[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Timothy O'Neill Dang wrote:
> economic behavior in real life. My bias, which I've seen little reason
> to change so far, is that the basic economic decision-making processes
> aren't very different between real-life and the games.

They are different between cultures within the physical world, or?  Maybe
you will get something stable if you study a carefully chosen subset (power
gaming loners would probably be easiest), but cliques of players may have
their own particular understanding of proper behaviour.  If you happen to
bounce into a bunch of true role-players then your ideas about norms might
go to hell right away...

> 1) Institutional differences. That is, people behave differently because
> there's different sorts of institutions for economic exchange. One of
> the prime examples is the lack of a healthy contracting system in every
> game I've observed (which is limited). The different behavior with
> different institutional rules is the primary thing we want to research.

What do you mean by contracting?  Auction systems?  Renting?  Vending
machines?  Safe verified transaction?  Loans?

> I believe, awaiting strong evidence to the contrary, that economic
> decisions -- particularly those decisions which are really blatantly
> economic -- are made mostly like they are in real life, that there's
> nothing special about the psychology of living in a MUD which causes
> economic norms to vanish.

I'd suggest taking the opposite approach...  The situations are quite
different so there are differences in the psychology.  I don't know what
economic norms mean specifically.  They change with culture, time and
place?  Economic norms for people on vacation are different from their
regular norms?

In the physical world we have some preconceptions, social and moral, of what
things SHOULD cost, and what one SHOULD and SHOULD NOT spend money on. We
also have some fixed preconceptions about what we are entitled to have. 
Large commercial MUDs are new cultures, largely undefined, heterogeneous
expectations are aiming at fun and homogenous fairness.  In the physical
world there can be different morals for different groups. (handicapped vs
normal, young vs old, class privileges etc.)

I think you will have to show empirically that there are no significant
difference from the physical world, rather than wait for counterproof.

> compared to the more open-ended fun of an RPG. We can already do good
> research in our laboratory when there's clear goals.

Good??  I thought the lesson learned from laboratory experiments is that
they more often than not break outside that very narrow biased environment? 
Maybe you meant fun research? ;^)

> fruitful or fair. The many design decisions which are made to keep
> players happy while having a functional system will inevitably cause
> true differences. My task is to figure out how much those differences
> effect.

That really depends on the overall "psychological" situation, doesn't it?

> Ola wrote:
> > Example:
> > 1) I have a model of how the physical world works.
> > 2) I have a set of random MUDs
> > 3) I construct or modify MUDs based on the principles in 1)
> > 4) I compare 2) and 3)
> > 5) The was/wasn't an effect, the effect was good/bad.
> >
> > But:
> > 1) I have a model of how a virtual world works.
> > 2) I have a physical world.
> > 3) I am unable to compare 1 and 2 because the premises are different.
> 
> Your first example is what is of primary interest to us. I'm not sure
> what you mean by the second example. I agree that there are some things
> from the virtual worlds which will be wholly unenlightening about the
> real world, the Source-Sink model for instance.

The first example was an attempt at describing how you can obtain reasonably
valid results for MUDs, and _only_ for MUDs.  The second was an attempt at
describing the difficulty of obtaining results that are valid for the
physical world from MUDs.  I think you said you were trying to do the
second, yet you say that you are primarily interested in the first?

I think that economists will have to accept that MUDs are valid studyobjects
in their own right. Then when you have a reasonable understanding of MUDs,
you might want to see if there is room for knowledge transfer to other
domains... 

Why a priori assume any relevance for the physical world?  Is that the only
way you can be paid to do fun research?  *grin*

--
Ola



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