More games from Finance

In a way this post builds on the direction I was moving in with my last post. Video Game worlds are currently too static. A great way getting them to change is to implement facsimile financial models into games. The financial system (while outrageously broken and corrupt) is a big factor in how society moves, changes, and grows.

Detractors may tell me that Recettear has already accomplished this. Which is true, but Recettear puts you in control of a small world (your store) where supply and demand are the same thing as HP and MP. It's a good first step, to be sure but we need to expand it and I'm afraid implementing more substantial and self-contained economics systems (outside of MMOs, of course) is quite a bit more difficult than a simple buy low sell high logical challenge.

I've read the blog of Paul Krugman for a few months now (which probably explains my big interest in pushing economics/finance on video games). A few days ago Krugman post a link to an article he wrote about 10 years ago about a Baby-Sitting Co-Op. Basically a bunch of couples decided to set up a co-op to babysit each other's kids without having to hire babysitters. They issued their own currency to ensure nobody gamed the system. But they ran into troubles because there wasn't enough of said currency.

It's a pretty interesting model, but I'm not really here to talk about economics. I think trying to create a Baby-Sitting Co-Op game is in the interest of the game design community because it's a relatively simple system which acts as a microcosm of the greater world of economics. If successfully implemented into a game, the next iteration could be a more realistic market system for FFXV or whatever where towns sell weapons based on what materials are closest to them rather than where they are in the linearity. As long as we're being linear, let's make it engaging!