'' )〕 that they were able to make the Educational Manager, which allowed teachers to monitor the actions of students and give them the tools needed to accurately grade them. In November 2005, ''Miniconomy'' decided to start actively targeting the international markets. To do this an international country was made inside the game where the official language was English and a complete translation of the game was made into English by a volunteer. The country has been growing, with besides a large number of Dutch players, also reaching 150 active players from the United States at the end of round 49 in January 2008.〔(''History of Miniconomy'' )〕 As of today, March 15, 2015, ''Miniconomy'' has nearly 11,000 registered users from the USA, just over 3,600 from the United Kingdom and a core of active Danish players, with nearly 400 registered accounts. The Dutch speaking community still is quite dominant in the statistics, with over 63,000 accounts registered from Belgium and the Netherlands. It should be noted that these figures handle registered accounts, not active accounts and that the actual number of active players per round averages around 1,000. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Miniconomy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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