[ExI] World of Statecraft

Mirco Romanato painlord2k at libero.it
Thu Jan 7 13:44:18 UTC 2010


Il 07/01/2010 12.10, The Avantguardian ha scritto:
> I notice that a lot of debate on the list take the form of debates
> over sociopolitical idealogies and the relative merits of each
> utilizing a very limited pool of historical examples: capitalism
> versus socialism versus minarchism versus populism versus democracy
> versus fascism etc. These debates seem to become very acrimonious
> and people seem to invest a lot of emotion in their chosen ideology
> on what amounts to little more than faith in the status quo.





> Admittedly I haven't put a lot of thought into it so it is still a
> very rough idea, but it occured to me that modified MMORPGs would
> make a great "laboratory" of sorts to empirically compare all the
> possible ideologies with one another in a risk-free controlled
> setting.

Yes, they do.
For example, EVE Online is considered to have the best economy.
Near any thing in the game is mined and built by the players and can be
sold or bought on the open market, with contracts and with direct exchange.
Remarkable is the fact that the behavior of the markets is similar to
what the theory say.
For example, the distribution of market hubs is near exactly what the
theory say. The prices move like the theory say they would.


> One would simply need to eliminate computer generated "antagonists"
> and simply have the world populated by actual players with
> characteristics and abilities similar to any of the dozens of
> existing MMORPGs but more "down to earth".

Well, in EVE, but in many other MMORG, the NPCs are not "antagonists",
they are "resources" to harvest in a more or less organized way.
The real antagonists and enemies are other players and other player's
corporations and alliances that compete for the control/sovranity over
the 0.0 security areas and their resources.
This part of the game is very much as political as militaristic as
economic. Huge battles are fought, groups change side, leave for greener
pasture (or simply quieter ones) and enormous quantity of resources are
spent or change hands or are invested. To give numbers, many battles
normally could be waged by more than 100 pilots on a side and the same
for the other. 200-300 pilots in the same fleet are not rare.

Given the rules of the game, Madoff-style scams are OK in-game,
speculations on the market are OK, economic warfare is OK, infiltrating
enemy corporations and alliances to steal and destroy stuff is OK. If it
is possible by the game mechanics, it is OK.


> The players could form whatever types of "states" that they wanted
> and compete against each other for some predetermined periods time
> with the servers keeping track of metrics of success and failure of
> the various "states" resulting from the aggregate behavior of the
> individual players. One could simulate wars and markets and whatever
> else. This way dozens of civilizations could rise and fall within the
> space of a few years of real time and the reasons for each could be
> analyzed by political scientists and economists and the lessons could
> be applied to the real world.

EVE have a real economist surveying the economy and releasing quarterly
analyses of how the economy work. Dr Eyjol Gudmondsson (formerly of the
University of Iceland)
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/star-bucks
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/122840/virtual-world-hires-real-economist

>> "As a real economist I had to spend months trying to find data to
>> test an economic theory but if I was wrong, I wasn't sure if the
>> theory was wrong or the data was wrong. At least here I know the
>> data is right," Guodmundsson said.
>>
>> As new players join, CCP adds new planets and asteroids that can be
>> exploited, one of several "faucets" that serve to inject funds into
>> the universe and keep the economy ticking.
>>
>> "After we opened up an area where there was more zydrine (an
>> in-game mineral), we saw that price dropped. We did not announce
>> that there was more explicitly, but in a matter of days the price
>> had adjusted," Guodmundsson said.




> Admittedly this might not be as fun as scorching hordes of computer
> generated orcs with magical fireballs, but it could be funded by
> grant money sufficient to pay the participants some small amount of
> cash for their participation as "research subjects".

Scorching CG orcs with fireballs is boring.
Scorching human generated adversaries in many ways is funnier.

The point, like in EVE, is having all the players in the same shared 
world. Not separated instances.

Mirco
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