2018 Workgroup Topic Proposals

Utopian Capitalism in Games

A few Horseshoes ago, Crystin Cox sparked this topic by mentioning how income inequality appears inevitably in games with trade. Add trade and 6 months down the road, you’ve got an inherent power dynamic that warps every economic and social system in the game. A subtle issue, admittedly, but we are all familiar with how the naive inclusion of trade results in bots, trade spam, scams, anti-social cabals and sociopaths rising to the top of power structures. In the end, the downsides of trade are so great many teams simply remove it from our games.

Assumption: Trade is worth saving. I believe trade is a powerful motivating for good, especially if you look at it from the lens of Homo Reciprocans where reciprocal economic transactions are non-zero sum. Trade can be a net social positive.

The challenge: We, as game designers, want to make a thriving, pro-social community within our online games. What are the Utopian economics that support such as structure and avoid the downsides of traditional capitalism?

Online games are in a unique place to experiment with new forms of capitalism

  • We don’t have to follow real world rules of scarcity in our games. We’ve got substantial control over the underlying means, methods and physics of production.
  • We can run experiments with large scale populations.
  • We have immense access to data when it comes to understanding even the most minute of interactions.

Issues to tackle:

  • Valuing long term goals and consequences
  • Valuing social bonds between individuals
  • Valuing existing culture and traditions
  • Valuing public goods
  • Valuing equality and equal opportunity
  • Valuing human labor
  • Valuing human dignity and human rights
  • Managing corruption

Personal note: I don’t feel like I know enough about this topic to do a full weekend on it. So I may not. But I wanted to put the idea out there in order to spark ad hoc conversations and find folks that are also interested in the space. What should people interested in this topic be reading?

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