@PeachMcD said in How do you think the Economy will actually function?:
@Zori - I wonder whether anyone has done any academic work around this? Seems like game market dynamics would be a natural sub-field of Economics, and allow someone to get their PhD by playing a lot of games!
There's legit a lot of em! haha
Fortunately a lot of the paywalls can be bypassed by curious and determined people!
Abstract result from this study:
This study shows that the most important factor of better ingame economy is a necessity of
trade. If a player earns the most out of trading, instead of generating new wealth, the
inflation should stay low. This of course means the economy has to be designed to utilize
even the least valuable materials, so no matter how long the players played the game;
they have a reason to acquire and consume those goods.
When comparing the results gained from these games, it is clear that not all game
developers understand how to build a stable economy even though the knowledge has
existed for over a decade. This disregard for economical knowledge has serious
consequences that ultimately are not good for anyone.
There's even a study done on pandemics based on a bug that happened in WoW. The quick synopsis of that incident is, players took their pet to a dungeon instance and it was affected by a DoT poison or sorts, when players stepped out of the dungeon, the DoT stayed and infected many other players who aren't able to survive the dungeon, thus a virtual pandemic was born!
The incident piqued a lot of virologists interests as to how people react to a virus. They found that some people avoided the cities to not get infected, some players stuck around the cities/hot spots and healed people.
Some players would intentionally infect others, some even had some sort of a visual sign that says they're infected/not infected so people would stay away from them, etc. etc.
It was a really good read. I bet there's even a YT video out for it lol
edit:
I clearly don't work in the gaming industry but I do tend to study a lot of random things to keep me informed, there are a few other studies/models done that's essentially became the base foundations of what MMORPGs take now, like Bartle's Taxonomy for instance.
