Emergent Economies for Role Playing Games

Computational Economics, 2014

Designers of MMOs such as Diablo 3 face economic problems much like policy makers in the real world, e.g. inflation and distributional issues. Solving economic problems through regular updates (patches) became as important to those games as traditional gameplay issues. In this paper we provide an agent framework inspired by the economic features of Diablo 3 and analyze the effect of monetary policy in the game. Our model reproduces a number of features known from the Diablo 3 economy such as a heterogeneous price development, driven almost exclusively by goods of high quality, a highly unequal wealth distribution and strongly decreasing economic mobility. The basic framework presented in this paper is meant as a stepping stone to further research, where our evidence is used to deepen our understanding of the realworld counterparts of such problems. The advantage of our model is that it combines simplicity that is inherent to model economies with a similarly simple observable counterpart (namely the game environment where real agents interact). By matching the dynamics of the game economy we can thus easily verify that our behavioral assumptions are good approximations to reality.

TechTrends, 2010

Games have always been a part of the human experience. Even the earliest of civilizations created games for enjoyment and entertainment. However, the educational value of those games is a relatively recent consideration. Over the previous fifty years, scholars have questioned the potential positive lessons learned from games such as Monopoly®, Scrabble®, and sports. While millions of children participate in these activities, a new type of gaming has emerged over the previous decade and is quickly surpassing other gaming formats. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGS), such as World of Warcraft and Diablo, now have millions of players; however, the potential educational influence of these games is relatively unknown. This article presents an exploration of one potential educational strand -economic theory -that these types of games may facilitate.

Acquiring and transacting Virtual Goods is now an established practice in online games, social networks and virtual worlds. These goods are in essence, digital code, and have no intrinsic value, yet their perceived value is such that the sum of micropayments for millions of digital items is in excess of $5billion USD annually, with notably high growth rates, particularly in the 5-16 age group. This paper is the introduction to a themed edition of the 'Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Vol 2 No 4', published in February 2010,' entitled 'Virtual Economies ,Virtual Goods and Service Delivery in Virtual Worlds'. The aim of our paper is to contextualise current trends, plotting the path and erecting some historical signposts along the way.

Proceedings of the …, 2008

As massively multi-player gaming environments become more detailed, developing agents to populate these virtual worlds as capable non-player characters poses an increasingly complex problem. Human players in many games must achieve their objectives through financial skills such as trading and supply chain management as well as through combat and diplomacy. In this paper, we examine the problem of creating intelligent trading agents for virtual markets. Using historical data from EVE Online, a science-fiction based MMORPG, we evaluate several strategies for buying, selling, and supply chain management. We demonstrate that using reinforcement learning to determine policies based on the market microstructure gives trading agents a competitive advantage in amassing wealth. Imbuing agents with the ability to adapt their trading policies can make them more resistant to exploitation by other traders and capable of participating in virtual economies on an equal footing with humans.

EAI Endorsed Transactions on Context-aware Systems and Applications, 2019

The digital gaming business has changed in the last years. Digital games are no longer just products. They developed into services. People play games not only on a stationary device, but on mobile devices, too. The change of gaming devices also had an impact on game design. Competition between mobile digital games mostly takes place at a download price of zero. Today the Freemium monetization method is the dominant monetization method. Players of digital games often have to go through a core loop by repeating the same tasks inside the game. The stability of the virtual economy inside the game affects the game's core loop. This paper discusses the role of instability in virtual economies in the context of core loops. A small instability inside a virtual economy can increase revenue of a digital game. Players tend to stay in a game because of sunk cost fallacy. If instability inside a virtual economy happens for a too long time players will quit playing and revenue will decrease.

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 1981

ThiS WtiCk atttn@S to prOvidC a StrtlCture-fJnct~ona1 analysis of ecob-jo~nic ac-Sty and propositions on thiff rcaatysis about applications of gaming-simt lation for an insiitutronahst Study of the futxtioaing of ccrrnamic syswms. Modem instit tionalism in contrast to neecsassical sconomicS, which is to a great extent rna~hematicized. does not ar=tually use any quantitditivcl IT&~& caed rrodels. ~>nnulati~,n hames I epresent such yodels thar can be designed and promote the impkmenration of reScareh in the spirit of neoinst,tutiond ee~~nomics. In thjs sotnsc, gaming-simulation may bc cxxkdercxl as institutional modeling. In th;j work we shall, first. bt cornxxned with a 'static' structure of economic activity deriving from the three-level sheme by Persons. Next, a ' the Con-t of Jimitai sJructure of economic activity wiil be :malyz4 in terms of Simon. In the finai section, we characterize the methods of mfkction of d3krtrt economic systems in gaming simulation models, as we11 as wTAdv the research on such models.

2011

We analyze a unique data set from a massively-multiplayer online video game economy called The Kingdom of Loathing to assess the viability of these markets in conducting economic research. The data consist of every transaction in a market with over one million players over three years of real time. We find that 1) the game markets are efficient, 2) the

European Journal of …, 2011

Johan Huizinga's claim that commercialization threatens the self-enclosed 'magic circle' of free play still permeates many contemporary games studies. Critiquing such generalizing and essentialistic assumptions, this article distinguishes four different 'orders of commercialization' that impinge on online game worlds and studies empirically how each of these is evaluated and negotiated by players themselves. Based on an analysis of World of Warcraft and Second Life, it demonstrates that some orders of commercialization -that is, the game itself as a commodity and the construction of its world as a virtual marketplace -are compatible with free play since they enhance players' ingame agency. Other orders of commercialization -that is, 'real money trading' and the colonization of the game world by multinationals -are experienced as commodifying and undermine the spirit of play. Contextualization is called for: while some orders of commercialization threaten the 'magic circle' of free play, others stimulate or facilitate it.

2015

This paper discusses the potential application of procedural content generation to a game about economical crises, intended to teach a large general audience about how banks function within a market-guided economy, and the financial risks and moral dilemmas that are involved. Procedurally generating content for abstract and complex notions such as inflation, market crashes, and market flux is different from generating spatial maps or physical assets in a game, and poses several design challenges. Instead of generating these kinds of phenomena and other macro-economic effects directly, the designers aim to let them emerge from automatically generated game mechanics. The game mechanics we propose include generic business models that can be parameterized to model the behavior of companies in the game, while the player controls the actions of a bank. What makes generating these game mechanics particularly challenging is the interaction between phenomena at different levels of abstractio...