For online cohabitives, you have to ask how you make agreements binding. People will be less honorable with strangers, especially if you take advantage of the linear returns of persistent score to model utility payouts.
We talked a bit about having temporary recording and arbitration processes for contract violation reports. Obviously, that has a bit of overhead, in implementation complexity and probably as an ongoing running cost. In many cases, players might be so familiar with the rhythms of the game that it isn’t necessary for the contract system to be so explicit or flexible as that, instead, bounties for detectable events, “kill this guy over here and I’ll give you 10 credits”, “occupy this period soon and I’ll give you 5 credits” and the like. (Credits would be a debt currency, players are supposed to earn about as much as they spend. Offers from players who haven’t been repaying their debts would be clearly marked as such. Hoarded credits might decay.)
But what about public goods… in overwatch there’s a situation where there’s a payload that needs to be pushed, but often people will pursue kills instead. You can’t expect individuals to place a bounty on pushing the payload for the same reason you can’t expect them to push it.
So say you propose a ‘public commission’ where If anyone doesn’t sign, then no one has to pay, but everyone signs everyone has to share in the paying. Everyone has an individual incentive to sign, because they’d prefer to live under the order where it passes even if it means they have to pay a share. This solves the collective action problem for rational citizens.
I guess this is one example of how quickly these games become testing grounds for economic mechanisms.
For online cohabitives, you have to ask how you make agreements binding. People will be less honorable with strangers, especially if you take advantage of the linear returns of persistent score to model utility payouts.
We talked a bit about having temporary recording and arbitration processes for contract violation reports. Obviously, that has a bit of overhead, in implementation complexity and probably as an ongoing running cost.
In many cases, players might be so familiar with the rhythms of the game that it isn’t necessary for the contract system to be so explicit or flexible as that, instead, bounties for detectable events, “kill this guy over here and I’ll give you 10 credits”, “occupy this period soon and I’ll give you 5 credits” and the like. (Credits would be a debt currency, players are supposed to earn about as much as they spend. Offers from players who haven’t been repaying their debts would be clearly marked as such. Hoarded credits might decay.)
But what about public goods… in overwatch there’s a situation where there’s a payload that needs to be pushed, but often people will pursue kills instead. You can’t expect individuals to place a bounty on pushing the payload for the same reason you can’t expect them to push it.
So say you propose a ‘public commission’ where If anyone doesn’t sign, then no one has to pay, but everyone signs everyone has to share in the paying. Everyone has an individual incentive to sign, because they’d prefer to live under the order where it passes even if it means they have to pay a share. This solves the collective action problem for rational citizens.
I guess this is one example of how quickly these games become testing grounds for economic mechanisms.