My worry with [using a highly addictive game] is that will remove the incentive to make it a good testbed for economic theories of that will make the game less addictive.
That’s an interesting question, tying back into the fundamental query about what would be required to make a game an accurate simulation.
An argument in favor of using a maximally addictive game goes “the least realistic part of games is how people only play the game a little of the time, so they’ll have needs which the game economy doesn’t have to meet. If players spent 100% of their time in a game, the game would need to meet all their human needs, so it would experience economic forces related to all needs”. The degenerate case of that argument would be for game currency to be tied to physical needs such as food and housing as well as non-physical needs like entertainment and esteem and fulfillment.
I think I mostly agree with that argument, in that I believe games where players spend a higher percentage of their time tend to create more realistic microcosms of human behavior than those where players might only check in once per day or less.
I’m having trouble imagining an economic theory for which a more-addictive game would be a worse testbed than a less-addictive one. Could you help me construct a toy example or two of those?
As I have understood it Eve players start world wars because they are bored and there isn’t much to do in the universe. When the default win move is to play the game taht heavily favors against games where the default win move is not to play.
Thanks, that helps me understand. The concrete example of people getting to the top and running out of game to play reminds me that game addictiveness often involves an element of unrealism to character growth, or mechanics which let you succeed just a little more easily than you’d expect to in real life.
I also hold in mind the example of well-established minecraft servers, where people who “run out of game” but want to keep hanging out with their friends often embark on ambitious community infrastructure projects to show off their power and skills. So an MMRPG trying to simulate the economy could potentially sidestep the world-war problem by encouraging a cultural definition of success more consistent with reality… although, that leads to all kinds of speculation about the complex motives behind actual world wars that I think I’d rather not dig into at the moment.
Games which give players constant rewards tend to be more addictive, so there’s an incentive to make it easy to create money easily, without producing a usable good for example.
Some great points here:
My worry with that is that will remove the incentive to make it a good testbed for economic theories of that will make the game less addictive.
That’s an interesting question, tying back into the fundamental query about what would be required to make a game an accurate simulation.
An argument in favor of using a maximally addictive game goes “the least realistic part of games is how people only play the game a little of the time, so they’ll have needs which the game economy doesn’t have to meet. If players spent 100% of their time in a game, the game would need to meet all their human needs, so it would experience economic forces related to all needs”. The degenerate case of that argument would be for game currency to be tied to physical needs such as food and housing as well as non-physical needs like entertainment and esteem and fulfillment.
I think I mostly agree with that argument, in that I believe games where players spend a higher percentage of their time tend to create more realistic microcosms of human behavior than those where players might only check in once per day or less.
I’m having trouble imagining an economic theory for which a more-addictive game would be a worse testbed than a less-addictive one. Could you help me construct a toy example or two of those?
As I have understood it Eve players start world wars because they are bored and there isn’t much to do in the universe. When the default win move is to play the game taht heavily favors against games where the default win move is not to play.
Thanks, that helps me understand. The concrete example of people getting to the top and running out of game to play reminds me that game addictiveness often involves an element of unrealism to character growth, or mechanics which let you succeed just a little more easily than you’d expect to in real life.
I also hold in mind the example of well-established minecraft servers, where people who “run out of game” but want to keep hanging out with their friends often embark on ambitious community infrastructure projects to show off their power and skills. So an MMRPG trying to simulate the economy could potentially sidestep the world-war problem by encouraging a cultural definition of success more consistent with reality… although, that leads to all kinds of speculation about the complex motives behind actual world wars that I think I’d rather not dig into at the moment.
Games which give players constant rewards tend to be more addictive, so there’s an incentive to make it easy to create money easily, without producing a usable good for example.