Games with interesting economic systems

[clyde]

I'm looking for games with interesting economic systems. I'm watching a lot of Youtube videos about capitalism and as I do so, I realize that I have no ability to visualize anything else. In theory, computer games can rapidly prototype alternatives. Even though massive multiplayer games such as EVE are the most fertile grounds for such discoveries, I'm hoping for single player experiences where you eventually get the sense that there is a well simulated economy in the background that you can explore. The best example that I know of is Greed  Corp, though it is pretty much an essay on the ecological impact of militaristic capitalism. It doesn't take long to figure out how it works and you have to change the way you are used to thinking about economics in order to be successful. 

I suppose walking around, killing rats with a sword and then spending the gold you find in their belly is an interesting economic simulation, but really it's evidence that game designers have difficulty thinking of alternatives to capitalism. You take the profit from the rat, spend it on better machinery to kill more rats faster and enter into a spiral of paying more for machinery for a thinning profit eventually ending in crisis.

Anyone know of games that introduce something fresh?

 

[Lu]

This game in the style of Diablo 2 called Path of Exile has no currency; it's entirely barter based. Scrolls of identify and things like that are the most basic bartering objects you have when purchasing goods from NPCs. 

[clyde]

This game in the style of Diablo 2 called Path of Exile has no currency; it's entirely barter based. Scrolls of identify and things like that are the most basic bartering objects you have when purchasing goods from NPCs. 

So identify scrolls become the de facto currency?

[Lu]

No, because it's a barter economy. For low-level items you might be able to get them for a few scrolls of identify, but there are a lot more elements to be bartered with all of which have a mechanical purpose in the game too. Anyhoo, that's just at the lowest level; I've never seen trade between players for high quality items, but I suspect they don't pay each other with identify scrolls.

[Geremy Tibbles]

Metro 2033 and presumably Last Light use a system with pre-war ammo (which ironically is probably still super corrosive because it's been packed into spam cans, though not as bad as the post-war stuff.)

 

Pre-war ammo is all shiny (Which is funny because almost all Russian firearms use a polymer coated steel casing which is different then... never-mind.), and is dramatically more effective then post war stuff. It's less likely to jam and it kills mans twice as fast. It is also your money. 

 

Some times I'd piss away a magazine's worth of fancy bullets by accident, only realizing after the fact that I was now down 60 shinnies, but most of the time it was the game forcing you to decide between saving and spending in very hectic situations. 

[mikemariano]

Fallout New Vegas had several types of currency, but there didn't seem to be any interesting limitations or variations on exchange rate.  The casinos accepted any currency you gave them, and I can't recall any merchants refusing one form of payment or another.

[tegan]

The World Ends With You had kind of a weird take on currency. The battle system basically has every action your character can take as a physical, equippable item -pins with different designs on them- which can be sold at any time just like any other item. Pins gain experience, level up, and evolve like Pokémon under different circumstances. They cheat a little by making certain pins unsellable so you can't screw yourself over and making some pins explicitly meant to be sold, but it presents a lot of potentially interesting situations. ie: "Do I sell my best attack to buy better gear?" "Do I waste one of my precious combat action slots on a 1 Yen pin so that it will eventually level up into a 10,000 Yen pin?" Stuff like that.

[darthbator]

Metro 2033 and presumably Last Light 

 

I believe they have said that last light will not include the bullet currency mechanic (or it will offer an option to just switch it off). I really loved that particular mechanic in 2033. 

[clyde]

It seems like the interesting thing about Metro 2033 economics and The World Ends With You economics is that the player is constantly having to choose between use value and exchange value.

Now that I think of it, I've played with some map-makers within console games that have an interesting economic system. They will have a gauge that shows you how much RAM or whatever that you are using. As you place more stuff or make it complex, you lose some from your finite pool or resources. You can gain resources by deleting things from your map. I could see this type of system being put into a game for narrative purposes. I suppose the Elder Scrolls series does this to some extent when you have to destroy an enchanted weapon in order to make another, but it would be interesting if there was a quest where the mage's circle confronts you about your sucking up an unfair amount of the limited magical resources in your attempts to make a super awesome helmet.

