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It has been a long journey for me but I finally have my Bachelor's Degree in Game Design and I'm looking forward to getting started in the industry. After taking a look at a position being offered at Prophecy Games I have been thinking a lot more about whether or not my choices of specialization have been altogether the most advantageous. Certainly, I would prefer to specialize in procedural content generation and game AI in the long run, but if there are opportunities developing first person shooters and game economies in my immediate area might it not be more prudent to shift gears toward something a with a bit more broad application? Ultimately who can really say without knowing the future. 

I've begun work building a First Person Shooter on my own based on a tutorial I was able to find online. Animating is certainly one area where I'm realizing I have room for improvement. Then again, as a budding game designer what isn't? At Fullsail I was ahead of the curb in terms of my understanding of programming concepts and so I got to feel like a big fish among my peers. I can't help but think that once I get in the real world industry I'll start off feeling quite a bit behind the curb. 

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Well, that said I've been thinking a bit about game economies. I suppose I learned about most of the important concepts in our Systems Design class. Taps, Drains, etc... that said I have a pretty good understanding of real world economics as well which I'm sure I can leverage. Once concept I found thought provoking while looking into it was the concept of treating every in game resource like a kind of in-game currency. Health, if you think about it, is a kind of currency. You can spend health in order to survive an attack. You can spend health potions to purchase health. You can spend gold to buy health potions and you can spend junk to purchase gold. Thinking of it in that way made me realize that all economic exchanges are trades of once currency with lower value for currency of a higher value. 

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Of course, at the end of the day this is all a matter of shuffling things around within the machinery needed to take real world dollars and exchange them for time spent having fun. That's a gross oversimplification but for now let's run with it in order to stick closer to the topic at hand. In truth, you never really buy a game once, because every time that you play a game you spend more of your time on it and time is money as well. Time spent in game making purchases is additional expenditure increasing the game's total price which demands a commensurate ROI (return on investment). This ROI is paid out in the form of experiences, typically those falling within the range of difficulty values that produces various experiences of "fun" as long as they are in pursuit of a valued goal such as "saving the princess". The ultimate valued goal lies outside of the game. We pursue fun because fun itself is a kind of general internal metric for determining the growth rate of our competence at obtaining our desires within a simulated environment. 

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Ideally, having more fun also leads to greater competence in pursuing real world goals of consequence. However, it is also possible to trick the brain into having fun that only leads one hopelessly and inexorably toward addiction and addictive behavior. That said, I think in game economies should ultimately be less like models of real world economic interactions and more like minigames that train the player to become more savvy and financially responsible in a way that delivers those sought after feelings of competence. One can try to model real world economics for inspiration, however in the real world most people hate finances and economics for a reason: it often leaves them short changed. People struggle constantly just to scrape by and there is much that lies beyond their ability to address. What they can address is often deeply unpleasant, such as sacrificing desires and even at times skipping meals in order to save enough to make sure essential bills get paid. 
 

By reframing the intent from accurate modeling to mini-game design and lesson planning we can more clearly see where designs of the past have fallen short. We can frame the discussion by first asking: "what are good spending habits?" and then "how do we teach those through game design?". Good money conscious spenders save, they budget and they shop around for the lowest prices from the most ethical sources. Again, the goal here is not fidelity per se, but we can use this emphasis to highlight some of the areas that economic systems in games have lacked historically. The loop of questing, looting, selling, stocking up and questing again disincentivizes saving in many cases where the vendor doesn't have many goods worth saving up for and little point saving for a rainy day when every time you go out questing is just as rainy a day as any other. Shopping is sometimes encouraged but only occasionally and the budgeting is rarely explicit and usually left as an unconscious instinctive process. With a few simple changes the budgeting, saving and shopping can be made explicit, taught and encouraged. 

For instance, give different vendors different value ratings for different categories. Allow those value ratings for different categories to change from location to location based on environmental factors and events in a way that's logically discernable (water's more valuable in a desert). Set prices on a random range according to the value placed on them by the individual vendors and have those prices change every couple of in game days to keep the player price conscious. Create an in game budgeting tool like separate money pouches or simply an in game list to give people the option to budget their in game finances. Of course, if you're going to empower the player to budget you must also give them a reason to have to both diversify their expenditures and save funds. One potential concept for a drain that will encourage players to save without punishing them for playing is to create random emergency events (especially things on a large scale affecting entire towns for instance) that can be fixed or resolved more quickly with large expenditures. For instance a storm blows through or a giant monster rampages and afterward several homes are destroyed. You can fund the town repairs in exchange for social and special rewards from the villagers but only if you've got the scratch on you to repair it. It creates a nice little drain to take money out of the player's piggy bank voluntarily in a way they won't hate but instead might feel rewarded for participating in like they're some sort of community hero and in the process teaching them the importance of saving up for a rainy day. 

 

And in the end I think it's worth remembering that even though the NPCs are fictional characters, social capital even among fictional friends is still highly prized. Just think about all the people willing to go out of their way to mod skyrim to be able to marry Serana. Systems of reputation, honor and so forth allow the players to potentially exchange money and other resources for a kind of social currency that can be valuable in its own right. That could in and of itself be a major improvement over morality systems in games. Even Christianity, a religion famous for its emphasis on moral considerations, frames its morality largely in terms of a social context (the reputation you build in the eyes of your creator). Reframing everything in terms of a kind of economic value can be useful when considering in-game economics because it reframes the world as a large network of interacting transactions in pursuit of optimal equilibriums of supply and demand. Capturing the essence of human interests can be difficult, but tracking exchanges of value is systematizable and therefore, in some ways, easy. Those are my current observations at any rate.