What Can a Videogame Tell Us About How Economies Work?
46 replies, posted
My dad (who's an economist) wanted me to play EVE and write a paper about the economy
Capitalism 2 taught me that seaports can be a total bastard and put companys out of business with their cheap imports.
[QUOTE=Vaught;35351734]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.[/QUOTE]
The problem with EVE is that there is no regulation. It would be like studying the Somalian economy to gain insight into our own economic trends. Sure, you might get some valid data, but the economy functions much different when thievery, piracy, and cheating people are commonplace.
Don't EQ2 and most MMOs have infinite sources of money though? As in, money is not cyclic. You buy something from an NPC, and your money disappears into the air as you get your item. An NPC pays you, and the money is instantly there when it previously did not exist. This isn't really a great stand-in for a real life economy.
[editline]30th March 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=Electrocuter;35351387]Reminds me of when there was that infectious disease in WoW and some health agencies monitored the spread of the disease.
Pretty awesome stuff.[/QUOTE]
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident[/url]
thought this would be eve related that games crazy.
[QUOTE=trent_roolz;35354734]Don't EQ2 and most MMOs have infinite sources of money though? As in, money is not cyclic. You buy something from an NPC, and your money disappears into the air as you get your item. An NPC pays you, and the money is instantly there when it previously did not exist. This isn't really a great stand-in for a real life economy.
[editline]30th March 2012[/editline]
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident[/url][/QUOTE]
New money is created from nowhere in real life too
[QUOTE=trent_roolz;35354734]Don't EQ2 and most MMOs have infinite sources of money though? As in, money is not cyclic. You buy something from an NPC, and your money disappears into the air as you get your item. An NPC pays you, and the money is instantly there when it previously did not exist. This isn't really a great stand-in for a real life economy.[/QUOTE]
I can't speak for EQ2, but money isn't very infinite in WoW. The economy is actually fairly well kept because a lot of the money you take in from quests and loot is taken out by repairs. That keeps the auction house economy a lot more stable, since you can't really farm quests for obscene amounts of gold and gold is taken out of the economy regularly.
It doesn't matter if money cycles between merchants or not. The auction house and other player to player activity is what really matters in terms of the economy.
[QUOTE=Sgt Doom;35352300]It's not murder if they've got more legs or spikes on their heads than you have![/QUOTE]
But doesn't getting a new helmet with more spikes on it increase how obvious it is that people can kill you and get away with it?
either nobody would become rich and live long enough to enjoy it, or the hat market would plummet in stock value
Remember that time in EVE Online when this happened?
[IMG]http://gd.klaki.net/006dfcfd06a2720c0af5c242214f9d28/page-1.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://gd.klaki.net/b87d17e04e6111563f67f35c56da8142/page-2.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://eve.klaki.net/heist/page-3.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://gd.klaki.net/082a9f2437c965f8cb29aeb5d5d7e5d2/page-4.jpg[/IMG]
Economy right there.
[QUOTE=Croix;35354751]New money is created from nowhere in real life too[/QUOTE]
Yup, saying that this isn't true would be like saying:
When we first thought of having money, we just handed out 1000 billion dollar to everyone, and see what happened, apparantly everything worked out all right!
We used to have "less" money, so everything cost "less" respectively too. (For instance, a bread costs 1 euro, when it used to be a few cents, 100 years ago. They even had coins for 1/8th of a cent, in Holland anyway.)
[QUOTE=gufu;35352037]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]
360,000 subscribers last january, with active player counts averaging out at about 20-25k users. Less datapoints, but arguably more useful. It also helps that they have an economist on staff you could use as a resource.
[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]
A good point. I imagine game worlds consider the characters to be in high demand. In EVE, the largest ISK(currency) creator is bounties for hostile npcs, and after that are missions and incursions. (Concord and the NPC factions pay out for these sources of income) CCP is aware of how much each of these produces to the last ISK. As for living expenses, you have insurance fees (not mandatory but...), corporate hangar rental, and for starbases, there are ISK costs for transporting the planetary fuels and opportunity costs for mining the ice fuel. (on a side note, all trades and contracts have NPC fees attached as well, for acting as brokers) All said, it has some living expense analogues. Not at all perfect, but closer than most games.
So, what are the results?
Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is a fun economy based game.
Sell too much of one thing, the value goes down, hike up the prices when things are in demand, Capitalism Ho, and what not.
This article was in this month's edition of Popular Science.
[QUOTE=Corey_Faure;35352188]Reminds me of when I used to play Runescape some time ago.[B] I would be a little kid[/B], watching the prices of lobsters drop and rise on those grand exchange graphs.[/QUOTE]
The grand exchange update isn't that old...
[QUOTE=Ericson666;35351988]All I've learned from the TF2 economy is everyone wants to rip you off, every time[/QUOTE]
its funny, i always troll them and say their stuff looks like crap.
[editline]30th March 2012[/editline]
then i give them free crap weapons
[QUOTE=elitehakor v2;35354584]My dad (who's an economist) wanted me to play EVE and write a paper about the economy[/QUOTE] Everyone tries to scam you in station trade. The End.
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