Economics is so hard. I think I might not really understand what capitalism is. Everything seems like capitalism to me. Still, it seems like games focus on trade more than they focus on production. That's not true either. That's what crafting systems do.

I want a game to show me an economic system that I would never have imagined.

[darthbator]

I mean I know you talked about EVE but games like that are IMO the most interesting. Since sub time in eve is an in game item it gives their in game currency a direct correlation to money in the real world. This acts IMO as a sort of "silent motivator" to not just race to the bottom of your pockets. I think that's one of the keys to economic modeling in video games. The currency in game worlds often has only endogenous value. Other then banking on the fact that there is better stuff to get later in the game experience there is really no motivation to hord the currency. Once you give the currency some manner of exogenous value by doing something like letting you cash it into bitcoins or use it to buy items that can also be acquired for real cash the players entire relationship to the in game currency changes. 

 

In a game where the currency has only endogenous value players behave like a visitor in a country where they cannot exchange their currency on exit. They spend to broke more often then not. IMO if you're looking to do economic modeling inside of games you need to look at or design a currency that has a relation to real world currencies or else you're not going to be getting "true human" behaviors. People are not going to treat that particular digital doodad like real money.

[I Saw Dasein]

Chicago Express is a board game, but has a pretty interesting economic model. 

 

Dollars are the main currency, and whoever ends the game with the most dollars wins. 

 

During each player's turn, they can call for a share issue, build tracks, or develop a region. 

 

When a player calls for a share issue, that player choose a train company, and a single share of that company is auctioned off to the highest bidder. The money from the share purchase is held by the company whose share was just auctioned. Each company has multiple shares, but each company has a limited number of shares that can be issue (e.g. blue company has 6 total shares, red company has 4 total shares). 

 

When a player calls for a track-building phase, money held by any one company can be used to build tracks for that company. In other words, the player can't use their own money to build tracks, only money held by the company. Tracks increase the value of the company by connecting cities. If the company runs out of money, it cannot build new tracks. To put more money into a company, a new share issue phase needs to be called.

 

Every so often, a special "dividends phase" is called. At that time, you count up the value of each train company. Then you divide the total value by the number of shares. So if a train company is worth $15, and there are three shares, each share gets five dollars. Those shares could be held by multiple players, or all by one player. The player collects the money from their shares' dividends. 

 

So money serves several purposes in the game. It is used by players as victory points and to purchase stock. It is used by companies to build tracks. Share issues can be used as a way of getting more shares to produce more income, they can be used to refinance a train company, or they can be used (spitefully) to dilute an opponents share value. 

 

I love the economic system in that game because it is so elegant and feeds back on itself in a really satisfying way. 

[TychoCelchuuu]

X-COM: UFO Defense is neat, not because the economy is reactive in any way but because like everything else, it's tied into all the other systems in the game, so you get a lot of fun, interlocking behavior. The two main sources of income are funding from member nations and selling stuff. Member nations fund you based on your effectiveness at keeping them safe from aliens, which is a function of where your bases are physically located usually, so you tend to want to place bases near rich nations or near dense concentrations of nations. The money you get from selling stuff can come from selling alien artifacts and corpses to who the fuck knows, which is enjoyable because of the sort of narrative it implies, or from selling stuff you manufacture, which is funny because you can transition X-COM into a self-sufficient arms manufacturer that is defending the earth from aliens by making massive profits off of selling cutting edge weaponry to, presumably, oppressive warlords or world armies or something. It's just a very weird situation.

But, of course, the real answer to this question is and always will be Team Fortress 2 and the larger Steam economy built around it.

[Sno]

I always absolutely loved the resource system in Total Annihilation and its successors.

