[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 08:13 PM 6/9/99 -0700, I personally witnessed J C Lawrence jumping up to
say:
>
>XScreenSaver has a module called "attraction".  Run it.  The
>mechanics are extremely simple and quite obvious to the eye.  Now
>consider that eacy ball is in fact a system value or state in your
>game and that your screen is a two-dimenional graph (with
>appropriately valued axis for each ball).  All of a sudden, with
>very simple mechanics you have rather interesting behaviours for
>little expense.

Based purely on this description, this is just the sort of thing I'm
looking at with UU. The existing economy is excessively simple, excessively
predictable, *if* you pay close attention to it. A little observation will
teach you what everything "should" cost in the game and whether 18 credits
a ton for water is a high price or a low one. But it's a really effective
*illusion* of a complex economy; it just fudges the idea of supply and
demand to make it appear that things are complicated when in fact there's
just a random fluctuation on a set of very simple calculations. A bunch of
theoretical calculations are lumped together into a final answer, which is
rapidly calculated based on available variables, and then I just go "umm,
well, okay, it's not always going to be PERFECT, so let's give it... say, a
ten percent skew in one direction or the other". I like the elegance of
this approach. I'm trying to extend it to other things... yeah, I know, the
magic is sort of gone now, isn't it? ;)

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
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