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syntotic@gmail.com@21:1/5 to
All on Fri Apr 29 11:16:14 2016
It is ironic, or paradoxic, that all these videogames are centered on economic systems incorporating models for which they are the model, but irregardless a model of the economies they emulate takes a very different form to make _economic_ _sense_ of the
videogame. This can be understood as programmers (or designers) emulating in a computer very basic and **mechanical** phenomena (or events) we can call economic in nature, for which not all assumptions are immediately evident, and yet the models work for
the game. The form of this analytical discipline is similar to the analysis of historical economies, or History of the Economy. Banks do not need to exist, in Reality terms and in videogame reality, for money to function as a measure of value to be used
for transactions, for example, so we can ask, what are the mechanics of money in such or such historical economy? In real terms for a particular example we might describe the gold standard as the source of value for money and the real life mechanics of
acquiring a stock of gold and the efforts (political, military...) to maintain it, as well as its distribution mechanics, conversion into coinage, etc. All these mechanics were necessary for some monied economies to work, not for others, but we are in
fact interested in how things actually worked and explaining it, as well as explaining why some economies stopped working and how they were trasformed, etc. So for videogame economies we can also observe they are based on money, or some named measure of
value, and then describe how such economic entity works and achieves its purpose and ontological status, even when, or precisely because, for the programmer/designer the videogame money is but a numerical variable that is incremented by these processes
and decremented by these other processes, sometimes in very design-standard (genre) ways, and does not have to go further into describing its properties, verifying incrementing/decrementing processes are consistent or sensible, worry about its physical
distribution (though in programming terms this problem has an equivalent in the programming problem of propagation of variable values), or otherwise make a **credible** or **real** form of money satisfying real money properties to satisfy the game
function. Games do not have to create a monetary system to have their money work, in game terms, or they do create one _implictly_. It is this intrepretation what separates the product created by programmers from the objective product they created,
actually giving to the discipline two ontological entities to be described, analyzed and explained, both in themselves and in relation to currently known working economic principles. So a videogame economy can be described in terms of how and to what
extent it was programmed or designed as an economy, and then in terms of how it works as an economy in the game itself. This is, furthermore, a condition in practical terms to differentiate **toy models** from **real life models** from theoretical models
and even to discern _games_ from serious _models_, (which may not be possible for all of us!), and extract value from them.
Danilo J Bonsignore
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