Instead of paying for everything in single sums or having a truck drive up to your base and dump off a pool of resources, you were essentially running an input/output ticker, and so you thought about the economy in the game very differently. It was about deficits and surpluses, a complex balancing act that encouraged planning things out across much longer terms than is usual in an RTS.

If things went wrong with your economy, it was a gradual deficit that you could plan around and respond to, it was not a matter of you spending that truck full of resources the second it showed up at your door and not knowing when the next truck will arrive. TA's model was great, in part, because it was a more predictable system that allowed for you to more safely bankroll the kind of ambitious, broad strategies these games are known for.

I was very disappointed when SupCom2 abandoned that model. (Well, i was disappointed in SupCom2 for a number of reasons.)

[clyde]

Chicago Express is a board game, but has a pretty interesting economic model. 

 

Dollars are the main currency, and whoever ends the game with the most dollars wins. 

 

During each player's turn, they can call for a share issue, build tracks, or develop a region. 

 

When a player calls for a share issue, that player choose a train company, and a single share of that company is auctioned off to the highest bidder. The money from the share purchase is held by the company whose share was just auctioned. Each company has multiple shares, but each company has a limited number of shares that can be issue (e.g. blue company has 6 total shares, red company has 4 total shares). 

 

When a player calls for a track-building phase, money held by any one company can be used to build tracks for that company. In other words, the player can't use their own money to build tracks, only money held by the company. Tracks increase the value of the company by connecting cities. If the company runs out of money, it cannot build new tracks. To put more money into a company, a new share issue phase needs to be called.

 

Every so often, a special "dividends phase" is called. At that time, you count up the value of each train company. Then you divide the total value by the number of shares. So if a train company is worth $15, and there are three shares, each share gets five dollars. Those shares could be held by multiple players, or all by one player. The player collects the money from their shares' dividends. 

 

So money serves several purposes in the game. It is used by players as victory points and to purchase stock. It is used by companies to build tracks. Share issues can be used as a way of getting more shares to produce more income, they can be used to refinance a train company, or they can be used (spitefully) to dilute an opponents share value. 

 

I love the economic system in that game because it is so elegant and feeds back on itself in a really satisfying way. 

I found Chicago Express for ios and it's even got A.I.:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wabash-cannonball/id392800625?mt=8

 

I've only played one game, but this is exactly the type of thing I was looking for. Even though I didn't know what I was doing, I was still completely baffled when another player bought shares in what I had considered "MY RAILROAD" and started expanding it with their own money. As the game progressed, I had to change my mindset from owning a company to having vested interests in multiple competing companies. This game is not a demonstration of an alternative to capitalism, but it is a new way for me to think about capitalism. It's exactly what I needed to complement my casual research. I suspect that this game's mechanics will give me an operable understanding of concepts such as price versus value, the equalization of profit, and how surplus value accumulates within the capitalist class. I'm just starting to be introduced to these concepts, so I don't really know what they mean, but I'm hoping this game and others like it can allow me to apply the terms for a more describable understanding. Plus it's pretty fun and only a dollar

[Merus]

Puzzle Pirates has a surprisingly interesting economic system despite being based on money spiders. Goods are produced by trading posts on islands (and what is produced is determined by whether or not it appears on the island, which means island owners end up having to bulldoze some of their goods as they make room for player buildings) and are sold to the highest bidder using buy orders. They then have to be physically (virtually) shipped to another island to be sold in a populated island's market, and the boat can be attacked and looted along the way. On populated islands, you have shoppes with buy orders to buy goods and transform them into other goods or equipment, using labour hours that players provide. So you can support this complicated, co-dependent crafting chain, much more sophisticated than EVE normally gets, without many of the problems that co-dependent crafting systems usually have thanks to the robust economy tools.

[axemtitanium]

Chicago Express

 

Speaking of board games, Der Weinhandler uses your wine as both currency and value. Each wine has a specific value (in euros) which is used to bid for other wine, but euros themselves are not a tangible currency within the game. Stop me if you've heard this before.

