3 ms·

Financial planning in a game? Is this semi-required busywork or are most players having fun with it? Why this and not paper trading (or real) investments outsid

Financial planning in a game? Is this semi-required busywork or are most players having fun with it? Why this and not paper trading (or real) investments outside the game? How much work would it take to turn EVE into a Libertopia? Could an MMO like this exist without griefing and scams being so common?

sp332 15y ago
EVE has a very strong economic component. It's sometimes called "spreadsheets online" :) so I think it's fair to say that serious EVE players like it that way. Scams are part of the gameplay, and are pretty common. I think e.g. Runescape had a very thorough anti-scam system, but for EVE players, this is part of the game.
mikeash 15y ago
I think this story is one answer for why to do this instead of real investing: risk can be more fun when not much is really at stake. The victims of this scam just lost some numbers, not their life savings. As for a dedicated trading game, often having a game mechanism embedded into a larger universe makes it more fun than just doing that on its own. This way you have enough consequences to the risk to make it interesting, but not enough to really be damaging.
garethsprice 15y ago
Isn't a libertopia (reading as a libertarian utopia) a place where griefing and scams are able to run rampant, the thought being that the free market will sort out the issues in the long run? Of course people get hurt in the short term, but that's just natural selection at work... At least, that's my understanding of a pure libertarian philosophy - still not sure how the philosophy gets around the people at the bottom of the social pile getting crushed, or even that it tries to. Running a virtual investment vehicle (legit or scam) actually sounds quite fun for a certain type of person. I find the mechanics of scams, cracking, social engineering etc. quite fascinating but have no desire to actually con people out of money. Running a ponzi scheme in a virtual game world sounds like a fascinating way to see the mechanisms at work - same with the whole virtual currency space in general. Seems like it would also be of interest to economists and social scientists - previously it's only been possible to do postmortems or theoretical discussions of certain economic issues (truly libertarian societies, ponzi schemes, etc.) but being able to watch them form in such a simple world must be quite exciting for researchers in that area.
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  As it happens, CCP (the company that runs the game) employs an economist who advises them on how to keep the in-game economy stable (so that commodity/game item prices are not subject to so much volatility that people give up and stop playing), and he also produces quarterly reports for the players on how the economy is functioning. There have been some academic papers written on virtual economies, it's an interesting theoretical tool.
- iwwr 15y ago
  This is where the abstraction leaks through. In Eve, death is just a minor setback, losing a ship may mean a few minutes to hours of work. It's still a game and people do things in games that may be objectionable in real life (see: shooter games).

sp332 15y ago

EVE has a very strong economic component. It's sometimes called "spreadsheets online" :) so I think it's fair to say that serious EVE players like it that way. Scams are part of the gameplay, and are pretty common. I think e.g. Runescape had a very thorough anti-scam system, but for EVE players, this is part of the game.

mikeash 15y ago

I think this story is one answer for why to do this instead of real investing: risk can be more fun when not much is really at stake. The victims of this scam just lost some numbers, not their life savings. As for a dedicated trading game, often having a game mechanism embedded into a larger universe makes it more fun than just doing that on its own. This way you have enough consequences to the risk to make it interesting, but not enough to really be damaging.

garethsprice 15y ago

Isn't a libertopia (reading as a libertarian utopia) a place where griefing and scams are able to run rampant, the thought being that the free market will sort out the issues in the long run? Of course people get hurt in the short term, but that's just natural selection at work... At least, that's my understanding of a pure libertarian philosophy - still not sure how the philosophy gets around the people at the bottom of the social pile getting crushed, or even that it tries to. Running a virtual investment vehicle (legit or scam) actually sounds quite fun for a certain type of person. I find the mechanics of scams, cracking, social engineering etc. quite fascinating but have no desire to actually con people out of money. Running a ponzi scheme in a virtual game world sounds like a fascinating way to see the mechanisms at work - same with the whole virtual currency space in general. Seems like it would also be of interest to economists and social scientists - previously it's only been possible to do postmortems or theoretical discussions of certain economic issues (truly libertarian societies, ponzi schemes, etc.) but being able to watch them form in such a simple world must be quite exciting for researchers in that area.

anigbrowl 15y ago
As it happens, CCP (the company that runs the game) employs an economist who advises them on how to keep the in-game economy stable (so that commodity/game item prices are not subject to so much volatility that people give up and stop playing), and he also produces quarterly reports for the players on how the economy is functioning. There have been some academic papers written on virtual economies, it's an interesting theoretical tool.
iwwr 15y ago
This is where the abstraction leaks through. In Eve, death is just a minor setback, losing a ship may mean a few minutes to hours of work. It's still a game and people do things in games that may be objectionable in real life (see: shooter games).