[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Timothy O'Neill Dang]

J C Lawrence wrote:
> 
> I strongly recommend you read up on the handling (and results
> thereof) of unique objects in the Habitat papers (posted to the list
> and thus in the archives and available at various sites I can't find
> right now (firewall troubles)).  The Egg and custom heads are
> particularly interesting there.  The Egg was a unique physically
> huge object that became greatly sought after and a signal of
> initiation into the social structure of the world ("Egg parties").

Thanks. I had read about the heads already, but missed references to the
Egg. Just found some in the archives. There's discussion of the egg at:
http://www.communities.com/company/papers/layza.html

I've heard both stories as to whether the heads evolved into a currency
or not. My impression is they weren't. It sounds as if it was more like
folks trading baseball cards. The heads weren't exchanged generally for
things other than other heads.

Looking at the archives for the heads, I saw currency come up, so I
figured now was a good time to be pedantic on currency. I've seen
"currency" used in two ways which make me bristle, referring to Time as
the currency of the games, and Attention as the currency of the games. I
have a feeling what is really meant is that Time and/or Attention are
the economic foundation, or the constraining resource, or something like
that. neither has features which make it at all a sensible currency.

Money serves two primary purposes. It is a store of value and a medium
of exchange. There are other purposes, such as being a unit of value,
and perhaps a proxy for status, but those two are the main ones.
A currency should be:
- Uniform. This is one of the weird things about game worlds. In a game
world, uniformity is easy, probably the default. All "long swords" are
identical unless something special is added. In the real world,
uniformity is unusual and takes work. The Chicago Board of Trade goes to
great lengths to ensure that soybeans are soybeans.
- Reasonably divisible. Some are great for this, such as electronic
exchanges or gold. But so long as the smallest unit is of a low value,
it should be OK.
- Durable. If it rots, it's not going to be a good store of value.
- Transferrable. It should be reasonably easy to transfer from one owner
to another, which implies it should be fairly easy to carry around, if
it's physical.

So, anything which is durable (generally the default in games), uniform
(also generally the default), and of small enough value to the folks
using it can serve as a currency. It helps if it's light and
"stackable".

Then there's the issue of does the currency have non-currency value. A
currency which is really well accepted as a currency even though it has
no intrinsic value can work ("fiat money"). It still makes sense for
something like reagents in M59 to become currency, because they have
real practical value in addition to their having good currency features.

There's also "inside fiat" money, which is generally unbacked currency,
but currency which is required to engage in certain activities, such as
paying taxes. UO has something in-between backed currency and fiat
money. It's backed in the sense that you can buy things from the NPCs
with gold, though the practicality of turning all your gold into
reagents can be oppressive if you're wealthy. The main "inside fiat"
feature is the player-run vendors where one may only trade with gold.
The vendors also improve the "transferrable" feature since the purchaser
has a debit card for vendor purchases.

Systems like this can help maintain the formal game currency as the
practical game currency, if that's important.

> Somehow, long term, we have to arrive at systems whose internal
> values are a product, a reasonable latency moving average, of the
> systems that produce and are affected by that value.  Thus, for
> instance, as the population of effective weaponry increases and the
> power curve for newbie growth reacts appropriately, the values on
> NPC's scale to match after a suitable (if short) delay.  Its not a
> real solution of course.  To get a real solution you have to
> implement evolution which is kinda difficult to codify.

I think that is a real solution, just not one which correlates to our
reality. Another real solution is to have the admins impose world
changes, which requires a model such that the admins can keep up with
player advancement. Yet another is to rely on player-player conflict. If
the players are their own opposition and advancing at a similar rate,
they'll keep each other challenged.

In principle, allowing constrained innovation to constantly power up the
game seems reasonable to me. It's safer than allowing for true
innovation. Having blacksmiths gradually create swords which do more
damage is straightforward, not like having a blacksmith invent a
flamethrower which makes wizards obsolete. In practice, I'm sure both
are challenging.

------------------------------
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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