Week 1: Economies as Designed Systems

Why a virtual economy is not a metaphor for a real one --- it's a system someone wrote code for, with all the same failure modes a bad API has.

22 February 2027

A national economy has millions of independent actors, no reset button, and no logs. A game economy has a database. Every trade, every currency drop, every item destroyed is a row somewhere, and the person balancing the economy can query all of it. This is the central claim of the course: a virtual economy is not a toy version of a real one, it’s a fully observable one, and that observability is what makes it a genuinely different design problem, not a simplified one.

Three levers no central bank has#

A central bank sets rates and reserve requirements and then waits, via millions of independent decisions, to find out if it worked. A game economy designer has levers with no real-world equivalent:

1. total observability: a central bank estimates spending from surveys and sampled data; a designer can query the exact row for any single trade, drop, or destruction event, for every player, at any time.
2. reversal: a designer can delete or rewind one specific player’s one specific transaction directly in the database. A central bank cannot unwind a single citizen’s already-completed purchase by fiat.
3. outright prohibition: “just don’t let players do that” bans a category of action outright, at the code level rather than merely discouraging it economically — the bluntest of the three levers, and the one designers reach for constantly anyway.

Outline#

• what “the economy” means for a game that has no bank, no interest rate, and no unemployment — just numbers that go up when the server says so
• faucets and sinks: every unit of currency in a live game either came from a faucet (a quest reward — World of Warcraft’s daily quest turn-ins pay out whether or not the game “needs” more gold in circulation) or will eventually leave through a sink (a repair bill — EVE Online’s ammunition and module losses in combat, which disappear from the economy the moment they’re consumed). The entire semester is going to keep coming back to this pair.
• what this course is going to ask of you: read real published data (EVE Online’s Monthly Economic Reports are public and free), and treat game economies as systems worth taking seriously rather than as jokes about “gold farmers”

Before Week 2#

Skim one EVE Online Monthly Economic Report (any recent one; they’re on CCP’s developer site). You don’t need to understand every chart. Come with one number from it you didn’t expect.