There are some pretty major differences between game economies and real life that would need to be carefully considered.
Motivation: People generally play games voluntarily for purposes of enjoyment and can stop when they get bored or fed up. Giving up on real life is entirely different. Games closer to reality will likely suffer from loss of interest.
Difficulty: Surviving and thriving in most MMRPGs is much simpler than reality where (for most people) huge amounts of time and energy are spent earning money for the basics of living (rent, food, bills) and engaged in bodily necessities like eating and sleeping. Games without serious consequences for failing to meet basic monetary and biological needs will miss huge categories of economic incentives (e.g. wage slavery).
Growth: Games tend to have monotonically increasing levels/stats for player characteristics. Reality is so much more frustrating. You lose strength if you stop training or get injured. You forget things you’ve learned, especially if you don’t practice. Growth in the real world is longer and harder and naturally decays over time even when there aren’t major regressions like an injury. Real-world growth tends to be asymptotically limited by individual aptitudes determined by things like the genetic lottery and easily hampered by arbitrary local environment and corresponding access to resources.
4. Selection effects. On many dimensions, gamers are not representative of any more general population. 5. Value independence. Economic choices in games are not connected to real-world experiences, so there’s both a smaller absolute range of tradeoffs that can be made, and a lack of compatibility to non-game decisions and impacts.
The promise of huge wealth can make a capsuleer try to live the “Capsuleers dream” and be attached to monotonous activity for quite a long while. Lottery tickets are expected negative value. While everybody CAN become a milloinaire, most won’t. The difference of expected income versus “fantasied income” can make wage slavery a thing that entertainment based thing might reach.
There are some pretty major differences between game economies and real life that would need to be carefully considered.
Motivation: People generally play games voluntarily for purposes of enjoyment and can stop when they get bored or fed up. Giving up on real life is entirely different. Games closer to reality will likely suffer from loss of interest.
Difficulty: Surviving and thriving in most MMRPGs is much simpler than reality where (for most people) huge amounts of time and energy are spent earning money for the basics of living (rent, food, bills) and engaged in bodily necessities like eating and sleeping. Games without serious consequences for failing to meet basic monetary and biological needs will miss huge categories of economic incentives (e.g. wage slavery).
Growth: Games tend to have monotonically increasing levels/stats for player characteristics. Reality is so much more frustrating. You lose strength if you stop training or get injured. You forget things you’ve learned, especially if you don’t practice. Growth in the real world is longer and harder and naturally decays over time even when there aren’t major regressions like an injury. Real-world growth tends to be asymptotically limited by individual aptitudes determined by things like the genetic lottery and easily hampered by arbitrary local environment and corresponding access to resources.
4. Selection effects. On many dimensions, gamers are not representative of any more general population.
5. Value independence. Economic choices in games are not connected to real-world experiences, so there’s both a smaller absolute range of tradeoffs that can be made, and a lack of compatibility to non-game decisions and impacts.
The promise of huge wealth can make a capsuleer try to live the “Capsuleers dream” and be attached to monotonous activity for quite a long while. Lottery tickets are expected negative value. While everybody CAN become a milloinaire, most won’t. The difference of expected income versus “fantasied income” can make wage slavery a thing that entertainment based thing might reach.