[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Timothy O'Neill Dang]

Jo Dillon wrote:
> 
> Timothy O'Neill Dang (timothy at nmia.com) spake thusly:
> > NPC shopkeepers should not be thought of as a participants in the game's
> > economy unless you're willing to invest heavily in AI development. One
> 
>   As an economist, how much work do you think it would take?

I'm not an AI programmer. From what I've understood of game AI, normally
programming stupid MOBs with uirks that make them appear intelligent is
the way to go rather than programming a real AI. I don't think this
approach would work for an economic actor.

The difficulty of writing an AI to participate in the economy will
depend on the complexity of the economy. In the simplest of worlds,
they'll simply be optimizing some continuous, differentiable function
and there's no problem. In a complex world, they'll have a bigger
commodity space, they'll need to forcast supply and demand, they'll have
to consider competition or the lack thereof. I think it's a major
undertaking, even assuming the NPCs are only interested in maximizing
income.

I don't think it's an impossible problem. MUDs are still limited enough
that you won't need something which can pass the Turing Test to function
as a simple-minded but competent economic agent.

But is that worth it? Once you have come up with NPC shopkeepers who act
semi-intelligently as members of the economy, where do they get their
supplies from? Where do they sell things to if a player doesn't want
them? To a large extent you've just moved the problem a little further
from the players without eliminating it.

> I've played around with the idea and even written some simple code, but then Real
> Work got on top of me.

I don't know if your code's proprietary, but I'd love to see it.

------------------------------
Timothy O'Neill Dang/Cretog8
timothy at nmia.com
H: 505-843-6966
W: 505-244-8803
One monkey don't stop no show



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