New economic schemes in games
In the blogpost on the return of investments I proposed to use games for testing new economical scenarious. I currently try to make an article out of that.
In the draft I sofar have given an overview about games and roughly motivated why I think that it may be a good idea to introduce new economical schemes. In particular I talk about the limitations of this planet, design and in particular about something that I dubbed “recycling-run-away effect”.
Amongst others I also try to line out why I think that the nuclear waste problem may be a worse problem than the safety of reactors (see also the first post on Fukushima).
Comments are appreciated, here is the draft:
update (06072015) :
It currently looks as if an article format is rather not suited for the writings and findings made within the context of the game draft article. It is also still not clear wether this project will ever be finished and if in which form. You may though still find on and off some informations in this context, likethis blog post is an example.
update (06072011) : This blog post is now used as a referrer URL for the game scheme article, thus newer versions of the article and comments will be uploaded more or less regularily. Please note that this offer to our randform readers costs our private money. Since randform is currently purely financed by Tim Hoffmanns income as a math professor, we may eventually be forced to reduce or close this offer, depending on download rate, inflation, etc. Most of the content of the article is also spread on the Azimuth project like the section about the Game environment. The Azimuth updates are usually more current.
The most essential content article of the article was presented on July 1st at the open knowledge conference 2011 in Berlin:
Talk: “Testing new toy economies/political structures in MMOGs” at slideshare.net
older versions of the article:
March 26th, 2011 at 10:24 am
Nice to see that Marzipanien houswive published another paper!
May 4th, 2011 at 6:03 pm
Elderly Ladies should avoid growing a beard like Marx:
http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/ba/76/Women-s-Hair-Removal-buying-advice
December 15th, 2018 at 1:45 pm
I somewhere heard that this skript is going to a book project – but there has been so much silence about it since 2011. Are you still working on this?
December 16th, 2018 at 11:50 am
I think there is currently a major socio-economic shift underway, and I wrote in this 2013 post:
I have since then “digressed” even more and did not add much written text. I do think that basic notions of evolution such as domination and protection etc. have to be better understood in order to be able to come up with more profound concepts for a macro-economic set-up than for example I did within the quick game draft, which I dubbed “Utopia”.
Not that I think that the proposals in Utopia are nothing – no I still think that from a conceptional viewpoint it makes sense to start from the premise that currently this is about the distribution of “surplusses”. That is currently humans have basically only the sun and the earth as “ressource” which provides a limited surplus. Limited in terms of space and energy and other. And so even toy models around how to distribute a surplus may eventually help. In particular the Utopia proposal to give “money” to “normal people” to function as some kind of shareholder could even be an interesting “real” experiment for some bored billionaire. I mean there exists for example similar in its ansatz – apart that it was/is not a billionaires money, but the people’s money and that it was not a really controlled experiment – the socalled “Volksaktie”. As far as I know the emission of “Volksaktie” was never thoroughly investigated with respect to aspects like manipulation, work load to navigate the investor space, comparision to professional strategies, etc. It would be interesting though to understand the differences to usual approaches, where the distribution of investments is to a great extend offered as a professional service. I bet there would be a different “swarm behaviour”.
As you can see at the latest post or at this post from 2007 I sort of keep looking at multi-agent simulations, which are a mean to model swarm behaviour, but as you also may have noticed – such swarm systems are rather sensitive to which concrete implementation you choose. Where in particular a crucial question here is of course the question of long-term behaviour (“sustainability”). I am not sure whether it is possible to find a suitable approach which provides an evidently much better solution than the sofar tested ones.
So in short – a book’s still sort of cooking, but I might abandon it. I would like to add that in my private surroundings it currently looks as if there might be upcoming rather bleakish events, which might be such a burden that an abandonment will be mandatory.