[clyde]

Chicago Express a.k.a. "Wabash Cannonball" is killing me with the game ending too soon. Right when I manage to position myself perfectly to turn my would be competitors into soon to be paupers, the game ends. It drives me crazy. I want to watch the bots drop out one by one. I get the concept that eventually the established income will accumate enough capital to make one player's interest unstoppable, but not by turn 8. This was obviously developed as a board game that can be played in an hour, but the developer of the iphone version should consider the option to turn the end game switch off. That way I can expend all the resources of a railroad I own a small amount of shares in. That method of reducing a competing investor's buying power isn't effective when I only have 8 turns to do it. There are other disingenuities I can't fully explore because of this crazy turn limit.

[I Saw Dasein]

Hm, I never had an issue with the turn limit. Getting good at the game requires players to learn how to effectively value shares, which in turn depends on how many dividend rounds are likely to remain. Valuing shares accurately would be a lot harder in a longer game. Players also have a lot of control over when the game will end; you can deliberately run companies out of tracks or shares. I've never played it electronically, though, so perhaps it doesn't work that well on an ipad. 

[Frenetic Pony]

Some interesting economic lessons from video games for you:

 

In Diablo 2 the most valuable items are always dropped, and gold is as plentiful as leaves. This err, leaves, little value in purchasing anything from merchants. Thus lowering the value of "gold" to the point of uselessness, because if you've a million gold and can get a million more in half an hour inflation is so high as to make it useless. Which made the multiplayer trading of items barter based.

 

However, there was one, extremely valuable (initially) item that could be reliably gotten called a Stone of Jordan. These took a lot of work to get, and so were limited in supply, and being powerful (initially) were in high demand. They became a de facto standard to judge the value of other items against. "Oh, this thing is worth 2 Stones of Jordan!" or etc. However, since it's a video game and limited supply isn't a thing, more and more SoJ's became available over time, as did items even better than a Stone of Jordan.

 

But because they took so long to get, while they did suffer inflation over time they were never the less supply limited. And since they'd become a common comparison standard they were kept as such even as they became useless versus other more valuable items. I.E. even though no one wanted to use a "Stone of Jordan" things were still bought and sold via SoJs. A somewhat similar comparison can be drawn to gold in the real world, which was for much of history practicably useless, but never the less was in limited supply and so became a de facto standard of comparison for the value of items.

 

 

The other two comparisons I can think of are:

 

Fable 2: This shows you the lack of pricing adjustment and competition. In F2 you can buy houses and rent them out, to eventually get a bigger return. These returns can quickly escalate to make money useless; accelerated because you earn money when not playing the game, but this isn't the actual reason for it. No, the reason for it is that you have a guaranteed return, and then you buy more houses and get more money to buy more houses quickly and etc. You always get a return, never losing money on your houses due to someone undercutting you or tenants not being able to pay, which means money eventually becomes incredibly useless because you have all of it.

 

Dragon Age: Now here is an RPG done right. You never have enough money, no matter how much you get, because there's multiple party members to equip with items that are more expensive than you'll ever get even 100%ing the game. This means you as a player always have incentive to get money, because  there's always something not just to use it for, but to work towards as a goal. "I want that kickass 50g sword!" But you'll have to save up for a couple hours to get it. And when you do get it, there's still that 60g staff and those 2 40g helmets you want and etc.

 

Another interesting thing about Dragon Age is it's one of the only RPG's to divide "gold" (or insert money here) into multiple levels of denomination. 1 gold = 100 silver = 10,000 copper. Now what sounds better? "12 copper for your sword" or, if a game only uses "gold" "12 gold for your sword"? In the second, "g" only game, it sounds like your getting a better deal, even if by numbers 12g in that second game is the same as 12 copper in Dragon Age. But our brains don't work that way, we don't think of "10,000 copper" as being equal to "1 gold". We think the gold is more valuable. Which makes selling things in the game feel more like a gyp, but buying things in it more rewarding "I spent soooo much on that!" In the real world this is evident as people being less willing to spend any part of a $20 bill and "break" a $20 (OMG!) yet not being bothered spending money when they have say, 4 $5s.

