[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:

> 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? ;)

Actually, this sounds like sort of the opposite of what JC is talking
about. A good example of what he is talking about is the game of Life (not
the board game). I'm sure most of you have seen it, so I'll spare you a
detailed explanation, but essentially you start with a bunch of lighted
squares on a computer screen, then apply simple rules to them. I forget
the details of Life, but it's something like if an empty square has 2
lighted neighbors it will light up. If it has 3 or more (or maybe 4 or
more, I don't remember), it will die out.

That's the simplest version, but even with those extremely simple rules,
you end up with these really interesting and persistent patterns. You've
got flyers, which are patterns that fly across the screen over and over,
maintaining the same pattern (the screen wraps around), you've got guns,
which are stable islands that regularly fire off clusters of the same
pattern. You've got some that switch back and forth between the same
states (some guys at MIT even were able to devise an initial configuration
through which a stable pattern would be produced that would cycle through
_eight_ variations before returning to the original). There are others
too, but I can't remember them. Life is an absolutely fascinating program
to watch. You can start out with total chaos, with squares lit up at
random, and see how long the systems can go before all chaos dies away and
you have pure order. You want to avoid hitting order, because then it's
boring and uninteresting (not to mention not realistic), but you also want
to see stable patterns emerge and disintegrate. The ideas that the Santa
Fe Institute are dealing with are all about finding this "edge of chaos",
where they feel that things get interesting, from the possibility of life
and intelligence, to most economic activity, etc.

Defining what the outcome is going to be is sort of the opposite of this
sort of thing. What JC is doing sounds really interesting, though I have
no idea how much fun it is for the players. I doubt I will ever take the
risk of putting a system in with the intention of allowing emergent
properties, simply because they could be bad for business.
--matt




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