• What Can a Videogame Tell Us About How Economies Work?
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[QUOTE]On October 3, 2008, President George W. Bush signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program bill into law, delivering $450 billion to failing banks on the premise that it would prevent their collapse and stimulate a faltering economy. Like millions of Americans, Dmitri Williams, an associate professor of communications at the University of Southern California, found TARP troubling—not because the bill provided too much or (as many economists argued) too little, but because it was unscientific. “We did a half-a-trillion-dollar experiment with the economy and had no control group,” he says. Setting up a test bed for a program as complex as TARP might be difficult, but it wasn’t impossible. Williams had found just such a petri dish in videogames. Williams, a sociologist, had always based his research on data gathered by clipboard-wielding graduate students. But when people know they’re being watched, they change their answers with startling regularity, so much so that the behavior has a name, the Hawthorne effect (for the factory in Chicago where it was first observed). Four years ago, just before the economy imploded, Williams and his colleagues found a way to counteract the Hawthorne effect. After asking permission from the game’s manufacturer, Williams was able to access 4.5 terabytes of player data from the “massively multiplayer” online game EverQuest II. The data set was enormous; it chronicled every action, exchange and decision made by nearly five million players. By comparison, the General Social Survey, the benchmark for sociological research in the U.S., consists of some 800 questions answered by about 5,000 people. The game data also drew on behavior that was, at least from the perspective of the players, unobserved. Now Williams had to determine which behaviors were true in both the real world and in games, a process called mapping. He and a team of computer scientists looked at five months of economic data from EverQuest II, in which players buy and sell roughly two million items every month: a real economy at work. Williams then set about studying the data from two different servers, where two groups of people—a test group and a control—played the same game with the same conditions. The control group was filled with people who had already been playing EverQuest II, and the test group was made up entirely of new players. “It would be like taking a copy of the U.S. and removing the people and then seeing if you’d get the same country, with the same behavior when you repopulate it,” Williams says. Players’ activities in EverQuest II mapped theories of money that had never before been tested on such a large scale. Unsurprising though it may seem, the fact that as more gold coins were added, prices in the game rose, proved that the communities of EverQuest II could be a stand-in for the American economy—and a way to safely field-test those billion-dollar bailouts before any real money changes hands.[/quote] Source: [url]http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-03/video-game-tells-us-about-how-economy-works[/url]
Reminds me of when there was that infectious disease in WoW and some health agencies monitored the spread of the disease. Pretty awesome stuff.
It's pretty easy to study economy through videogames. [sp]EVE[/sp]
Sell hats in real life as heavily as TF2
As cool as this idea is I'm not sure if that's the right game to test something like this for. Does EQ2 have a set-amount economy or is it like most other mmorpgs where gold is an inexhaustible resource constantly created by quest-giving NPCs and destroyed when buying things from merchant NPCS? AFAIK Eve has a set-amount economy and it's much more like the real world: corporations, employees, pirates and scammers... It'd be interesting to see if gleaning numbers from games like these could actually prove useful in understanding exactly how economies work.
This is actually pretty interesting. While I'm no economics buff, this could be a way to really test out or predict certain trends and patterns that could very well happen in real life. If any economy has it down to a point where it closely mimics a real world economy, it'd be EVE, but it could possibly work with other economies as well, granted no muling was involved and funding was granted from quests and selling crap, but again I'm no economics buff.
It's pretty easy to make a game about economics, just make it fun or let it be a simulator. Are we talking about supply and demand? Bartering? Stock Market? How much political influence will be involved? will here be riots over bad economy stability or other events? There is alot of things that Economy effects the people, country, and politics, might as well add them all and make a tutorial to how to play this game.
EVE Online. That is all.
[B]HATS[/B]
All I've learned from the TF2 economy is everyone wants to rip you off, every time
just watch one session of dwarf fortress
People who talk about EVE have to realize that they like the EQ because it provides a big pool of data of 5 million compared to EVEs rather small numbers.
[QUOTE=Lambeth;35352010]just watch one session of dwarf fortress[/QUOTE] I for one welcome our biscut-based economy.
Reminds me of when I used to play Runescape some time ago. I would be a little kid, watching the prices of lobsters drop and rise on those grand exchange graphs.
[QUOTE=FullStreak12;35351403]Sell hats in real life as heavily as TF2[/QUOTE]TF2 is an interesting example of what was setup to be a barter economy turn into a market driven currency economy. Its far from prefect but its fascinating to watch.
Video games teach me all I need to know about the economy kill everyone loot their corpses strip their bodies sell to the nearest locally owned Treasure/weapon/clothing store walk out with an Iron helmet and broadsword to work a job get paid for a murder
If an economy in SimCity is going bad, a Volcano will surely cometh, and wash away the town.
[QUOTE=Political Gamer;35352201]TF2 is an interesting example of what was setup to be a barter economy turn into a market driven currency economy. Its far from prefect but its fascinating to watch.[/QUOTE] The TF2 economy failed in every way possible.
[QUOTE=Sardonus;35352205]Video games teach me all I need to know about the economy kill everyone loot their corpses strip their bodies sell to the nearest locally owned Treasure/weapon/clothing store walk out with an Iron helmet and broadsword to work a job get paid for a murder[/QUOTE]It's not murder if they've got more legs or spikes on their heads than you have!
[QUOTE=JustGman;35352290]The TF2 economy failed in every way possible.[/QUOTE] Dunno valve doesn't seem to be complaining
World of Warcraft would be interesting to look at like this. A relatively new server versus an aged one. The economies are hilariously different.
The problem with game economies is that it is literally impossible to be unemployed and typically there are no living expense analogues.
the economy in pokemon is an interesting one. and a scary one.
[QUOTE=The Decoy;35352528]the economy in pokemon is an interesting one. and a scary one.[/QUOTE] Where wallets can only hold 999,999 pokedollars and the bikes cost a million.
First thing that came to mind, SimCity 4
[QUOTE=DarkMonkey;35352364]The problem with game economies is that it is literally impossible to be unemployed and typically there are no living expense analogues.[/QUOTE] Well, technically for a good "Job" in World of warcraft you have to keep your gear repaired, uptodate, enchanted etc. You can spend a fair bit of gold in that.
[QUOTE=Novangel;35351394]It's pretty easy to study economy through videogames. [sp]EVE[/sp][/QUOTE] So in other words, the Russians are going to take over everything.
[QUOTE=Ericson666;35351988]All I've learned from the TF2 economy is everyone wants to rip you off, every time[/QUOTE] That's capitalism for you. v:v:v
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[QUOTE=Ericson666;35351988]All I've learned from the TF2 economy is everyone wants to rip you off, every time[/QUOTE] The TF2 economy is equivalent to two dogs fighting over a scrap of meat for the rest of eternity.
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