I’ve heard of quite a bit of research using Eve Online—a quick Google Scholar search suggests 3,870 results at the moment.
Would it be possible to create an MMRPG with an accurate enough model of the economy to test economic theories whilst still being fun to play?
Mu. Take a game that’s fun to play, and improve the accuracy of its econ model, rather than the other way around.
I suspect that starting with a desire to test economies and building a game around it may not be the order of operations that would get the best balance of quantity and quality for data. If a game feels like a chore to players, they’re less likely to engage for as much time over a long term as they do in games which are described as “addictive”. Instead, I would start with a game that’s already mastered the player addiction loop, or even rip off the gameplay of something successful, and change as few things as possible to allow it to emit the kind of data I wanted.
What would the plot of your economic MMRPG be?
I would avoid games with a single plot for all players, because I think open worlds offer a more accurate simulation of the choices that people in real economies face. Plots with warring factions could emulate the dynamics between countries in the real world, but plots with individual NPC bosses that players team up to take down seem to make collaboration easier than it is in reality. I think it’d work only in as much as that type of boss is analogous to natural resources, or possibly big bosses could serve a function similar to scientific breakthroughs if the game lacks another way to unlock new mechanics.
How would it be funded?
If one used a sufficiently addictive game, players would pay to play it.
What types of inaccuracies would you expect results from theories tested that way to contain?
I would expect inaccuracies anywhere that I hadn’t scrutinized for accuracy. In particular, economic changes resulting from exploiting bugs in the game itself may show up without real-world analogues. This could potentially be managed by introducing intentional and more-exploitable bugs that would be more realistic than any accidental ones, such as making it easy-ish to illegally print unlimited money for the tradeoff that the money could be detected as forgeries with sufficient scrutiny.
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.
I’ve heard of quite a bit of research using Eve Online—a quick Google Scholar search suggests 3,870 results at the moment.
Mu. Take a game that’s fun to play, and improve the accuracy of its econ model, rather than the other way around.
I suspect that starting with a desire to test economies and building a game around it may not be the order of operations that would get the best balance of quantity and quality for data. If a game feels like a chore to players, they’re less likely to engage for as much time over a long term as they do in games which are described as “addictive”. Instead, I would start with a game that’s already mastered the player addiction loop, or even rip off the gameplay of something successful, and change as few things as possible to allow it to emit the kind of data I wanted.
I would avoid games with a single plot for all players, because I think open worlds offer a more accurate simulation of the choices that people in real economies face. Plots with warring factions could emulate the dynamics between countries in the real world, but plots with individual NPC bosses that players team up to take down seem to make collaboration easier than it is in reality. I think it’d work only in as much as that type of boss is analogous to natural resources, or possibly big bosses could serve a function similar to scientific breakthroughs if the game lacks another way to unlock new mechanics.
If one used a sufficiently addictive game, players would pay to play it.
I would expect inaccuracies anywhere that I hadn’t scrutinized for accuracy. In particular, economic changes resulting from exploiting bugs in the game itself may show up without real-world analogues. This could potentially be managed by introducing intentional and more-exploitable bugs that would be more realistic than any accidental ones, such as making it easy-ish to illegally print unlimited money for the tradeoff that the money could be detected as forgeries with sufficient scrutiny.
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.