I second the Eve Online suggestion as an example of what you are looking for. Relevant features of the game are:
Wealth is the measure of player progress, and the purpose of player activity. This is because experience accumulates with time rather than kills or quests, and you simply buy the necessary skills when you have the prerequisites. Further, your ship is destroyed it is gone—you have to buy a new one. Though wrecks can be salvaged for parts.
Players participate in almost every level of the economy: they manufacture most of the ships and many of the weapons; they extract most of the raw materials used to build those ships; etc.
There is an explicit sector of traders, of both the merchant and speculative variety. The game has explicit transaction costs, and the skills in this area are centered around reducing those transaction costs.
The game deals with hard-to-reconcile social values which compete with economic ones (PvP is a wealth-destroying activity, and is called “content” because it is usually more entertaining than mining space rocks).
Players responding to economic incentives has several times unbalanced the game in such a way the game company needs to intervene. For example the most recent changes are being imposed to make raw materials more rare, because player mining got so efficient that ship prices plummeted across the board, resulting in wars among player alliances lasting forever because no one would ever run out of hulls.
The company, CCP, keeps at least one full time economist on staff, whose job is to help model the economy of the game.
Based on this example, the things a game needs to be able to show complex economic behavior are:
Players need to be able to both add and destroy value, which is to say there needs to be player driven production as well as material losses.
Players need to be able to exchange value, which means being able to buy and sell almost all things within the game.
The parts of the game need to interact, so that changes in value in one segment of the game can affect completely separate parts of the game.
This answer is really good. One thing I want to add is that “players destroying value” doesn’t have to be quite as literal as it is in EVE Online to be useful.
In World of Warcraft, players destroy value every time they equip a “soulbound” item (these items can only be used by one player and can’t be given away or sold once they’re used for the first time).
There’s also levels of accuracy in the simulation. You can probably test economic theories in World of Warcraft’s auction house, but you’d have to keep in mind that the economy in that game isn’t like the economy of any real countries (but maybe some parts are similar enough to generalize?).
The significance of value destruction in Eve is that it provides continuous opportunity for players to produce value.
This is similar to selling gear to NPC merchants in most games; selling stuff to the NPCs destroys the thing, and new things similar to it are harvested from the environment. Since this is the default, and is often relatively symmetric, there’s only as much opportunity for players to produce value as there is value routinely destroyed by the players.
This is surely just a heuristic in most cases; games from Diablo to D&D have long suffered from a gold inflation problem because no-one troubled to balance this.
I second the Eve Online suggestion as an example of what you are looking for. Relevant features of the game are:
Wealth is the measure of player progress, and the purpose of player activity. This is because experience accumulates with time rather than kills or quests, and you simply buy the necessary skills when you have the prerequisites. Further, your ship is destroyed it is gone—you have to buy a new one. Though wrecks can be salvaged for parts.
Players participate in almost every level of the economy: they manufacture most of the ships and many of the weapons; they extract most of the raw materials used to build those ships; etc.
There is an explicit sector of traders, of both the merchant and speculative variety. The game has explicit transaction costs, and the skills in this area are centered around reducing those transaction costs.
The game deals with hard-to-reconcile social values which compete with economic ones (PvP is a wealth-destroying activity, and is called “content” because it is usually more entertaining than mining space rocks).
Players responding to economic incentives has several times unbalanced the game in such a way the game company needs to intervene. For example the most recent changes are being imposed to make raw materials more rare, because player mining got so efficient that ship prices plummeted across the board, resulting in wars among player alliances lasting forever because no one would ever run out of hulls.
The company, CCP, keeps at least one full time economist on staff, whose job is to help model the economy of the game.
Based on this example, the things a game needs to be able to show complex economic behavior are:
Players need to be able to both add and destroy value, which is to say there needs to be player driven production as well as material losses.
Players need to be able to exchange value, which means being able to buy and sell almost all things within the game.
The parts of the game need to interact, so that changes in value in one segment of the game can affect completely separate parts of the game.
This answer is really good. One thing I want to add is that “players destroying value” doesn’t have to be quite as literal as it is in EVE Online to be useful.
In World of Warcraft, players destroy value every time they equip a “soulbound” item (these items can only be used by one player and can’t be given away or sold once they’re used for the first time).
There’s also levels of accuracy in the simulation. You can probably test economic theories in World of Warcraft’s auction house, but you’d have to keep in mind that the economy in that game isn’t like the economy of any real countries (but maybe some parts are similar enough to generalize?).
The significance of value destruction in Eve is that it provides continuous opportunity for players to produce value.
This is similar to selling gear to NPC merchants in most games; selling stuff to the NPCs destroys the thing, and new things similar to it are harvested from the environment. Since this is the default, and is often relatively symmetric, there’s only as much opportunity for players to produce value as there is value routinely destroyed by the players.
This is surely just a heuristic in most cases; games from Diablo to D&D have long suffered from a gold inflation problem because no-one troubled to balance this.