[clyde]

Hm, I never had an issue with the turn limit. Getting good at the game requires players to learn how to effectively value shares, which in turn depends on how many dividend rounds are likely to remain. Valuing shares accurately would be a lot harder in a longer game. Players also have a lot of control over when the game will end; you can deliberately run companies out of tracks or shares. I've never played it electronically, though, so perhaps it doesn't work that well on an ipad. 

I can accept the way it is as something I have to work with, but I'm too busy redesigning the game

One thing I had never thought of before is that an advantage of boardgames versus computer games is that you can make house rules. 

 

I'll just have to change the narrative to fit the win conditions. We only have a month to raise enough money to save the community center from the other capitalists who will turn it into a shopping mall if they have more cash by then. No, they said it was going to be a shopping mall, but now we've been a thorn in their side so they will turn it into a parking lot in spite.

[clyde]

In reference to my original post which was asking for economic systems in games that provide alternatives to capitalism:
As I'm looking into this stuff more, I'm realizing that most city simulations and time management games demonstrate an alternative to capitalism. Most of these games are based on the idea that the player is the deciding method of a planned economy. In a capitalist economy, the different exchange values decide where to allocate labor using price. Capitalist economies are also known for their tendency to encourage producers to make things in order to exchange them, rather than to use them. In a planned economy, an organized body (like a government) decides what needs to be produced. It's assumed that the planned economy would decide what to produced based on what it can use or needs. Most of the single-player city management games I've played resemble a planned economy. I am deciding what should be produced for my own use. Even Command and Conquer is this way; I'm deciding which combat units to produce in order to defend or attack. Games with capitalist economies like Chicago Express a.k.a. Wabash Cannonball and Settlers of Catan don't assign values to the commodities which you can produce (shares in Chicago Express; wheat, wool, lumber, brick, and rock in Settlers of Catan). The values are determined by exchange with other players. Though you do produce some commodities for your own use in those games, the reason I think they feel fresh is because of the trading aspect. I have often raised my brick output not for my own use, but because I think I can get a large quantity of commodities in exchange. 

[Dewar]

X3:Terran Conflict is an Elite style game with a fairly detailed economy setup. You can actually hire CPU truckers to move supplies around to your (designed and built yourself) starbases. Prices are based on real supply and demand. An alien invasion of a crowded production system can totally screw up the economy and make basic necessities like ammo cost up to three times as much. Additionally, there are mods out there that add even more options to the economy game.

[clyde]

Today I'm especially interested in games that demonstrate the competitive benefits of having a social welfare system or a higher standard of living for laborers. I would prefer the game to express this through interacting systems of low-level simulations. Arbitrary bonuses that are assigned to ideologies like those in Civilization 5 aren't very convincing to me. I'm hoping that a game can show me how raising the living standard of the most impoverished can provide a competitive edge, regardless of morality or compassion.

[Frenetic Pony]

I doubt any such game exists, the most detailed economics system around is Eve online, which is a purely laizess faire approach, though you could infer some interesting things from ISK.

[Merus]

Today I'm especially interested in games that demonstrate the competitive benefits of having a social welfare system or a higher standard of living for laborers. I would prefer the game to express this through interacting systems of low-level simulations. Arbitrary bonuses that are assigned to ideologies like those in Civilization 5 aren't very convincing to me. I'm hoping that a game can show me how raising the living standard of the most impoverished can provide a competitive edge, regardless of morality or compassion.

 

The only thing I can remember that's anything along these lines was a serious game about a family in a third world nation, and you had to plan their day to try and pull them out of poverty. Can't remember the name of the game, though.